{"id":18406,"date":"2021-02-07T12:45:46","date_gmt":"2021-02-07T18:45:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.deepfocusreview.com\/?p=18406"},"modified":"2024-07-28T09:52:17","modified_gmt":"2024-07-28T14:52:17","slug":"satyajit-rays-charulata-calm-without-fire-within","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.deepfocusreview.com\/satyajit-rays-charulata-calm-without-fire-within\/","title":{"rendered":"Satyajit Ray\u2019s Charulata: Calm Without, Fire Within"},"content":{"rendered":"

Charulata<\/i>\u2019s eponymous character personifies the alienation afflicting a generation caught between past and present in colonial Bengal. The film is Satyajit Ray\u2019s 1964 adaptation of the Bengali novel Nashtanirh (The Broken Nest)<\/i> by Rabindranath Tagore, a polymath\u2014as well as poet, novelist, playwright, composer, painter, philosopher, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, who has blended Bengali literature and classical music with contextual modernism. Set in late-nineteenth-century Calcutta when the Bengal Renaissance was at its peak, and India was under British colonial rule, the film revolves around an intelligent, curious, resilient, and well-cultivated young woman named Charulata, played by Madhabi Mukherjee. Around this time, the western education curricula\u2014introduced into British India in 1835\u2014had given rise to a new bourgeois elite, who forged an uneasy cultural and political coalition between Western liberalism and traditional oriental thought. Perhaps no other movie has captured so vividly fin de si\u00e8cle<\/i> cultural anxiety, and the personal entanglements it entails, here seen through the lenses of the intellectual class.<\/p>\n

The contrast between the traditional and modern in Calcutta permeates Ray\u2019s films. At times, it appears as an adversary to his innocent characters (like the eponymous Apu of his trilogy), who suffer the impositions of a changing society, and at times as a coadjutor to those (like Bhupati in Charulata<\/i>) yielding to change with an uneasy conscience. Charulata<\/i> and Devi<\/i> (1960) contribute to the historical dialogue in colonial Bengal, where Ray attempts to cast Bengali women as agents to accentuate the tendency of narrative cinema to show without telling or, at least telling much. In Mahanagar<\/i><\/strong><\/a> <\/i>(1963), his protagonist exerts her female agency in the external spaces of Calcutta\u2019s streets and workplaces, where she needs to come to terms with the compromises required to achieve her promised independence<\/i>. This contrast is never more prevalent in Ray\u2019s films than in Charulata<\/i>, where it is in the internal affairs of the home\u2019s private space and enlightened nineteenth-century marriage that the same Madhabi Mukherjee negotiates, this time through an inconvenient<\/i> sexual emergence. As Chidananda Dasgupta pointed out, \u201cseldom has a film director\u2019s work chronicled the process of social change in a country over a long span of time as Satyajit Ray\u2019s.\u201d His depiction of modernism<\/i> put into question the ideas of modernity entrenched in political, social, and cultural aspects of the past hundred years in India.<\/p>\n

\"\"Ray\u2019s films from Pather Panchali<\/i><\/strong><\/a> (1955) onwards concerned the conflicts between the traditional and modern. They became \u201can extended study of an emerging nation as filtered through the experiences of men and women who seek to define themselves in relation to the larger forces that are transforming their world,\u201d wrote Brinda Bose on Modernity, Globality, Sexuality, and the City: A Reading of Indian Cinema. <\/i>He shows these forces that composite identity, within conflicts between feudal and modern, tradition and progress, and the village and city\u2014the old and new. Ray was known for depicting humanism, illusive simplicity, rhythm, and pace in the colonial and postcolonial context. Charulata<\/i> epitomizes these themes in his work, making its central character, Charu, the \u2018Archetypal Ray woman.\u2019<\/p>\n

The film begins with the strings of a sitar picking out a remarkable Tagore song, \u201cMomo citt\u00e9, niti nrity\u00e9, ke je naach\u00e9 . . . \u201d (\u201cWho is it that dances daily in my heart?\u201d), making a memorable introduction to Charu. Ray\u2019s visual style triumphs in this silent sequence from the beginning of the film, which shows us Charu on a magnificently crafted bed. She tries to entertain herself with a book, discards it, then picks up \u201cKapalkundala,\u201d a romantic novel by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay. Earlier in the scene, Charu hums the name of Bankim\u2014a novelist who introduced the concept of female agency into Bengali literature through the contrast between nabeena<\/i> (modern woman) and pracheena<\/i> (traditional woman). The depiction of the \u2018ideal Indian woman\u2019 can be traced back to Hindu Vedic tradition in Sanskrit scriptures. In reaction to that, Bankim attempted to recast the image of the \u2018ideal Indian woman\u2019 in his novels through his female characters. Charulata builds a multifaceted set of responses to the idea of nabeena, <\/i>taking shape amid the social self-discovery of post-nineteenth-century Bengali upper-class urbanites. As a symbol of the nabeena<\/i>, Charu exemplifies the inconsistencies of Indian femininity trapped between traditional and modern expectations.<\/p>\n

Ray attempts to elaborate on a despairing historical clash between the colonial past and an emerging present in which all his characters, above all Charu, are caught. He used crucial figurative forms and methods of cinema\u2014namely allegory\u2014that articulate the problem of alienation by modifying the connections between modern femininity and historical consciousness. In his thesis \u201cUrsprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels\u201d <\/i>(\u201cThe Origin of German Tragic Drama\u201d<\/i>), Walter Benjamin contrasted the past filled with intuition and emotion, in which symbol<\/i> ruled, against the present where allegory<\/i> emerges to depict real feelings and experiences. Charulata<\/i> embodies what Benjamin called the Trauerspiel <\/i>(tragedy) <\/i>that <\/i>deals with internal and external space that are unmoving enigmas of monotony and transformation, tradition and modernity, recklessness and intuition. Benjamin suggested that allegorical reflection seeks the ruination of things so that it can, in its emancipating moment, compose a new entity out of elements of the old. In these terms, Charu extricates<\/span> herself from the creative invention of fantasy since it maneuvers and rearranges pre-existing material. For Benjamin, allegory is both \u201cconvention and expression,\u201d which resonates with Ray\u2019s ideas to represent the film as an allegory in its demarcation of modern ruins and historical immobility.<\/p>\n

\"\"Charu lives the life of a nineteenth-century upper-class young woman, wearied within the confines of her spacious home. Indeed, she has nothing but time on her hands, hands that are shown embroidering, playing cards, and in the most cherished of her movements, writing. The backdrop of the film, filled with baroque objects, signifies the feelings of Charu as a bird in a gilded cage. Ray captures the distraction and curiosity of Charu at the beginning of the film, when she hears noises outside in the street, finds her lorgnette, and moves from window to window, observing a street musician with his monkey, a stout Brahman with his black umbrella (a connotation of his distinguished status), a humming group of porters. All these subjective shots come under the scrutiny of Charu\u2019s glimpses of the street, contemplating the world outside.<\/p>\n

Charu\u2019s husband, Bhupati (Shailen Mukherjee), an anglicized Bengali intellectual, does not share Charu\u2019s embrace of literature and comprehends that his consuming preoccupation with publishing his nationalist newspaper has led to her lonely existence. Along with his Western liberal sensibilities, he also wants to encourage Charu to become a nabeena<\/i> who is capable of independence. He invites his cousin, Amal (Soumitra Chatterjee), a dynamic, free-spirited, and thriving writer, to help Charu explore her literary talents. A literature student, he pens romantic prose and spreads fresh energy around the house bringing life to Charu\u2019s universe. The depth of their intimacy is delicately stated throughout many moments shared by Amal and Charu, notably the garden scene, perhaps the most powerful in Bengali cinema. This is when we see Charu in a different spatial context, almost outside of her gilded cage. As Amal lies on the grass trying to uncover his muse for writing, Charu swings back and forth, looking into the lens of Ray\u2019s camera and singing a song by Tagore:<\/p>\n

The cuckoo sings in the trees and gardens
\n<\/i>Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo,
\n<\/i>My absent heart does not know why
\n<\/i>It was borne away completely.<\/i><\/p>\n

Zoom and reverse zoom methods are used, showing that the camera cannot capture Charu\u2019s overall image moving through space and time, leaving the viewers almost dizzy. Keya Ganguly mentions in her book, Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit Ray<\/i>, that \u201cmusic, camera movement, and Charulata thus collide in something like a parallax view,\u201d showing Charu imprisoned in time as \u201cthe emblem of a much more thoroughgoing derangement.\u201d Charu\u2019s affections for Amal are strengthened by the ideological significance of Tagore\u2019s song, giving an impression of continuous events constellated with emotional turbulences. The title of one of Ray\u2019s essays, \u201cCalm Without, Fire Within,\u201d perfectly captures Charu\u2019s character, conveying her feelings through sidelong gestures, fugitive glances, voyeuristic gazes, and murmurs of songs throughout the motion of the film.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"Consider how Ray uses one of cinema\u2019s most universal devices, music, to build upon his allegorical intention. The film\u2019s music represents a disparity between the constraints that play out in the narrative of Charulata-pracheena <\/i>as opposed to Charulata-nabeena. <\/i>The film starts with the musical refrains that conjure rhythms of prospering femininity, foreseeing a future outside the narrative’s strict space. If the musical refrains are about being in step (ta ta thoi thoi<\/i>\u2014the bols,<\/i> or beats taught to fledgling dancers), Charu is presented out of step with the person dancing in her heart<\/i>. <\/span>Instead of being positioned as either nabeena<\/i> or pracheena<\/i>, the song casts her as taruni<\/i> (young woman), relating her with the modesty of girlhood, the idealized romance of the Rubaiyat,<\/i> and a model of femineity that is quite out of step from the representation of the \u2018ideal Indian woman.\u2019 The use of Tagore\u2019s song in this opening sequence suggests how impossibilities and confinements are expressed; how they are, as shown, not only concerning Ray\u2019s explanation of Charu but also in terms of the overall political allegory of India\u2019s emergence. If Charu is to bear the burden of signifying the relay between the past and the present, she also serves as an emblem of the future\u2014as Reinhart Koselleck once said, every meditation on the past is also speculation about future possibilities.<\/span><\/p>\n

Contrary to other musical refrains, rendered only instrumentally, the one featured in the garden scene<\/span> speaks directly to Charu\u2019s dilemma, which can be heard in her own singing. \u201cPhul\u00e9 phul\u00e9 dhol\u00e9 dhol\u00e9\u201d (\u201cWhat gentle breeze floats in the flowers?\u201d) are the opening lyrics to the song, and while Charu can only<\/i> sing the song as a set of possibilities, Amal can actually experience in life.<\/span> Delineating her along these lines, Ray goes beyond rendering a historical model of nabeena<\/i> towards a timeless allegorical progression from girlhood to a more sophisticated modern woman. The music thus conveys the allegorical space between time and reality, where Ray uses music as a means to synchronize different temporal moments, prompting the viewer to relay between one time and another, between youth and maturity. <\/span><\/p>\n

Similar to Ray\u2019s use of the camera, he uses lorgnettes to redirect the suggestive focus towards sexual desire and subjective agency. The baroque era heightened the use of lorgnettes among female spectators who used the lorgnette as an object to see and be seen, as well as an object that, no less than a camera, mediates between time and space. Through her opera glasses, Charu\u2019s gaze controls the action of a segment of the film, where her gaze remains largely unreciprocated by both the men in her life\u2014her husband Bhupati and her brother-in-law, with whom she falls in love. Charu uses the lorgnettes to observe and desire after Amal, a charming, romantic, and free-spirited young man on one hand, but also a juvenile and egotistic person who does not have the courage to convey his sentiments directly to her. The lorgnette is almost as effective as a camera, serving as a visual aid that reconciles time and space through which Ray introduces us to a theoretical insight\u2014the passage of time may have brought with it the ruins of hopes and dreams for the future.<\/p>\n

\"\"The camera continuously reminds us of art and deception, and that a fictional story has encouraged this cinematic representation. Brinda Bose explains, \u201ccinema is notorious for making the unreal somehow appear real due to the medium\u2019s realistic effects, this reminder is clearly a gesture by the filmmaker to distance the narrative from its contents.\u201d <\/span>The setting is in a Western-style mansion with Victorian d\u00e9cor and dialogues sprinkled throughout the film, reflecting colonial inheritance, oriented toward Western literature and politics. <\/span>At the same time, parts of the film are packed with details\u2014passages of music, literary allusions, local details, Charu\u2019s lightheartedly flirtatious relation with her debar <\/i>(brother-in-law)\u2014encouraged in Bengali society, all of which give the film a concreteness that cannot be fully grasped by other cultures. Omar Ahmed wrote in his book Studying Indian Cinema<\/i> that \u201cRay frowned upon the pretentiousness of European art cinema in the shape of the French Nouvelle Vague, yet Charulata<\/i> demonstrated an ability to incorporate new ideas from western cinema without making it look as if he were paying homage to European trends.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Bhupati invites Amal to encourage Charu\u2019s penchant for literature, which is his way of encouraging her to be more independent. On the other hand, he completely fails to understand Charu\u2019s apathy and boredom in her antarmahal<\/i> (inner chamber) of life\u2014the consequences of a network of constrictions imposed on women by their upper-class families, whose heads affected a hypocritical sympathy for progressive ideas. This contrast highlights the film\u2019s critique of the ideological movement that transported modernity into Bengali consciousness. For Bhupati, being liberal and modern means focusing on understanding current affairs and politics, and shying away from intuitive sentimentalism\u2014which arguably forms the substance of any literary endeavor. When Amal shows Bhupati one of his literary pieces, Amabasyar Aalo <\/i>(The Light of the New Moon<\/i>),<\/i> the liberal Bhupati advises Amal to put his talents to more concrete use. As Brinda Bose observes, \u201cthe film marks the peculiarities of the coming-to-consciousness of the Indian modern.\u201d The irony of Charu\u2019s existence is that she is established in contrast to the men in her life: the perplexed husband Bhupati; the equally indecisive Amal. Yet, she is confined to being nabeena<\/i>, caught between the traditional and the modern.<\/span><\/p>\n

Charu\u2019s dilemma calls to mind Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak\u2019s gendered subaltern essay, Can the Subalterns Speak?<\/i>, where she writes, \u201cbetween patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which the displaced figuration of the \u2018Third World woman\u2019 caught between tradition and modernization.\u201d In this film, the burden of representation is on perceiving the allegorical delicacy of a \u2018Third World woman\u2019 who is trapped between desertion and presence, historical possibility, and simulated independence. The encumbrance of representation in the film was to demonstrate the vicious influence of alien and alienating modernity that, alongside British domination, must be confronted\u2014at least about its apprehensions for female subjecthood. Modernity is irrevocable. Keya Ganguly writes in one of the chapters from her book, The (Un)moving Image: Visuality and Modern in Charulata<\/i>, that Ray\u2019s production is not meant to disenchant \u201cbut rather to stress the fatal aspects of the predicament allegorized in Charulata<\/i>,\u201d and that his vision \u201cpermits no reversal because reversibility would ensure that we are still within sight of a resolution of historical dilemmas.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Bhupati considers himself a man of principles who can grasp complex political ideologies, a believer of Western liberal ideology. Yet, he lacks any understanding of human behavior and emotional intelligence. Charu and Bhupati\u2019s immobility is captured in the closure, symbolized by grainy freeze-frame shots on the threshold of their house\u2014perhaps<\/i> their common life will be regenerated once the filmic action ends. <\/span>This expressionist tableau is used to contrast the movements that Ray uses throughout the rest of his film, and in so doing, to challenge the faith in the idea of historical perseverance trapped between the light of its own beginning. The final freeze-frame technique was inspired by the final shot of Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut\u2019s The 400 Blows<\/i><\/strong><\/a> <\/i>(1959), which was thought to be one of the most agonizing endings by Ray. <\/span>The last frame of the film says Nashtanirh, <\/i>which appears untranslated in Bengali script in the subtitle to refrain from the seductions of translation. One can read the script, but one who is paying attention to the closing frame will only be able to distinguish the writerly gesture of the film, which contradicts the anticipation held out in the previous frame: Charu holding out her hand to her husband, who deliberately never reaches it. This ending signifies Bhupati\u2019s liberal ideology struggling with the impulsive and emotional actions of individuals like Charu, who remain imprisoned in \u201cThe Broken Nest.\u201d Permanently shattered or not, Ray leaves that for us to decide.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Bibliography:<\/p>\n

Ahmed, Omar. “Feminist Concerns.” In Studying Indian Cinema,<\/em> 87-106. Liverpool University Press, 2015. doi:10.2307\/j.ctv13840p5.8. Accessed December 27, 2020.<\/p>\n

Bhattacharya, Amitabha. “Satyajit Ray’s Calcutta: Friend or Adversary?” India International Centre Quarterly 17<\/em>, no. 3\/4, 1990, pp. 301-313. <\/span>http:\/\/www.jstor.org.ezproxy.neu.edu\/stable\/23002471. Accessed December 27, 2020.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Bose, Brinda. “Modernity, Globality, Sexuality, and the City: A Reading of Indian Cinema.” The Global South 2<\/em>, no. 1, 2008, pp. 35-58. http:\/\/www.jstor.org.ezproxy.neu.edu\/stable\/40339281. Accessed December 27, 2020.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Ganguly, Keya. “The (Un)moving Image: Visuality and the Modern in Charulata.” In Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit Ray<\/em>. University of California Press, 2010, pp. 63-91. http:\/\/www.jstor.org.ezproxy.neu.edu\/stable\/10.1525\/j.ctt1ppj5q.8<\/span> Accessed December 27, 2020. <\/span><\/p>\n

Majumdar, Rochona. “Debating Radical Cinema: A History of the Film Society Movement in India.” Modern Asian Studies<\/em>, 46, no. 3, 2012, pp. 731-67. http:\/\/www.jstor.org.ezproxy.neu.edu\/stable\/41478328. <\/span>Accessed December 27, 2020.<\/p>\n

Morris, Rosalind C., editor. Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea<\/em>. Columbia University Press, 2010. doi:10.7312\/morr14384. Accessed December 27, 2020.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

\"\"<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Maaisha Osman is a health care journalist based in Boston. She has written for Boston Globe Media\u2019s STAT News, Scope, and Point of View Magazine. A lifelong cin\u00e9phile, she dreams of writing book of essays on films by her favorite directors like Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, Satyajit Ray, Rwitik Ghatak, Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut, Wong Kar-wai, and others.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Charulata\u2019s eponymous character personifies the alienation afflicting a generation caught between past and present in colonial Bengal. The film is Satyajit Ray\u2019s 1964 adaptation of the Bengali novel Nashtanirh (The Broken Nest) by Rabindranath Tagore, a polymath\u2014as well as poet, novelist, playwright, composer, painter, philosopher, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, who has blended Bengali literature and classical music with contextual modernism. Set in late-nineteenth-century Calcutta when the Bengal Renaissance was at its peak, and India was under British colonial rule, the film revolves around an intelligent, curious, resilient, and well-cultivated young woman named Charulata, played by Madhabi Mukherjee. Around this time, the western education curricula\u2014introduced into British India in 1835\u2014had given rise to a new bourgeois elite, who forged an uneasy cultural and political coalition between Western liberalism and traditional oriental thought. Perhaps no other movie has captured so vividly fin de si\u00e8cle cultural anxiety, and the personal entanglements it entails, here seen through the lenses of the intellectual class. The contrast between the traditional and modern in Calcutta permeates Ray\u2019s films. At times, it appears as an adversary to his innocent characters (like the eponymous Apu of his trilogy), who suffer the impositions of a changing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","topic-film-editorials"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nSatyajit Ray\u2019s Charulata: Calm Without, Fire Within | Deep Focus Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.deepfocusreview.com\/satyajit-rays-charulata-calm-without-fire-within\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Satyajit Ray\u2019s Charulata: Calm Without, Fire Within\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Charulata\u2019s eponymous character personifies the alienation afflicting a generation caught between past and present in colonial Bengal. The film is Satyajit Ray\u2019s 1964 adaptation of the Bengali novel Nashtanirh (The Broken Nest) by Rabindranath Tagore, a polymath\u2014as well as poet, novelist, playwright, composer, painter, philosopher, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, who has blended Bengali literature and classical music with contextual modernism. Set in late-nineteenth-century Calcutta when the Bengal Renaissance was at its peak, and India was under British colonial rule, the film revolves around an intelligent, curious, resilient, and well-cultivated young woman named Charulata, played by Madhabi Mukherjee. Around this time, the western education curricula\u2014introduced into British India in 1835\u2014had given rise to a new bourgeois elite, who forged an uneasy cultural and political coalition between Western liberalism and traditional oriental thought. Perhaps no other movie has captured so vividly fin de si\u00e8cle cultural anxiety, and the personal entanglements it entails, here seen through the lenses of the intellectual class. The contrast between the traditional and modern in Calcutta permeates Ray\u2019s films. 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