Captivity, Emancipation and beyond: Time and Society – a Comparative Study of Satyajit Ray’s Women

Women, the mystic- the exotic and the nurturer, are a reservoir of binaries. Female psyche possesses such fascinating opposites that might either demean or out rightly subjugate them in one hand; simultaneously, on the other hand, at times, the docile femininity itself might reverberate with extraordinary promises to establish a meek- submissive woman in budding magnificent ‘New Woman’. The struggle of women in an austerely gendered society is beyond the boundaries of spatio-temporal particularities. The prolonged incarceration of their spirit results in a crushed and crumbled locus of identity, totally exterior and alien to the women themselves. Within a high ‘phallocentric’ ambience the feminine eccentricities are stoned and denied to breathe and germinate. While the periodic time gradually moves forward, the general outlook towards women moderated scarcely. In spite of that, the ‘second sex’, largely succumbed to the overpowering presence of their male counterparts, or society per se, rejuvenates with new hopes to overturn the age old speculations and customs which chain them down. Satyajit Ray, the iconoclast who was responsible for the revolutions in the field of cinema, portrays these dualities of women subtly and marvellously in two of his classics, Devi and Mahanagar. During the high tide of European New Wave films in the late 1950s and 1960s, it was Satyajit Ray who gave voice to the widely acclaimed Bengali Parallel Cinema to render it not only to the level of visual art, but to expand the meaning of cinema from aesthetic pleasure to a socio-political-cultural text in itself. Being a neorealist himself, Ray was concerned with the actual existing realities behind every apparent celebration of ritualistic and customary codes. In this paper, I would like to merge the reel with the real as both of them are indivisibly complementary to each other. Visual arts are often termed as the inseparable tools to represent the social construct and its nuances so visibly that the audience are jolted, trembled and somewhat silenced with the feats of sudden epiphany. In the visual arts, thereby, often rest the seed of the gestation of a self realization and courage to moderate and bring revolution within the inner world. The director’s eyes act as a prime lens to bring into a closer scrutiny the simple yet much intrinsic realities surrounding the women. To add to this, Ray frames these two fictive women so convincingly and realistically that any common household l