The Woman and the City: Narrativizing Spaces in Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar

Adapted from the short story “Abataranika” (“Introduction”) by Narendranath Mitra (1916-79), Mahanagar (The Big City) (1963) is considered to be one Satyajit Ray’s (1929-92) most masterly directed films.

Set in 1950s Calcutta, the film zooms in on the quotidian drama of a lower-middle-class household as it unfolds against a bustling cityscape. Caught in a financial crisis, Aarti Mazumdar (played by Madhabi Mukherjee) decides to take up a job as a saleswoman in spite of the misgivings of her bank-clerk husband (played by Anil Chatterjee).

At her workplace she befriends an Anglo-Indian woman named Edith (played by Vicky Redwood) for whom she engages in a conflict with her boss (played by Haradhan Bandhopadhya) and consequently resigns.

The film follows the evolution of Aarti’s character from a demure housewife to a street-smart saleswoman whose unfailingly critical take on workplace politics, money, labour and justice redefines the fraught relationship between tradition and modernity.

Mahanagar: A Tale Told through Spaces

The arc of Aarti’s character overlaps with a transitioning cityscape undercut by the spectre of the 1947 Partition on one hand and the pulls of globalisation on other. The linear alignment of the Bengali middle-class morality embodied by Subrata’s retired school teacher father is frequently threatened by the reality of an onsetting modernity which facilitates men and women to take over the streets and work and earn as equals. The syncopation between city and gender is beautifully illustrated through space politics in the narrative.

The Poetics of Confinement

Domestic spaces primarily occupied by women but dominated by men became complex sites of contesting patriarchal ideologies that hardly left room for the articulation of the female self. Through abounding interior shots, Ray has simultaneously jeopardised and validated this prototypical feminist assumption. The symbolic lack of space assigned to women is visually conveyed in this film through the easy susceptibility of the bedroom Aarti shares with her husband Subrata, to an invasion of privacy. Although Subrata does come across as quite progressive and empathetic as a partner, the bedroom as a space is culturally encoded with the norms of disciplinarian masculinity that condition female subjectivity into obligation and subservience. In the bedroom, Aarti is unable to realise her true self because here her identity as a wife tends to subsume her identity as an individual. The same argument applies to the official cabin occupied by Aarti’s boss, Himangshu Mukhopadhya. There too, Aarti struggles to translate her rage into communicable terms as is quite evident in the scene where she is obliged to sit through the boss’s vilification of her colleague and confidante, Edith Simmons. Aarti’s equation with her boss is a re-enactment of the power dynamics she shares with her husband at home. Within the space of the office, the husband’s ownership of Aarti is handed over symbolically to the boss who assumes the position of the superior master.

Blurring Borders, Unfixing Labels

Ray, a humanist to the bone, refuses to align such scenes of gender conflicts along a purely feminist point of view. Rather he exploits spaces as contested sites where female consciousness critiques patriarchy without ever aspiring to replace it. For instance, Aarti’s decision to be the bread-winner in her family entails an assertion of selfhood that is immediately undercut by a potent sense of guilt on her part regarding her duties as a caregiver and mother. She insists that even though she becomes a working professional she is, at the end of the day “just a housewife” and gladly so. A director as sensitive as Ray aptly grasps the misgivings of an early 20th century Bengali middle-class woman who is about to step across the threshold of her home for the first time and assume a position reserved for men. 

Breaking Free

The non-linearity of the process by which the female self finds expression can be captured within certain alternate spaces that are liberatory in their imports. For instance, the ladies’ restroom at Aarti’s workplace. The restroom becomes a site of female solidarity, self-expression and sorority. From bonding over their first pay check to putting on lipstick for the first time; from breaking down after an emotional turmoil to silently backing each other up, the washroom stands as a testimony to female friendship which is arguably at the root of the revolutionary power of Aarti’s anger. It is also a space that momentarily allows the woman to momentarily escape the patriarchal gaze that follows her around all the time. The narrative abounds in mirror shots all of which are captured in the washroom, and which visually invokes those rare yet epiphanic moments when Aarti looks back at the camera by looking into the mirror and in relation sees herself.