I. Like Rabindranath Tagore's novel Nastanir (The Broken Nest), its film version by Satyajit Ray titled Charulata (name of the novella's main character) has been hailed by critics as one of the most outstanding achievements of their creators. A leading film-critic of India has even claimed that in Charulata "Ray's understanding of the character is perfect .... Charulata is observed entirely from the inside."¹ My paper argues that Ray not only distorted the story of Nastanir, he totally and brutally caricatured Bhupati's character, neutered Amal's and marginalized Manda's in order to render the novella filmworthy and reflective of his personal preferences. Although it has not been generally recognized, Ray's estimate of the Bengali male was less than perfect and in almost all his films he manifested his contempt for him. On the other hand, bred in the puritanical Brahmo culture of a patriarchal society reinforced by the 19th-century misogynistic dicta against kamini-kanchana, Satyajit betrayed a peculiar ambivalence in his work. On the one hand, he remained under the thrall of a strict code of morality that considered sexuality as barbarous while, on the other hand, as a progressive minded intellectual, he betrayed a curiously gratuitous condescension to women. He in fact believed that "a woman's beauty ... lies in her patience and endurance in a world where men are generally more vulnerable and in need of guidance."² One critic has called Ray's feminist concern, a la Toril Moi, "feminist ventriloquism" and declared that he is the "perfect spokesperson for... all the Ratans [Ratan is the preteen househelp for Nandalal the postmaster in Postmaster, Ray's movie on Tagore's short story bearing the same title], Charulatas,[and others]... of India." ³

Yet for all his self-conscious progressivism Satyajit's bhadralok (urban genteel class) upbringing was situated squarely in the cultural-moral world of Renaissance Bengal. It was Janus-faced in that it absorbed and appropriated the metropolitan Western cultural norms while adapting them to nationalist purposes by amalgamating the pristine cultures of Hindu India.⁴ Nirad Chaudhuri writes that the free-flowing and overt sexuality of the Bengalis prior to the onset of British rule was transformed under the influence of Western education in the 19th century. "There is no doubt," writes Chaudhuri, "that the Bengalis in the late 19th century... sincerely believed that the higher form of love between man and woman transcended carnality."⁵ The patriotic neo-Hindu of renascent Bengal was averse to romantic love. Thus Tagore has Gora (protagonist of his novel bearing the same title) declare that "the proper place for worshipping woman is her home where she is mother, the chaste housewife. Any attempt to pay respect to her elsewhere is to insult her indirectly."⁶ The respectable woman was modeled after such Hindu female cultural icons as Ahalya, Damayanti, Sita or Savitri. This paradigmatic model of a Hindu woman continued into the post-colonial times. Growing up in the decades just before and after India's independence in 1947, Ray's attitude to femininity remained anchored to the culture that had elevated womanhood to a high pedestal a deviation or fall from which was to lower its status. At the same time, the modernizing and liberalizing trends of the sixties influenced Ray. As Chidananda Das Gupta has it," in Mahanagar [The Metropolis], ... for the first time, we come across a woman who is awakened to the possibility of determining the course of her own life" and "the sureness of touch is much more evident in Charulata."⁷

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