Through Agnostic Eyes: Representations of Hinduism in the Cinema of Satyajit Ray

Abstract

Examining the filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s engagements with religious questions with reference to his films Devi (The Goddess), Mahapurush (The Holy Man), Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder), Sadgati (Deliverance) and Ganashatru (A Public Enemy), this essay assesses the influence of Ray’s Brahmo inheritance, his personal atheism/agnosticism and his cultural fascination with Hinduism in his representations of women’s status and caste discrimination. It concludes that although Ray’s approach to Hinduism was far from one-dimensional or sectarian, its negative social consequences were emphasized more in his work than any positive role it might play in society and culture.

Satyajit Ray’s Brahmo origin is used so often, especially by Bengalis, to explain so many characteristics of his films, writings, opinions and personality that one is in danger of assuming that it was the driving force of his life and art. Actually, Ray was an atheist for most of his life and never participated in Brahmo services and festivals in his adult life. From the 1860s, however, many Brahmos argued that Rammohan Roy’s original project for the reform of the Hindu creed could not be fulfilled without the reform of Hindu society, for Hinduism was as much a faith as a code of life and behavior; project after project for social reform, from temperance to women’s education, were taken up by Brahmos, often with Western or even colonial support, creating an enduring link of Brahmoism with cosmopolitan, progressive ideologies that, although greatly weakened, had not entirely been severed by the time of Satyajit Ray (Heimsath 1964; Kopf 1979). Whether consciously or not, Ray expressed this dimension of Brahmoism in his work and it was obviously prominent in his treatment of religious issues, which I shall address in this essay with reference to two themes: the position of women and the caste system. I shall conclude with the argument that although Ray’s approach to Hinduism was far from one-dimensional or sectarian, the negative social consequences of faith, on balance, interested him more than any positive contributions that religion might make to life and society.

1. A Godless Brahmo?

But first, we need to outline just what kind of Brahmo upbringing Ray had and how he reacted to it. Ray’s father Sukumar Ray (1887–1923), who has long been iconic in Bengali literary history for his nonsense verse and other works for children, also distinguished himself as a printing technologist, a photographer, a publisher and magazine editor. Although a committed Brahmo, he and his young associates nearly brought about a split in the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj with their demands for sweeping reforms in structure, administration and ethical code. For Sukumar Ray, the Brahmo movement, despite commencing within orthodox Hinduism as a reform initiative, had diverged so greatly from the parent since then that it had become a sovereign faith, and he did not shy away from a public (and sharply polemical) debate with his close friend Rabindranath Tagore, who, belonging to the conservative Adi Brahmo Samaj, held that Brahmos, in spite of their rejection of many orthodox beliefs and practices, were still members of the larger Hindu family. Sukumar Ray, of course, died at an early age and Satyajit was brought up by his mother Suprabha, whose understanding of the Brahmo-Hindu relationship was interestingly different from her late husband’s. Diligent as she was in attending Brahmo services and shunning festivals such as the “idolatrous” Durga Puja, she wore the iron bangle and vermilion like all Hindu married women. Apart from giving them up after losing her husband, she never dressed again in anything other than the orthodox Hindu widow’s plain white sari (than), despite being reminded by no less a Brahmo luminary than Dr Kadambini Ganguli that her own father-in-law Upendrakishore Ray had decried this custom (Sengoopta 2016, pp. 336–42).

But although Ray grew up without imbibing Sukumar Ray’s notion of Brahmo sovereignty, he was bored by the long, sermon-filled Brahmo services and the annual festival of Maghotsava (except for the music) in childhood and envied the boisterous festivities that filled the lives of his mainstream Hindu relatives (Ray 1983, p. 81). As an adult, Ray never attended Brahmo services and Brahmo settings or characters are conspicuous by their absence in his work. Even though some of his films, as Ray once explained, might seem to be set in Brahmo backgrounds—Charulata (1964), for instance, or Ghare Baire (Home and the World, 1985), both based on texts by Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941)—that impression is neither validated in the film nor explicitly rejected (Sen 1984, p. 12). This downplaying of religious identity, in fact, is characteristic of most of Ray’s films; on the rare occasions when Ray does depict religious scenes or actions—as in the earlier, Benaras sequences of Aparajito (The Unvanquished, 1956)—he uses them as details illustrating his characters’ daily lives and shows no interest in probing into their emotional or theological dimensions. Nonetheless, the social setting of virtually all of Ray’s films is discernibly Hindu. There is not one major Muslim character in his films, not even in those set in pre-partition, Muslim-majority Bengal, even though the smaller communities of Bengali Christians and Anglo-Indians are represented, respectively, in Abhijan (The Expedition, 1962) and Mahanagar (The Big City, 1963).1

The range, diversity and depth of Ray’s lifelong study of Hindu Bengal and especially of its middle classes—the much-mythified bhadralok—cannot, of course, be denied. Indeed, Ray himself acknowledged that he was attracted to the “contrastive situations and possibilities” inherent in the “coiled cultural layers” of Hinduism and Hindu social life (Cardullo 2007, p. 217).2 The interpenetration of religious and social factors in Hindu life meant, of course, that Ray, for all his adherence to a secular social realism, could not always avoid engaging directly with questions of religious identity, beliefs and practices. In this essay, I shall explore the representation of Hinduism in such overtly “religious” films, concentrating on two broad themes—gender and caste—and concluding with a brief, provisional attempt to assess the place of religion and religiosity in Ray’s cinematic corpus.3

2. The Mother Goddess and the Patriarch

Devi, made in 1960, was Ray’s sixth film and although Ray was to make other notable films on the place of women in Bengali society, he would never again focus so intently on the intersection of gender and faith. Devi was based on an 1899 short story by Prabhatkumar Mukhopadhyay (1873–1932), the plot of which had been “donated” to the author by Rabindranath Tagore (Mukhopadhyay 1916, pp. 197–215).4 Set in a wealthy feudal household of the 1790s, the tale’s protagonists are the devout patriarch Kalikinkar Roy, his two sons Taraprasad and Umaprasad, their wives Harasundari and Dayamayi, and Khoka, the young son of Harasundari and Taraprasad who is very close to the childless Dayamayi. The elder son is in thrall to his father but Umaprasad, who has a mind of his own, wants to learn Persian (the key to worldly success until English replaced it as the language of law and administration in the mid-1830s), earn an independent living and leave home with his wife. Even though Umaprasad is only the younger son and would not inherit his father’s estate, his aspiration is still curious for the period and the author offers no explanation for it. It is all pre-empted, however, by his father announcing one morning that he had been told in a dream that Dayamayi is an incarnation of Shakti, the mother goddess whom, in the form of Durga and Kali, Kalikinkar Roy has worshipped all his life.5 From the way Prabhatkumar phrases it, it is clear that Daya has not simply been “taken over” by the goddess—the kind of temporary spell that, in Bangla, is described as bhor kora—but is an embodiment of her (an avatar). The concept of avatar, however, is almost exclusive to the worshippers of Vishnu and all but unknown amongst Shakti worshippers; one does not know whether this difficulty had been overlooked in Tagore’s plot but it is surprising that Prabhatkumar, who was a mainstream Hindu, does not seem to register the discrepancy in his narrative.6

Husband and wife, stunned by Kalikinkar’s announcement, refuse to believe that the sixteen-year-old Daya has suddenly been transformed into a goddess, but they have neither the authority nor the courage to stop her public installation and worship. Umaprasad decides to escape with her and his wife concurs; over the week that he takes to organize their flight, however, Daya seems to save the life of a dying boy with her divine power and loses her conviction that she was no more than human. When Umaprasad arrives to collect her, she says that it would be a sin to run away if she were indeed an incarnation of Shakti; failing to persuade her to join him, Umaprasad leaves and the worship of Goddess Daya continues in full spate. She comes to believe in her own divinity so sincerely that when her beloved nephew falls ill, she promises to cure him but the boy dies and Daya, now reviled as a witch by her erstwhile worshippers, hangs herself to death.

Although relatively faithful to this Tagore-inspired plot, Ray did make one massive change for his film. Instead of setting the narrative in the late 1700s, he brought it forward into the 1860s, when British rule over Bengal was unquestioned, Calcutta was the capital of British India, and Western-style education had spread sufficiently to influence the views of a significant minority. An age not only of literary efflorescence, the later decades of the nineteenth century also witnessed generational confrontations on the value of age-old Hindu beliefs and practices. From idol-worship to polytheism, from child marriage to the seclusion of women, customs that were integral to traditional Hindu life in Bengal came to be questioned by reformers and whilst one must guard against exaggerating their accomplishments—which, at best, affected relatively small numbers of younger gentlefolk—their campaigns, even the ones that failed completely, generated a significant amount of debate and social turbulence.7 Relocating Prabhatkumar’s story in the 1860s was an inspired decision, for it allowed Ray to intertwine the original father-son opposition (the reason for which had not even been explained) with a whole range of confrontations, catalyzed by English education, between old and new in Bengali Hindu society.

Ray’s Umaprasad, a college student in Calcutta, considers his father’s Sanskrit learning to be passé and encourages a wealthy friend to risk disinheritance by marrying the widow he has fallen in love with. Many years later, Ray himself declared that he had empathized fully with Umaprasad: “I was full of sympathy for him. I believed his arguments were much stronger than the father’s arguments” (Robinson 2004, p. 124). There was an obvious risk, then, that the film would glorify the moderns but although Ray’s sympathy is clearly with the latter—a recent contention that Devi is “as sceptical toward the discourse of secular cosmpolitanism as it is critical of an intolerant traditionalism” (Ganguly 2010, pp. 113–14) is an overstatement—the film does not ignore the limitations of Bengali modernity. Ray includes a scene from Dinabandhu Mitra’s play Sadhabar Ekadasi (1866) where Nimchand Datta, an erudite English-educated drunkard based, reportedly, on the poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824–1873) is seen insulting a pompous official for his caste, using as his authority an old legend about all kayasthas except the Dattas kowtowing to Brahmans.8 All that English education had produced in Bengal, Mitra implies, was a breed of men whose seemingly “modern” talk shrouded deeply unmodern sensibilities.9

Having used this extract to warn us against overestimating the strength of character of people like Umaprasad, Ray depicts him assuring a friend who has fallen in love with a widow but cannot marry her for fear of being disinherited by his father that all of Vidyasagar’s arguments for widow remarriage were at his fingertips. Here is another subtle indication of the dilemma of the moderns: Vidyasagar had drawn his evidence from Sanskrit scriptures, not Milton or Shakespeare. Umaprasad might be able to parrot his arguments but could he or his generation construct their like? They had lost the capacity to reform their society from within whilst also failing to acquire anything more than the rhetoric of European rationalism.10 Even more importantly, Ray builds on hints in Prabhatkumar’s story to demonstrate that Western-educated young Hindu men like Umaprasad had no monopoly on rationality or a critical outlook. Harasundari (the wife of Uma’s elder brother Taraprasad and the mother of the boy who is so fond of Daya) is as skeptical of the divinity of her sister-in-law and refuses to believe that Daya would be able to cure her son.11 She is an ordinary woman, neither learned nor irreligious, and flawed in her own way—she is jealous of Daya because of her son’s affection for her—but she is nonetheless independent-minded and a critical thinker. Unlike her husband, she cannot accept an absurd assertion simply because it has been made by the learned, wealthy and powerful Kalikinkar or because a single child’s illness had responded to her sister-in-law’s “divine” touch.12

Such “organic intellectuals” in Ray’s films, one should add, are usually women who do not have a great deal of social or economic autonomy, and illustrate Ray’s oft-repeated conviction that women are “more honest, more direct, and, by and large … stronger characters” than men (Cardullo 2007, p. 126). Ray’s polarity, no less problematic than the conventional opposition of the strong, rational male and the passive, emotion-driven female, influences his portrayal of Umaprasad’s reaction to Daya’s apotheosis. Appalled by Kalikinkar’s actions but failing to persuade the old man to back down, he decides, as in the original story, to run away to Calcutta with Daya. When Daya hesitates—“The child was cured, wasn’t he?,” she asks—Umaprasad remonstrates with her but in vain. Although this is what happened in Prabhatkumar’s story, its connotations are quite different in Ray’s film, which, of course, is set in the 1860s and depicts Umaprasad as an upholder of rationalism and modernity. Considering the risks to Daya’s health and sanity, a true rationalist, after having failed to persuade her to escape, would have felt justified in removing her by force.13 The British critic Eric Rhode, for instance, was puzzled that an intelligent and well-educated youth like Umaprasad could allow his wife to return to his father’s domain when the coast was clear for their flight, and considered it to be a blemish in Ray’s script (Rhode 1964, p. 195). In fact, of course, the scene is crucial to one of the film’s important subtexts: the exposure of the insubstantiality of nineteenth-century Bengali rationalism. Umaprasad allowed his wife to return—and eventually to go to her death—because reason had only found a place in his intellect and was a long way off from governing his emotions or strengthening his will.

The liminal position of Umaprasad becomes even more evident when, back in Calcutta, he asks one of his professors for advice. The latter, a character created entirely by Ray, is rather more genuinely modern—or, at all events, a more courageous human being—than his student. We learn that he had defied his orthodox Hindu father to convert to a different faith—Ray does not disclose which—but the faith he embraced is less relevant than the strength of his conviction, for repudiating one’s Hindu identity was no small thing, especially in the nineteenth century, and his choice would not only have cut him off from his immediate family—and inheritance, if any—but constrained his relations with all his kinsfolk. Daya, the professor points out to Umaprasad, might be helpless but he is not; he must save his wife from the clutches of unreason even if it meant offending his father. Emboldened by the advice, Umaprasad returns home determined to bring his wife away by force if necessary but by then, the final crisis has occurred. By the time Umaprasad arrives, his nephew is dead and a bejewelled, obviously unhinged Daya, whom Harasundari has already accused of being a demoness, is preparing to run away before “these people” could kill her. Rushing out of the house with Umaprasad chasing after her, she disappears into a mist-shrouded field and that is the last we see of her. The film ends with the same unadorned face of the Durga icon that had been decorated and “brought to life” at its beginning but was now lifeless clay for good.14

So, in Devi, one of Ray’s many chronicles of the confrontation of old and new, the latter is vanquished as definitively as the former. Umaprasad loses his wife and his father’s religious convictions, although strong enough to co-opt his daughter-in-law, result only in the loss of his grandson and the termination of his bloodline, the cruellest of fates for an orthodox Hindu. Neither orthodoxy nor the new learning can prevail in a battle that, in Prabhatkumar’s story and more so in Ray’s film, is as much about faith as it is about the position of women. This grim tragedy has generated much psychoanalytic interpretation, especially of the scene where Daya massages her father-in-law’s feet as he lies back languorously in a plush armchair and asks her whether his son appreciated her worth and where, in his dream, the goddess’s face fuses with Daya’s.15 Whilst one cannot dismiss Freudian arguments about the old man fulfilling his unconscious erotic longing for his daughter-in-law by turning her into a goddess and removing her from his son, it is, perhaps, worth balancing it with critic Geeta Kapur’s point that the father-son struggle underlying the narrative reflects the tussle between the “dying aristocratic order” of nineteenth-century Bengal and the emerging but still weak English-educated bourgeoisie.16

Kapur also remarks on the unusually negative representation of Kalikinkar by a director famed for his “gray” characterizations (Kapur 1987, p. 98) and although she does not pursue the point, it is interesting to compare Ray’s depiction of Kalikinkar with that of the equally delusional Biswambhar Roy in Jalsaghar. Is the latter portrayed with such sympathy because he is obsessed with music and Kalikinkar given short shrift because his delusion is religious? Brahmo by birth, irreligious by choice and an impassioned devotee of music, Ray, arguably, was incapable of endowing Kalikinkar even with the kind of dinosaurian majesty that he had bestowed on Biswambhar, and after Devi was released, the director’s own religious identity became a subject of heated discussion. Acknowledging that he did not practise any religion himself and was opposed to all organized religions, including the Brahmoism that he was born into, Ray insisted, however, that Devi was not anti-Hindu or even anti-religious: what it condemned was superstition.17 Ray’s distinction between religion and superstition was ultimately a rationalist device, reminiscent of the classic Brahmo argument that apart from its Upanishadic core, virtually everything in Hinduism was either unimportant or superstitious. For mainstream Hindus, however, the dividing line between “religion” and “superstition” was not so clear-cut, and more than two decades after making Devi, even Ray told his biographer Andrew Robinson “with a wry smile” that although the religion/superstition argument had been useful for defending himself, it was always “a fine distinction, a thin line” (Robinson 2004, pp. 126–27). It is debatable whether even that thin line exists for the orthodox Hindu and whilst Devi does not even refer to the Brahmo movement—a surprising, possibly eloquent omission in a film that establishes the historical situation in the 1860s so meticulously—it is hard to deny that its critique of blind faith and superstition is more Brahmo in spirit than Ray acknowledged or may even have realized.

3. Caste: Transcendence and Subjection

It is impossible to portray Hindu society realistically without recognizing caste and even in Ray’s first two films Pather Panchali and Aparajito, the family’s Brahman identity explains the kind of work the feckless father Harihar looks for or actually does and his widow finds after his sudden death. In Ray’s subsequent films, class and location (rural or urban) receive greater attention but viewers familiar with Bengali society would find it easy to identify most characters from their surnames as Brahman, Baidya or Kayastha, the three higher castes in Bengal. It is as hard to find members of other castes as Muslims in Ray’s films until Abhijan (1962), where a Christian convert hesitates to serve food to the upper-caste hero because she had belonged to an “untouchable” caste before her conversion. This short scene is not complemented, however, by a deeper investigation of the social consequences of caste divisions and it is not until the early 1970s that Ray’s cinema engages with them.

This absence, it is only fair to emphasize, was accidental, for Ray had been eager from 1960 to film Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder, 1973), where untouchability plays a significant role but the project was repeatedly stalled by factors beyond his control.18 One of Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay’s last novels, Ashani Sanket had been left incomplete, but Ray was gripped by its sensitive depiction of the approach of the calamitous famine of 1943 from the perspective of a small, peripheral but relatively prosperous village in the interior of Bengal, the residents of which are only vaguely aware of the war raging in Asia and its consequences.19 The narrative commences with scenes of a stable rural community, where a newly-arrived Brahman is treated with universal reverence and munificence. He and his young wife accept the caste hierarchy as god-given and when a young woman from their previous village comes to see them, the Brahman’s wife warns her to stay at a safe distance since she had just bathed and if touched by her, she would have to go down to the river for another bath. Her husband, too, has no qualms about accepting gifts and free services from the villagers; he is not particularly learned or holy and something of a pompous fraud, but he is a Brahman and he as well as the villagers consider it the sacred duty of the lower castes to revere and nurture him. It is a society that cannot even conceive of a different kind of order.

But things soon change. Foodgrains rise sharply in price and then disappear from the market. The Brahman’s rights are recognized less and less; once, at a mini-riot near a rice shop, he is even manhandled by people desperate to obtain some of the grain. Trekking for miles to a nearby village where a resident is reported to have rice, he is told that what rice there was could not be spared, but since it would be a grievous sin not to offer hospitality to a Brahman visitor, he was welcome to have a meal but, because the household did not belong to a caste entitled to touch a Brahman’s food, he would have to cook it himself. Observing his clumsy attempts to cook, the householder’s widowed daughter takes pity on him and helps him out with instructions—from a distance, of course—and then tells him to eat without worrying about his hungry family, for she would secretly give him some rice before he left. Such charitable gifts cannot, however, go very far in protecting anybody from the famine—which, of course, was still in its prodromal stages—and soon, his wife has to go out with other women to dig out edible roots and to operate the dhenki (manual device for husking rice grains) for wages payable in rice. In the middle of this crisis, the untouchable woman who was asked to keep apart earlier in the film is reported to be lying sick in the outskirts of the village and rushing out to see her, the Brahman’s wife discovers that she is not sick but starving. Bringing her whatever little she could spare, she carefully places it near her and asks her to get it herself. The barrier of caste is still inviolate, even though everything else is disintegrating.

The woman cannot reach out to the food for she is too weak and soon dies. The Brahman, unaware of what had transpired, notices her lying in the fields and suspects the worst as he approaches her. He has been practising a bit as an ayurvedic physician and knows that he had to feel her pulse to decide whether she was alive or dead. In a remarkably composed close-up, in dark silhouette, we see his hand, after some hesitation, picking up hers. The portentous framing, lighting, and sound design of the scene are justified by the magnitude of his act.20 This scene, it should be mentioned, is Ray’s invention; it is not to be found in the novel (Bandyopadhyay 1991, pp. 82–83). Reporting the woman’s death to his wife, the Brahman laments that she was from such a low caste that nobody would touch her corpse and it would be left to be picked apart by vultures. Perhaps, he muses, he should attend to the cremation—he has grown sufficiently as a human being during the ongoing calamity to contemplate such a transgression of caste rules, but he still anxiously asks his wife whether she would object to it. She does not, but the question itself is more significant, at least from a sociological point of view. Even after the last barrier had fallen for the Brahman himself, he still cannot assume that it had fallen for his wife as well.21

Ashani Sanket, overtly, is as grim a tragedy as Devi—grimmer, in fact, in its implications, for what we see in the film is only a small glimpse of a calamity that would kill millions, as Ray reminds us in an uncharacteristic note in the last frame. Nevertheless, the film’s portrayal of self-transcendence—the Brahman grows at every level over the film, although I have only outlined his overcoming of caste distinctions—is one of the most remarkable in Ray’s corpus, and all the more so because of Soumitra Chatterjee’s magisterial performance. How realistic is it to imagine, however, that the barriers of caste could be demolished so easily? The question is bound to trouble viewers and perhaps troubled the director himself, for nearly a decade later, when addressing caste discrimination even more directly than in Ashani Sanket in a short film for television, he refuses to entertain the slightest notion of transcendence.

That tele-film, Sadgati (Deliverance, 1982), was based on a story by Munshi Premchand and set far away from Bengal.22 It is a searing tale of an “untouchable” seeking to persuade the local Brahman to conduct the ceremony for his daughter’s engagement. Rather like the Brahman of Ashani Sanket at the beginning of the film, this Brahman, too, demands services in return, which the supplicant does not dream of refusing to provide. But he is also unwell and has not had anything to eat and whilst trying to chop a massive, daunting log into small pieces with a blunt axe, he drops dead. Nobody except his widow mourns his loss but the question, as in Ashani Sanket, was who would move the corpse? The dead man’s caste-fellows have heard about the unconscionable treatment that had led to his death and refuse to do it. Finally, the Brahman himself, taking enormous care not to touch the unclean body, ties a rope around the leg of the cadaver and drags it, huffing and puffing, to the village dump for animal cadavers. As the film ends, he is back home, sprinkling holy water where the low-caste man had died and chanting mantras to purify it.

Leaving aside their different contexts, the central issues in Sadgati and Ashani Sanket are identical—the disposal of an “untouchable” corpse by a Brahman—and yet the resolutions are worlds apart. Obviously, the films are based on different stories by different authors but they were chosen for filming by the same director who, moreover, had never hesitated to deviate radically from the original when adapting a literary work for the screen. In Ashani Sanket, as orthodox a Brahman as the protagonist of Sadgati rises above a barrier that generation after generation had considered inviolable. Although the screenplay takes ample care to establish it as the outcome of gradual change in the character’s sensibility and the unprecedented crisis adds to the plausibility of hitherto inconceivable action, the transcendence, even if one accepts it at face value, is limited to one individual (two, if one includes his wife) in the midst of a calamity. It does not imply a broad social change.

In Sadgati, the crisis is singular and the Brahman, in spite of facing a degree of resistance from those lower in the caste hierarchy, resolves it without breaching tradition and the purification ritual at the end of the film removes the taint left on his house by the unclean corpse. Taken together, Ashani Sanket and Sadgati imply the invincibility of caste except, perhaps, in situations where society itself is in disarray and even then in individual cases. Smaller perturbations can perplex and perhaps transform individuals but cannot undermine the rules governing relations between the higher and the lower castes. If the Brahman touching the corpse of the untouchable woman in Ashani Sanket is not altogether a humanist fantasy, it is little more than an aberration conceivable only in aberrant times, whilst the turn of events in Sadgati, arguably, reflects the everyday realities of orthodox Hinduism.

4. A Besieged Agnostic?

One could say much more about Ray’s engagements with Hinduism, especially, for instance, about his depiction of religious fraud and the gullibility of educated believers in films like Mahapurush (The Holy Man, 1965). Space constraints, however, preclude such explorations and I would like to conclude this essay with a discussion of Ray’s final position on Hinduism and, broadly, on religion itself, drawing upon two of his last films, Ganashatru (Public Enemy, 1989) and Agantuk (The Stranger, 1991).23 Made when the director was in fragile health and usually regarded as being cinematically inferior to his earlier works, these final works are, however, useful for their relatively blunt and straightforward ideological statements. In Ray’s greatest works, his beliefs, prejudices and contradictions have to be teased painstakingly out of the interstices of his dense, layered narratives, from fleeting details or from casual allusions; his last works are far less ambiguous, anything but “gray” in their characterizations and, therefore, present us with fewer difficulties in deciphering the director’s point of view.

Based on Henrik Ibsen’s renowned play An Enemy of the People (1882), Ray’s Ganashatru transplants the action to a small Bengali town and instead of the populace being endangered by the contaminated waters of the public baths, here the risk to public health is the tainted charanamrita (water sanctified by the feet of the icon) from a temple that attracts countless devotees. As in Ibsen’s play, the doctor who detects the contamination struggles to make his voice heard but here, of course, he is opposed not by “the damned compact liberal majority” but by people of faith, or, at least, by those who do not want the temple to be closed even temporarily or devotees to be warned not to sip the charanamrita. The doctor’s own faith—or lack of it—becomes an issue in the debates that ensue and the fate of his campaign is sealed after his public admission of being an agnostic. The film does not, however, end with him discovering that the strongest man is he who is most alone; instead, when on the verge of leaving the town with his family in despair, he hears chants of support by young people who trust the voice of reason and science that he represents rather than the dogmatic assertions of the faithful.

In Agantuk, the situation is very different. The film is largely a conversation-piece, where, after the irruption of a long-vanished uncle into a middle-class household of Calcutta, questions about the stranger’s identity generate debates and heated exchanges between the polymathic, widely-travelled visitor—whom Ray acknowledged to be his “spokesman” and to whom he lent his voice for three brief snatches of song—and a superficially smart but utterly conventional friend of his hosts. The debates cover many disparate themes but religion, obviously, is among them. Predictably, Ray, through his spokesman, condemns “religion, and especially organized religion” for dividing people from one another and derides supposedly observant Hindus for being clueless about Hindu myths—how many times did Durga kill Mahisasur? Why does Ganesh have an elephant’s head?—and of possessing little understanding of the difference between dharma and religion. Leaving religion aside, however, what about God? Does he believe in a supreme being? Humming a Tagore song that prays for the blind to be allowed to see and for the dead to be given life, the stranger declares that the state of life on earth constantly undermines any belief one might have in such an all-powerful entity. His answer is not the atheist’s flat “no” but nor is it the agnostic’s “I don’t know”—it is “seemingly very unlikely,” a position for which there is no formal label but which, one feels, is rather closer to atheism than to anything else.

The somewhat one-dimensional presentations of religious issues in Ganashatru and Agantuk are less interesting than the fact that they are voiced in contexts of more-or-less hostile interrogation. At the end of his life, it seems, Ray increasingly regarded the secular, agnostic/atheist modernist position on religion (as well as other social questions that we have not discussed here) as besieged by traditionalists and those who sided with them in order to serve their own interests. There is no scope here for any substantive analysis linking this perception with the resurgence of Hindu fundamentalism in Indian politics and society from the end of the 1980s, but the possibility of such a connection may well deserve attention, at least from any biographer of Ray’s. Moreover, it is worth asking whether Ray still accepted the broadly Brahmo distinction between “superstition” and (legitimate) “religion” or, in his final years, opposed religion tout court. Such questions are not purely biographical either, for Ray’s creative life spanned the critical decades over which independent India’s admittedly imperfect and even, at times, hypocritical secularism gradually lost what little substance it had ever had, yielding its place to a rhetoric and political practice that scoffed at secularism, proudly declaring its Hindu identity and its conception of India not as a modern secular republic but as the ancient homeland of the Hindus alone. A more comprehensive examination of Satyajit Ray’s engagement with Hinduism than I have been able to conduct here would, therefore, enable us not only to understand Ray the man or his mind at greater depth, but to appreciate how the slow transformation of secularist aspirations marking the first decades after India’s independence was reflected in the art and ideology of one of twentieth-century India’s major artists.