‘Mahanagar’, Satyajit Ray's feminist masterpiece

Only for an instant, though. Soon a colleague enters, complaining about the lack of newness in her own cash, and Arati, smiling wide, trades five of her just-kissed new notes for her friend’s crumpled ones. This gesture earns her a forbidden reward. Her Anglo-Indian friend Edith presents the middle-class Bengali heroine with a lipstick. 

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As with the currency, Arati is simultaneously scandalised and fascinated. Edith paints Arati’s lips, and Arati promptly wipes off the colour — but not before catching a glimpse of herself in the bathroom mirror. Lipstick, this foreign and modern object, feels like warpaint to her. For the first time, Arati has gotten paid, has had her work appreciated, has made a friend at the workplace. She has not only tasted blood, but agency.

Made over sixty years ago, Ray’s feminist masterpiece remains bracingly modern. A beautifully restored Mahanagar print is currently showing in select theatres across India; the film can also be streamed on The Criterion Channel. I watched the 1963 film on Saturday in a packed Mumbai theatre where the audience gasped and applauded Ray’s powerful heroine, played by the director’s muse Madhabi Mukherjee, and at one point — in reaction to her most defiant line — the theatre erupted into cheers not unlike those heard for brawny blockbuster heroes. We believe, even after all these years, in Arati as our champion.

Mahanagar — translated to ‘The Big City’ and based on a short story by Narendranath Mitra — is an indictment of Calcutta itself, of a 1950s megapolis on the verge of turning into a machine, an assembly line that values output above all else. Ray begins with the tramlines empowering the worker and ends with the evening streetlight showing the way home, but the filmmaker’s focus remains personal. So intimate is this portrayal of a lower-middle class Bengali family that the 1963 Time magazine review raved about how Ray could nearly “take the lens off his camera and allow life itself to touch the raw film."

The Mazumdars are a modest Calcutta family. Arati’s husband Subrata works in a bank, but — having to support a family of six — can’t buy a new pair of spectacles for his father, a retired schoolmaster. Even tea, the most Bengali of household staples, must be borrowed from a neighbour. It is here that Arati feels guilty and considers joining the workforce. Subrata sarcastically says “A woman’s place is in the home" and “I’m very conservative, like my father," but backs her efforts completely, with a degree of bemusement. When Arati is embarrassed about wearing ragged slippers to office, he asks her for a list of “fashionable" items he can buyfor her by taking an advance on his salary.

Subrata is prepared that this will lead to a ‘cold war’ with the elder Mazumdar. When Arati wonders what to tell his parents if called for an interview, Subrata suggests that she fib and say she’s going to see her father. “It wouldn’t be too much of a lie," he assures. “A boss is like a father. Both are providers." It’s a lovely, telling line about deep-set patriarchy, and when Subrata’s father Priyogopal hears that his daughter-in-law will be taking up a job, he puts his head in his hands. The lamentation is dramatic.

Subrata’s plucky kid sister Bani is instantly electrified by the idea of Arati going to work. She likens Arati to a movie star, and backs her careerism throughout — even when Subrata, later unemployed and increasingly insecure, sinks into cigarettes and chagrin. It is remarkable how instinctively women in Mahanagar keep finding their own language. Arati replies to Edith’s English with Bangla, but never has any difficulty understanding her colleague. Even when selling a knitting machine to a client, Arati’s pitch is underlined by empathy. 

Mahanagar’s men are under threat. Priyogopal is so ashamed about his bouma being the breadwinner that he would rather beg former pupils for charity, claiming a stake in their success. Arati’s jovial and supportive boss shows a parochial bias, readily helping those from his district and preferring Arati over her co-worker Edith because the latter is Anglo-Indian. Ray shows a highly cosmopolitan Calcutta — with Jewish ladies, British residents and Hindi-speakers — but also demonstrates the city’s propensity for cliquishness.

Madhabi Mukherjee is sublime. She is flawless as the housewife wracked by unreasonable guilt, hesitant and unknowing. She knows English, yet dithers before signing her own name — she isn’t initially sure whether she is Mazumdar or Majumdar. As Arati finds momentum, her body language becomes at first markedly different at home and the workplace, and later that confident gait strides into the house. Madhabi, with tiny gestures and nuanced tonal shifts, takes the viewer into Arati’s expansive, expanding mind, making her empathy, her guilt, and her determination palpable. To me, Mukherjee is even better here than in Ray’s Charulata.

Anil Chatterjee is beautifully natural as the once-enabling, once-hesitating husband Subrata. Vicky Redwood warmly and effectively breaks Anglo-Indian stereotypes as the lipstick-providing Edith. Haren Chatterjee is heartbreaking as Priyogopal, the bitter schoolmaster clinging to misplaced traditions while watching the world leave him behind. A young Jaya Bhaduri, in her first screen appearance, is delightful as Arati’s cheerleading sister-in-law, especially in a scene where she is soap-faced and hungry for praise. Arati, of course, understands precisely what the young girl needs to hear.

In a Mahanagar, we are all but cogs in the machine. Yet Ray remains ultimately optimistic. His film ends on a more forgiving note than the story it is based on, and the great humanist treats even the story’s more unlikable characters with disarming empathy. Subrata Mitra’s cinematography displays the city’s tram-lined sprawl, while Bansi Chandragupta’s miraculously cramped sets tell us how every single corner bursts with life. If each of us is a cog, each of us has a place.

Streaming tip of the week:

Ray composed the music himself for Mahanagar. The director had an intimate understanding of classical music. His expertise — and exactitude — is well demonstrated in the 1984 documentary The Music Of Satyajit Ray, now streaming on MUBI.

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