by Pauline Kael
It’s a different kind of love that Satyajit Ray’s Ghare-Baire, or The Home and the World, brings out, but it’s love all right. Adapted from a novel that Rabindranath Tagore wrote in 1912 (Ray prepared a script for it in the forties, long before he made his first film, Pather Panchali), it deals with a great modern subject that has come up in Ray’s work over and over: the emancipation of women, and what it does to them and to the men who love them. This is central to Ghare-Baire, which is the story of the emergence of a young wife from the seclusion and ignorance of purdah into the complexities of becoming more fully human—or, at least, adult—and having choices. The core situation is much like the one in James Joyce’s play Exiles—the husband, in his pride, wanting the wife to be free to be faithful—but that’s only the film’s starting point.
Victor Banerjee (the Dr. Aziz of A Passage to India) is Nikhil, a maharajah in Bengal with a Western education and liberal views. His wife, Bimala (Swatilekha Chatterjee), is conventional in her beliefs, and is content to live in the women’s quarters of his palace and be visible to no man except him. But he loves her and is proud of her, and wants her to be a modern woman, able to move in the world. She first saw him at their wedding: how will he ever know whether she really loves him if she doesn’t have the opportunity to choose him—to prefer him to other men? For ten years, Bimala is taught by an English governess and encouraged to think for herself and develop her creativity. At last, in 1907, Nikhil persuades her to take the momentous walk with him down the corridor that leads from the women’s apartment to the main rooms of the palace. There, in the drawing room, he introduces her to his friend the handsome, fiery radical Sandip (Soumitra Chatterjee, the Apu of The World of Apu, and a principal actor in eleven other Ray films). And then the refined, uncoercive Nikhil watches passively—helplessly—as she becomes enthralled by Sandip’s cocksure masculinity and his revolutionary rhetoric.
The movie is about the destruction of the marriage, and the riots and bloodshed caused by Sandip’s terrorist supporters. It’s a large theme—a double tragedy, in the home and in the world—presented in a formal style that owes almost nothing to the conventions of American or Western European films. The screen frame is almost square, and the scenes—most of them inside the rooms of the palace—are in deep, glowing colors. The main characters talk, and the camera just stays on them and waits until they finish, yet these conversations develop a heart-swelling intensity. In a sense, the method is like that of amateur moviemakers who think that all they need to do is put actors in a room and photograph them reading their lines as if they were on a stage. The difference is that Satyajit Ray, who has been making movies for thirty years, didn’t start with this simplicity—he achieved it. His approach—the intimacy of his focussing on the actors in their setting—may be influenced by Ozu or late Dreyer, but it isn’t remotely austere or ascetic. India takes care of that.
When you’re inside the palace, there’s a lot of India outside the windows. The home and the world are interpenetrating metaphors. The interiors seem to be lighted through stained-glass windows, and the colors, the fabrics, the way the actors move—everything is erotic, ambiguous, in the process of being transformed. The richness of the performances—those of Victor Banerjee and Swatilekha Chatterjee in particular—and the colors and textures of the interiors are like an electric field. The conversations in golden light and shadows have their own kind of voltage. You watch these graceful people in draped garments in their lethargic, patterned décor, and everything in the country seems draped, hanging, defeated—and hectic, too.
The story takes place during the chaotic aftermath of Lord Curzon’s partition of Bengal into Muslim and Hindu states, when the nationalist movement that Sandip is part of is trying to impose a boycott against all foreign goods (by claiming that imports are at the root of Indian poverty). Yet Bimala is becoming educated—becoming free—by imbibing English traditions. When this Indian woman sings, in English, the song that she has been taught by her governess—“Tell me the tales that to me were so dear, Long long ago, long long ago”—the confusion of cultures is insanely poignant.
Bimala is girlish and coquettish in the early scenes in the women’s quarters, and part of the fascination of the movie is that Swatilekha Chatterjee grows with her role, and becomes more absorbing the longer you see her. She’s not a mere ingénue; she’s a full-bodied, rounded beauty, and her Bimala has an earthy, sensual presence. But Bimala and Nikhil obviously have no children, and we don’t see them in passionate embraces, either. Nikhil’s love for her seems more spiritual than physical.
For much of their ten-year marriage, each time Nikhil suggests that Bimala leave purdah behind she looks down, smiling defensively. It isn’t her compulsion; it’s his. She doesn’t want to come out of the women’s quarters—all incense and silks, Arabian Nights cushions and English bric-a-brac. The rooms are stuffed—surfeited—with treasures; Bimala seems to emerge from inside a jewel. Maybe it’s because the drive isn’t hers that she’s so overwhelmed by Sandip’s fervor, and so easily taken in. Nikhil could guide her—could explain what the boycott is doing to the poor in the area. But he wants her to wise up by herself; he wants her to jump over the giant hurdle of growing up in ignorance, and see through the political line of a messiah like Sandip. He tells her to use her “woman’s intuition”—surely the last thing she should trust in making a choice between his passive principles and Sandip’s ruthless magnetism. This gracious, recessive maharajah (with zero carnality) is the innocent one.
Nikhil seems almost to will the destruction of his marriage. We never get inside his kindness, his virtue, his high-mindedness—or his weakness. Yet this doesn’t seem a defect in the film but, rather, part of its richness and its mystery. Toward the end, Bimala, who was wheedled into independence by her husband, becomes desperate to express that independence—recklessly, heedlessly. When it comes to truthfulness about women’s lives, this great Indian moviemaker Satyajit Ray shames the American and European directors of both sexes.
The New Yorker, July 1, 1985
