I thought of West Bengal’s transport minister through the opening title sequence of Mahanagar. Snehashish Chakraborty had just announced the imminent closure of Calcutta’s hundred-and-fifty-year-old tram system and Satyajit Ray’s 1963 film begins with a sustained close shot of a tram’s trolley pole snug against the overhead line sparking at every join. In Ray’s film, the tram line identifies his metropolis; in the minister’s explanation, trams are a drag on modern Calcutta’s bid to be properly metropolitan. So it goes. Sixty-one years is a long time in the life of a city.
I had never watched a Bengali film by Ray in a commercial theatre before; it was always film club screenings or grainy videos. The only exception that I can remember is Shatranj Ke Khilari, which was a Hindi film with marquee stars from Bombay’s film industry. This screening of Mahanagar was different: it happened in a plush cinema hall in an upscale Delhi mall, complete with popcorn and semi-reclining seats. There were no trailers, no commercials, not even the national anthem: the lights dimmed, the film began, and two and a half hours later, it ended. There were a dozen people in the hall, so phones didn’t ring and idiots didn’t whisper; it was the purest film-going experience of my life and thanks to Ray, it was sublime.
Mahanagar is the story of Arati, a young wife and mother, who goes out to work as a knitting machine saleswoman to supplement her husband’s income. Her husband, Subrata (Anil Chatterjee), is an accountant in a small bank soon to go bust and they live in a small, slummy set of rooms with her parents-in-law, her sister-in-law (a very young Jaya Bhaduri), and their little son.
Much of the film is given up to detailing the poverty of the household and the ongoing struggle for respectability that gives Indian family life its toxic pathos. Even Ray can’t escape melodrama when he shows us Arati’s father-in-law, a retired schoolmaster, scrounging money, spectacles and free medical appointments from his former students. Life in a petit bourgeois home is a precarious business and the melodrama comes baked in.
But luckily for us, the domestic squalor, masterfully detailed though it is, is just the set up for the real business of the film which is Arati’s coming of age as a working woman. There is something exhilarating about her first contacts with Calcutta’s corporate world and its bungalow-ed clientele. The art deco buildings, the elevators, the business signage, the glamour of the modern office, her camaraderie with co-workers, her interactions with strange men and women, unmediated by a monitoring male guardian, the diversity of Calcutta in the Sixties, make Arati’s working life a proper urban adventure.
It’s an adventure that draws us in. We sweat in that cotton blouse stuck to her back in Calcutta’s sticky heat, cautiously enter posh homes and pitch the knitting machine to idle hausfraus, lock ourselves into the office loo to inhale the promise of crisp banknotes, experiment furtively with the sinful stylishness of lipstick and dark glasses, we live, once again, the excitement of growing up that only work can bring.
Arati’s most pivotal relationship in this film is not with her husband, her father-in-law, or her pipe-smoking boss, though they get a lot of screen time. Her most crucial connection, the one that the film turns on, is her brief friendship with Edith Simmons, her Anglo-Indian colleague. Edith is important for several reasons. In realist terms, she represents that class of Anglo-Indian women who worked in modern offices and working environments as secretaries, stewardesses and saleswomen. But for Ray, she is also important for what she isn’t: Edith isn’t burdened with the baggage of middle-class Indian womanhood and therefore isn’t infantilised in public environments by lajja or deference or indirection.
From the moment she meets Arati, she’s both brisk and friendly. Despite Arati’s tentativeness and obvious inexperience, Edith treats her as an equal and colleague. She negotiates with Mr Mukherjee, their boss, a commission on each knitting machine sold on behalf of all the saleswomen. She gives Arati a brand new lipstick in the office loo and applies it for her so she can see how pretty she looks with it on. They become friends; Arati steps in to do a knitting machine demo that Edith had scheduled before falling ill. Arati visits her at home where she’s convalescing listening to pop music surrounded by posters of Western film stars on her walls. Edith’s mother welcomes her in, and they sort of chat even though Arati can’t speak English. Edith gives Arati a gift of goggles for stepping into the breach when she was ill. Ray pencils in, in his oblique, minimalist way, a modern female friendship.
It’s worth noting here that all the female characters in this film are sympathetic and all the male ones aren’t. Subrata, who begins well as an affectionate husband and droll family man, is quickly reduced to resentment and shame by Arati’s success at her job and the loss of his own. His father is redeemed only by his eccentric belief that he can make his fortune by winning a crossword lottery. For the rest of the time on screen, he displays a talent for martyrdom and self-pity that Guru Dutt’s character in Pyasa might have envied. Angry men beat up Subrata outside his failed bank. Arati’s pipe-smoking boss, who manages to be benevolent through most of the film, turns out to be a pig at the end.
In contrast, Bani, Arati’s sister-in-law, is a model of supportive good nature. Her mother-in-law works tirelessly at taking care of the family. Arati’s team of co-workers are robustly good humoured in the way they deal with strange meetings and awkward customers. Even the idle housewife Arati meets on one of her rounds is sympathetic in her loneliness, happy to while away the time with a perfect stranger. Edith, of course, is the friend who showed her how to be a working woman.
The climax of the film comes about when the hitherto kindly Mr Mukherjee, who has not only promoted Arati but promised her husband a job, arbitrarily fires Edith. Ray has built up to this by having Mukherjee talk knowingly about the things Anglo-Indian girls get up to when Edith reports sick. He fires her for shamming illness but really because Arati has done so well that he feels he can dispense with Edith’s services. Mukherjee with his pipe pretends to be cosmopolitan, but he isn’t. He’s keen on Arati because she isn’t just a good worker, she’s part of the bhadralok in a way that Edith can’t be. He is predisposed to find Subrata a job because like him, Subrata hails from Pabna. His instincts are parochial.
But Arati’s aren’t. She resigns her job in a fury because Mukherjee refuses to apologise to Edith for insulting her. She confronts Mukherjee in his office and testifies to Edith’s integrity. Edith reported sick because she was sick. When Mukherjee refuses, she resigns in solidarity with her colleague and friend. She is the modern cosmopolitan in this telling.
The film ends with Arati and Subrata comforting each other on the stairs of the office she has put behind her. Ray allows them an unaccustomed moment of hope: the camera looks out at the great city, and they allow themselves to believe that somewhere in this great metropolis there must be two jobs for them. It was still Nehru’s India when the film was made, and Ray, like his compatriots, must have had some faith in the redemptive promise of the young republic. But it should have been Arati and Edith hugging each other in that stairwell. Mahanagar is their story.
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