Satyajit Ray combined in himself the spirit of the traditional and the mind of the modern. For a long time, Indian cinema was synonymous with him to the world outside.
Satyajit Ray s Devi : When It Was Still Possible To Interrogate the Primacy of Faith
Two Satyajit Ray films made 20 years apart present searing critiques of the privileging of insular religiosity over humanity. Can we hope to see such films being made in India today?
Sharmila Tagore in Debi. Photo: Satyajit Ray Productions
Devi, 1960 and
Ganashatru, 1990) and one short made for television (
Sadgati, 1981) â Satyajit Ray examines the intersection and overlap of unreasoning, blind faith and crushing superstition. There is a fourth film foregrounding the same theme, at any rate elements of the same theme: I am referring here to
Mahapurush, one of the two segments making up the 1965 movie
Sharmila Tagore in Satyajit Ray’s Devi (1960) | Satyajit Ray Productions
Satyajit Ray arrived on the planet nearly a hundred years ago in 1921 and in the world of cinema with Pather Panchali in 1955. Devi and Jalsaghar
. Apur Sansar
, the concluding chapter of the trilogy, introduced Soumitra Chatterjee and Sharmila Tagore. Both actors would become an indelible part of Ray’s cinematic universe.
The haunting Devi
, set in nineteenth-century Bengal and at the intersection of blind faith and rationality, was Tagore’s first lead role. She plays Doyamayee, a member of an aristocratic family who is declared to be the living embodiment of the goddess Kali by her father-in-law Kalikinkar (Chhabi Biswas). The gentle and tradition-bound Doyamayee is unable to resist the cult that builds up around her. Her husband Umaprasad (Soumitra Chatterjee) is equally unable to persuade his father that his wife is all too human.