Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar – Emergence of the working woman

Mahanagar is set in 1955. Ray’s own move away from his joint family in 1948 was a forerunner of the major shifts in Bengali society immediately following independence. Mahanagar was based on a short story penned by Narendranath Mitra named Abataranika. Narendra Mitra is said to have thoroughly approved of Ray’s script for the film. Large numbers of middle-class women are now working, and the joint family, as depicted in Mahanagar, has become the exception rather than the rule. The original story placed the husband at the centre. Ray shifted the emphasis to place it on 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 and economic 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.

With Mahanagar, Ray took his first step inside a low middle-class Bengali family home. When pressures on the single earning member begin to mount, Arati is persuaded to take up a job. Arati and her sister-in-law pore over the classified columns of the newspaper with great enthusiasm. Arati lands a job as salesgirl for a knitting machine company. The lives of the Majumdars change forever. However, her husband tells her to quit quite soon after as he begins to feel insecure about the changes he discovers in his wife, some imagined, a few real. But before Arati can hand over her resignation letter, Subrata calls her up and tell her not to give it in – his bank has declared a lockout and he is jobless. The peace of the family is disturbed. Arati is now the sole breadwinner of the family, much to the open disgust of her old-fashioned father-in-law. Subrata’s initial reaction to the proposal is the typical patriarchal quote: “a woman’s place is in the home.” He has to relent soon.

Arati replaces her husband in the breadwinning role. She joins millions of white-collared workers of Calcutta. The financial burden of the extended family is now vested in the wife alone. There is no ‘sharing’ here; it is a ‘taking over.’ Her retired-schoolteacher father-in-law does not like this sudden reversal of roles. He prefers charity disguised as “guru dakshina” to living off his daughter-in-law’s earnings. Arati’s mother-in-law has no ego-hassles about serving a joint lunch to both son and daughter-in-law before they step out together. One finds her wiping off a tear with the end of her sari as she serves lunch to both of them. But it also indicates a silent acceptance of the change in Arati’s position within the family.

Her first appearance as a dutiful daughter-in-law with her head covered with the end of her sari, serving tea to her in-laws is a microcosm of the average Bengali housewife of the time. It is also a counterpoint to the image and the persona Arati later offers. The image she presents finds her wrapped up in household duties: giving medicines to her father-in-law, feeding her son Pintoo, putting him to bed, helping her mother-in-law cook, making tea, and so on. The scenario changes, slowly yet steadily, when Arati is persuaded by husband Subrata to take up a job. Later on, she looks different. Her body language has changed and so has her facial expression. But she is still too naïve to recognize the strain that begin to surface in her relationship with husband Subrata.

Arati asserts her autonomy with her resignation in reaction to her Anglo-Indian friend’s wrongful dismissal. The same letter of resignation she was asked not to deliver when her husband’s bank declared a lock-out is now handed over by her to the boss. The fact that her husband is out of a job does not shake her from this decision. 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 scenes demonstrate the change in Arati. (a) One, when she gets her first pay packet, in cold cash, she shows her money first to herself, in the washroom mirror, her nostrils flared in excitement and in the pride of achievement. (b) Two, 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. He refuses. 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 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 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. She is the sole contributor defines her the household expenses.

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. Would the chasm have widened had Arati gone on with the job and Subrata had 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, Vicky Redwood’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.

Subrata changes too, as he discovers the happy expression on his wife’s face when she comes home from work while he is forced to stay back at home. He sits on his bed, reeling in the frustration of having to watch his wife take on the breadwinning role and quite happy doing it. Where does the money for his cigarettes come from? From being a happily married man openly in love with his pretty wife, Subrata turns into an unhappy man who stoops to eavesdropping into a conversation between his wife and the husband of a friend of hers, in a roadside tea-shop.

The cold war that initially began between Subrata and his father Priyagopal over Arati’s taking up a job spills over into his relationship with Arati. Arati remains unaware of this change, till the husband questions her about the stick of lipstick hidden in her purse when she asks him to take some money out of it to pay someone. He tells her to give up her job at one point, saying that he will manage with moonlighting. Though Arati is reluctant to give up what she has just begun to enjoy, she signs the letter he drafts and puts it in her purse. Ironically, when she can finally hand in the same letter to her boss, the circumstances are dramatically different.

The closing shot smoothens out 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. They are both jobless at that point of time. As they walk and merge with the teeming crowds in the distance, the camera moves back to include a street light above. One of the two lights is out while the other one is on. The film closes on this note of courage – they are sure their Calcutta will soon find them jobs, and hope – as long as they are together, fear and uncertainty are superfluous emotions.

The timelessness and universality of Mahanagar can neither be denied, nor underestimated. The real tension within Arati remains a perennial one. The inner conflict is not about whether she should or should not take up a job, but whether she should try and please everyone – husband, child and in-laws, boss, clients – or whether she should only please herself. For the Indian woman, the conflict can be particularly acute, because those close to her expect more than is expected of women in the West, writes Andrew Robinson. As Arati’s husband tells her, with an affectionate smile, “a woman’s place is in the home.” Expressed in English as it is in the film, the line offers an authentic sample of a Victorian value system that held true in more orthodox circles in Calcutta during the time-frame of the film. For the first time, Ray deals 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.

Though the job brings out qualities within Arati that remained untapped when she was house-bound, it does not offer her the freedom of choice one would expect it to. It is the husband who accepts the fact that the wife must take up a job to supplement the meagre finances of the family. He writes the application letter, asking her just to sign her name below. She asks him how she should spell out the family name Majumdar and he tells her how. Later on, the same husband, burdened by his own insecurities, pens a resignation on her behalf and asks her to deliver it the same day. She signs the letter the way she did the letter of application. But just as she is about to submit it, her husband calls her up to tell her not to give it in. Till this point, Arati is simply serving the role of a puppet in the hands of a seemingly democratic and understanding husband who is actually as tradition-bound as the father he is ideologically distanced from. But with time, and with the vested responsibility of being the sole breadwinner, Arati unwittingly comes into her own, and ceases to be a puppet with the choice she makes following Vicky’s dismissal.