Devi: The Imposing Past

Author: Yuval Klein

1997 Portrait of Satyajit Ray by Rishiraj Sahoo

A zamindar – land-owning feudal elite – estate in late 19th century Bengal is the setting of Satyajit Ray’s 1960 film Devi (‘The Goddess’), a sensitive and thought-provoking masterpiece. It is partly adapted from Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay’s short story, the basic premise of which was derived from his prominent friend Rabindranath Tagore. Though complex and multivalenced, it is also a highly polemical film that contends, among other things, that at moments in which people can take creative license over the mercy or wrath manifest around them, they should claim that prerogative – of creation and destruction – even if that means sidelining gods in the stories of their modern lives.

Throughout much of the film, the only recourse to significant problems is blind, disinterested faith in our downcast protagonist, Doya, a 17-year-old housewife whose father-in-law, Kalikinkar, proclaims her to be an incarnation of the goddess Kali – a deity associated with mothering/creation and darkness/destruction – and in doing so, upends her life. Subscribers to religious orthodoxy – in the case of this film, belonging to the Hindu faith – are instructed to abstain from proactive behavior on account of faith in a higher entity that will presumably intercede on their behalf, and thus wind up existing in a state of perennial genuflection, a dangerous passivity. Throughout Devi, the power and responsibility of creating, destroying, and exerting change are outsourced to a submissive, helpless young woman. All phenomena are approached through the prism of one compelling dream in which her face becomes assimilated with that of the goddess Kali, and human agency is, in effect, forfeited. Devi is above all an allegory – no doubt universal and cross-cultural in its scope – of religious orthodoxy, whereby the spiritual subsumes every facet of life. Additionally, there is the oppressive reality foisted upon the protagonist, which, like orthodoxy, is totalizing in its effect.

Barath Mata depicted by Abanindranath Tagore, 1905

Evident in the case of Bharat Mata (Mother India), the female body can migrate to the realm of the symbolic in Hindu discourse. Another overt example testifying to this effect lies in the rhetoric surrounding the recent retaliatory strike on Pakistan, which the Hindu nationalist Prime Minister of India referred to as “Operation Sindoor,” the Hindi word for a red power which demarcates the married Hindu woman. The men are, in effect, fighting for womankind in the abstract. Also implied is that the Indian subcontinent (again, referred to as Bharat Mata) – pious and venerable woman that she is – has been

penetrated, desecrated, polluted, humiliated, and so forth by the terrorist attacks in Kashmir (Parciack 2025). Such stories are central to the film’s plot, which– at its core –relates the deification of a young woman by the devout old men around her.

Aside from the totalizing effect of orthodoxy, and the religious and national significance of female bodies – both of which are, again, broadly generalizable to various cultures – there is the female as object is to male as subject aspect of the story. The reality that allows for and is perpetuated by the symbolic depiction of women is articulated most eloquently by art critic John Berger: “Presence for a woman is so intrinsic to her person that men tend to think of it as an almost physical emanation, a kind of heat or smell or aura (Berger 1972).” For Doya, her presence and all that is presumed to emanate from it comes to be so overbearing that she is reduced to a corpse of her former self, being effectively ossified through most of the film, and meanwhile, observed and instrumentalized by the surrounding worshippers. Having been forced to become deeply aware of her presence in the eyes of others, Doya, too, succumbs to this symbolic dehumanization of her person. 

There is an elegant scene in which Doya’s husband, Uma, returns from college to find the oppressive shrine built around her; she returns his gaze, and in doing so, communicates her unease with the predicament he finds her in, thrust upon her as a corollary of his father’s dream. When Uma leads her to a boat headed towards Calcutta, away from the atavistic patriarchs, she is initially compliant – enthusiastically so – but at the riverbank turns agnostic towards the question of her divinity. In the moment before her departure, she comes to internalize the false appraisals of others – the objectification and abstractions circulated by her worshippers. To quote Berger again, “The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.” Like all mutations of self-consciousness, the origin of this sentiment is extraneous to the person; the voice of scrutiny is derived directly, or more often, deduced from the minds of others – from consciousness of other subjectivities, of the looming presence of audience. As though suddenly possessed by her worshipers, Doya ultimately decides to return against her better judgment.

In one early scene, Doya gives Kali a foot massage while he is reclined on a chair draped in a leopard pelt. Meanwhile, he refers to her repeatedly as mother. She is a nurturing figure for Kalikinkar; also to her son-in-law, Khoka, who strongly gravitates towards her until her unfortunate sanctification. In a sense, when Doya becomes deified, and subsequently deprived of her nurturing role, a shift towards the dark, opposite pole of destruction (latently recognized as such) transpires. After Khoka’s death, his mother proclaims Doya to be a witch, while Kalikinkar despondently questions where he had erred in his devotion; Uma, meanwhile, contemptuously tells him off, calling him a “murderer.” That is, he had chosen destruction through negligence – the nurturer had been made a liability of his own volition, his blind and unfounded faith.

Little Khoka, unformed as he is, may yet be nurtured along two diverging paths. The protagonist, too, is a young woman whose fate is bifurcated by two men in her life: the modernity and rationality of her husband beckons to her alongside the spirituality and traditional orthodoxy of her father-in-law. The young, to whom the emergent twentieth-century will inexorably belong, are shown tragically receding into stories of the past throughout the film. A minor example of this is the father of Uma’s friend, whose prejudice towards his son’s widowed sweetheart, again, reflects a patriarch insisting on confining young people to an intangible past; the widow is quite literally hitched to bygone days, tethered to a spectral husband, deprived of rebirth, of the prospect for reinvigoration that modern marital practices afford. Khokha’s arc is decidedly similar; whereas Uma’s friend is deprived of modern marital standards, he is deprived of modern medicine. 

Doya is worshiped for her presumed ability to give, and adversely, take life; the worshippers purport to be in her graces, yet while crooning about their awesome deference to her, they are destroying her agency as pertains to movement and self-fashioning. It is an almost comical absurdity throughout the film: the slave is called a goddess by her masters, her captors cower before her aura of omnipotence while failing to recognize that she is helpless and, well, captured… by them! Every act of creation and destruction is reflected off of her; the more her life comes to a virtual standstill, the more people are convinced of her extraordinary power. 

All of the characters, save for her husband, succumb to moments of believing in the proposition of her divinity. Even her sister-in-law, Harasundari, upon hearing her son intone ‘auntie, auntie, auntie’ in a feverish trance, is compelled to instrumentalize her and cease seeing her as materially normal. Crucially, the event that led her to fatefully approach Doya was her son’s encounter with Doya in a dream, a parallel to the pivotal moment in which a compelling dream impells Kalikar to her room. The image of her that is conjured in others’ imagination thus increasingly comes to replace the original. In the father-in-law’s pivotal dream sequence – the outline of a dream is quite literally superimposed on her flesh in Kalikar’s dream sequence. An underappreciated fact about dreams, I think, is that they consistently unmoor even the most pragmatic and rationally anchored beings; they tear at the fabric of reality time and again, only to be seamed together upon waking up. But sometimes the fabric of reality rips in a more permanent manner, that is, when a dream is consolidated to the realm of the spiritual. In psychoanalytic perspectives, dreams are a repository for unconscious truths. This, too, is represented in the film. Khoka’s murmuring reveals the longing for his aunt-in-law that has been tempered by the incongruent treatment of her by the adults around him. Dream logics are fatefully abused in those two striking scenes.

Doya ultimately deserts everyone. A brief flashback (the only one in the film) is shown of Doya and Uma at their wedding; she is deferential, her face in the darkness of a veil. Again, she is the object rather than subject. When Khoka dies and her role in the household finally becomes untenable, she is shown frantic, in a hurry to leave. Her back is shown running across a beflowered field, a fog gathering around her. In doing so, she escapes the gaze of the audience – both in-laws and moviegoers. In the original story, she hangs herself, which would mean: a. Her fate is sealed and known by all; and b. She remains asymmetrically observed and objectified through the gaze of others. In the original story, she is liberated from death but not the scrutiny of onlookers. In contrast, the film protagonist exits the story rather than allowing it to close in on her.

In the first scene, the unpainted face of the clay goddess statue becomes heavily stylized with an abrupt cut, perhaps mirroring and foreshadowing Doya’s oblique change in status. Before the final credits, the idol is shown again uncolored. It has been stripped of its striking but spurious features – the hypnotic eyes, two dark and broad eyebrows sloping beneath her third eye, and prominent lips. Similarly, the eyes and third eye that the father-in-law saw superimposed on her visage in that stirring dream have been metaphorically wiped off. Neither he nor the others – nor, for that matter, us – can see that maddening deity who had become assimilated with Doya’s likeness. In Andrew Robinson’s biography of Ray, he writes that this final image might imply that it is the human mind tasked with creating and manipulating deities, that they can be harnessed for the benefit or detriment of humanity. The question then becomes: How will the clay statue be used next time around?