Synopsis
Middle-class clerk Subrata Majumdar (Anil
Chatterjee) pursuades his wife Arati (Madhabi
Mukherjee) to take a job as a saleswoman
as he with his meagre salary is unable to
care for his large joint family consisting
of his parents, unmarried sister Bani (Jaya
Bhaduri) and son Pintu (Prasenjit Sarkar).
The family is horrified at the thought of
a working woman in their midst. For Arati,
going door-to-door selling sewing machines
opens up a whole new world which includes
an Anglo-Indian friend, Edith (Vicky Redwood)
and her employer Mukherjee (Haradhan Banerjee).
She proves to be quite successful in her
work and gains self-confidence as she earns
her own money. Earning money also changes
Arati's status within the family, causing
further problems, more so when Subrata loses
his job. He suffers as he watches his wife
go out while he sits in bed and scans newspapers
for job opportunities. They begin to grow
apart. When Edith is unjustly sacked for
racial reasons, Arati resigns in protest...
The film
 Mahanagar
defines a marked departure in Satyajit
Ray’s oeuvre. Before Mahanagar,
his films were based either on literary
classics, (Pather
Panchali (1955), Aparajito
(1956), Parash Pathar (1957),
Jalsaghar (1958),
Apur Sansar (1959),
Devi (1960), Teen Kanya (1961))
or, on his own script (Kanchanjungha
(1962)) Though Kanchanjungha
dealt with the urban Bengali of Calcutta,
the Roy Choudhurys came of affluent and
aristocratic stock. With Mahanagar,
Ray took his first step inside a low middle-class
Bengali family home. As he once said, “somehow
I feel that a common person – an ordinary
person who you meet everyday on the street
– is a more challenging subject for
cinematic exploration than persons in heroic
moulds, either good or bad. It is the half-shades,
the hardly inaudible notes that I want to
capture and explore.”
Mahanagar is based on a short
story penned by Narendranath Mitra named
Abataranika. The original story
placed the husband at the centre but Ray
shifted the emphasis to the wife, Arati.
This change of focus re-wrote the history
of women in Indian cinema. It traced the
beginnings of the working wife in a lower
middle-class family of Calcutta, her gradual
autonomy in the face of economic pressures,
and her changing status within the family
by virtue of the change in her status quo
in terms of employment. By going beyond
the realms of the original, Ray changed
the entire perspective of the story. Mahanagar
is Ray’s personal statement on the
changing values of the traditional, middle-class
Bengali family of Calcutta. It is a microcosm
of changes in urban, social values. Mahanagar
is a strong, positive and realistic
statement on the socio-economic changes
in urban Bengali life, more through the
metamorphosis of Arati than through other
characters in the film. Arati stands as
both the sign and the signified of this
slow but steady socio-economic evolution.
The interiors of the Majumdar household
reflect Ray’s genius for detail –
detail that reaches beyond the borders of
physical reality to underscore the emotional
underpinnings in the relationships between
and among the different members of the family.
The clutter within the small flat, the sister-in-law
drawing the tape that hangs the mosquito
net, a slightly disturbed Subrata smoking
inside the mosquito net, the close-up of
Arati and her sister-in-law joking over
the classifieds in the newspaper, the sister-in-law
proudly scribbling Dada-Boudi in chalk on
the kitchen floor as they lunch before stepping
out, the sister-in-law shyly showing off
the new saree Arati has bought for her with
her salary, are a few examples.
The strong female bonding between a low-middle-class
Bengali housewife and a low middle class
Anglo-Indian spinster is perhaps, unique
in Indian cinema. Ray establishes through
the friendship between Arati and Edith,
between Arati and her other female colleagues,
the notion of ‘collectivity’
between and among women. This acquires and
sustains greater power and strength only
when established beyond the restrictive
confines of ‘family.’ This very
‘collectivity’ and female bonding,
found subtle expression later, in Aranyer
Din Ratri (1969) between the young girl
(Sharmila Tagore) and her sister-in-law
(Kaberi Bose) but was demystified when it
came to blood-sisters in Seemabaddha
(1971) and Kanchanjungha (1962).
Despite surface differences, Arati and
Edith are reduced to one entity –
a working woman struggling to keep her family
alive. The question of morals, whether linked
to Arati’s clandestine use of lipstick,
or to Edith’s so-called loose morals,
has nothing to do with their efficiency
at their jobs. The boss is a man in power,
holding the financial futures of the women
in his control. He abuses this power with
Edith. Yet, he is over-generous with Arati.
Ray’s handling of Edith’s humiliation
and Arati’s angry response to the
injustice meted out to Edith just because
she is Anglo-Indian, is a telling comment
on racism in reverse – the English-educated
Bengali boss hitting it out at the ‘dregs’
of British rule in India – the Anglo-Indian.
In Mahanagar, for the first time,
Ray was dealing with an ordinary woman,
who, one fine day, finds herself thrown
out into the world, trying to make both
ends meet for the extended family she belongs
to. The family is sandwiched between the
social hypocrisies of the low middle class
and an impending financial crisis. Ray explores
the metamorphosis of Arati, of Subrata -
reeling under the emotional insecurities
of a working wife, and in the relationships
between and among the family members. He
takes a wide sweep to cover an entire range
of emotions, reactions and responses, of
and to the concept of the slowly emergent
working woman in urban India.
Three moving scenes demonstrate the slow
change in Arati from a stay-at-home housewife
to a working one. (a) When she gets her
first pay packet, handed then in cold cash,
she shows her money first to herself, in
the bathroom mirror, her nostrils flared
in excitement and in the pride of achievement.
(b) She then shows it to her husband. (c)
Then, in a crude gesture of grandiose generosity,
she offers some to her father-in-law who
needs a new pair of spectacles. Arati proves
that a woman has vast resources of inner
strength, which she is unaware of. She draws
upon these resources when the time is right,
when she discovers that patriarchy, which
defines a society dominated by men, has
failed to solve emerging socio-economic
problems that have a bearing on the family
to begin with, then on the economy, and
finally, on the culture.
Mahanagar offers several readings
of the text. It opens up possibilities of
a Marxist reading of the film. It sheds
light on the dual reproductive responsibilities
of the woman who reproduces labour for the
next generation (the little son who, in
future will become an economically productive
human being) and produces labour (through
housework), for the current generation.
Though her housework is comparatively marginalized,
she still has some duties to perform. The
third dimension that defines her is - she
is the only financial contributor to the
household expenses once she takes up the
job. It also makes a feminist reading possible.
Arati’s schism with Subrata is healed
only when the two are at par – she
too is jobless. Should one read between
the lines to raise the question –
would the chasm in the marriage have widened
had Arati gone on with the job and had Subrata
remained jobless? A sociological reading
emerges from the Calcutta backdrop the narrative
is set against. The tram car, the graffiti
on the walls, the angry depositors at the
bank, the interiors of the Majumdar’s
home, the narrow and dingy lane in which
they live, Edith’s home with its typically
cluttered Anglo-Indian décor, Arati’s
self-complacent and arrogant boss, the father-in-law’s
snobbish pupil and his patronizing wife,
the homes Arati visits to market her knitting
machine, the barking Alsatian outside one
of these homes, the gay camaraderie among
the saleswomen – all point out to
a richly textured collage of images in the
backdrop, subtly reinforcing the message
of a sociological transformation of the
city and of its people.
The closing shot smoothens the fracture
in the marriage brought in by Arati’s
employed status vis-à-vis Subrata’s
unemployed one. After giving her boss a
piece of her mind, Arati walks out of the
building to join Subrata. Both of them are
now without jobs. As they walk and merge
with the teeming crowds in the distance,
the camera moves back to include a street
light above. The film closes on this note
of courage – their Calcutta will soon
find them jobs, and hope – as long
as they are together, fear and uncertainty
are superfluous emotions.
Mahanagar is yet another masterpiece
from a master filmmaker.
Shoma A Chatterji is a freelance
journalist who specialises in cinema and
gender. She has won the National Award for
Best Writing on Cinema twice.
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