Devi: Seeing and Believing

The ideological split between Umaprasad and Kalikinkar draws on a particular moment of transition in Indian history, though there’s a palimpsestic aspect to Devi that scrambles our ideas of old and new, past and progress. The film is adapted from an 1899 short story by Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay, who received the premise from Bengali cultural giant Rabindranath Tagore. Mukhopadhyay set his tale in the 1790s, in the early years of the Bengal Renaissance, a cultural movement that emerged as the East India Company began to consolidate its rule over the province. The resulting encounter with European education and Enlightenment thought spurred a modernizing impulse among the urban middle class.

Ray’s adaptation moves the story’s timeline forward by almost a century. By then, colonial rule was entrenched in India and festering a growing resistance.  The Renaissance was well underway and had birthed the Brahmo Samaj, a monotheistic strand of Hinduism that advocated for liberal reforms to religious and social traditions. The Tagore and Ray families were both prominent within the Brahmo movement, which rejected Hindu customs such as idol worship, caste, and the burning of widows, and campaigned for women’s education and equality. Its adherents embraced the spirit of Western modernity and rationalism but emphasized its continuity—its “umbilical cord,” as the critic Chidananda Das Gupta puts it—with ancient Indian tradition.

But Devi drives home another dimension of Ray’s pursuit of the real—one rooted not so much in rationalist thought as in a classicist tradition of Indian art in which, per Das Gupta, “beauty is inseparable from truth and goodness.” If Kalikinkar stakes his faith in divine certainties and Umaprasad in empirical fact, Ray offers us a third option: truth in art (which, in the case of cinema, is also a kind of science). Although the filmmaker said that his own sympathies lay with Umaprasad, he commits to Kalikinkar’s perspective with such formal rigor and sensuousness that it unsettles the film’s Western-rationalist leanings. Consider Kalikinkar’s dream: the three graphic eyes of Kali float in a pitch-black abyss, slowly fading into Doya’s childlike face, the third eye superimposed over the red dot on her forehead. It’s a visual argument that’s utterly persuasive in its stark, hieroglyphic simplicity, embedding Kuleshovian correlations in one’s subconscious.

The seductive sense of doubt instilled by this bravura sequence comes to a head when Umaprasad confronts his father, announcing his intention to put a stop to the religious charade. Kalikinkar abruptly grabs his son and covers his mouth, and we hear cries of “Ma! Ma!” from outside the house. Ray cuts to a close-up of a villager bending over his sick grandchild, who is suddenly revived. In a swift series of shots, the camera moves from the reverential face of a priest to Doya’s confused visage, then a cut takes us back to Umaprasad and his father—the former in wide-eyed shock, the latter overcome by this seeming affirmation of his faith. “Would you like more proof?” he asks. Much like the opening sequence, where a formal flourish evokes the myth of genesis, this moment gains the texture of a miracle because of Ray’s careful arrangement of sound and gesture—a crescendo that strikes with the cosmic force of chance.

In these scenes, Ray isn’t so much critiquing Umaprasad’s rationalism as underlining its inadequacy in the face of myth, which entices with its promise of investing the world with meaning. The night after the supposed miracle, Umaprasad tries to flee to Kolkata with Doya. As they make their way through tall weeds and swirling mist, Doya spots the frame of the Durga Puja idol half buried in the sand by the river. Yet another sign from the universe. Doya refuses to go any farther, delivering in a trembling voice the film’s most poignant line: “What if I am the Goddess?” Umaprasad counters: “If you were, wouldn’t you know it?”

Doya’s unsure eyes offer a wordless answer, bringing into focus the real object of critique in Devi: the denial of self-knowledge, a gaping void that neither religion nor rationalism can fill. Shockingly young, unworldly, and uneducated, Doya is a cipher to her own self, caught between the certainties of her father-in-law and her husband—a dynamic that emerges organically from Ray’s pitch-perfect casting of a fourteen-year-old Sharmila Tagore.

Tagore’s visage is the film’s recurring image, her angular face and expressive eyes filling the screen with totemic beauty and terror. Yet there are few shots focalized through her point of view, or seen through her downcast gaze. In the classic patriarchal formulation of the female image, she is looked at but doesn’t look—always an object, never a subject. The one scene in which she is shown in the act of looking—and in which her look is duly received—sends an electric charge of hope through the film. When Umaprasad arrives in the village and walks up to his father’s house, he sees Doya in her shrine. Their eyes meet in a moment of tender recognition and compassion. Umaprasad can see her in all her vulnerable humanity, but this alone cannot save Doya, because she can’t see herself. Her ambivalence leads to the film’s coup de grâce. When her nephew falls ill, Kalikinkar has the boy brought to Doya instead of the doctor. Doya’s sister-in-law, Harasundari (Karuna Banerjee), is skeptical but desperate: “Are you human or divine?” In her own anguished hope, Doya asks that the boy be left with her for the night. He’s dead by morning.

There’s a parable-like simplicity to Devi that might be summed up in the dramatic accusation Umaprasad levels at his distraught father following the tragedy: “Your blind faith caused his death.” But the film’s wells of allegory run deeper, mounting a powerful critique against allegorization itself. Devi dramatizes the ways in which the symbolic deification of women comes at the cost of their material agency. This mythmaking isn’t merely religious; in the nineteenth century, it also became an integral part of the nationalist movement, as the image of the Goddess came to be associated with the Hinduized nation. The Bengali novelist and poet Bankim Chandra Chatterjee immortalized this idea with his 1882 novel Anandamath, which depicted India as an avatar of the Mother Goddess. Abanindranath Tagore, the nephew of Rabindranath, gave this image its pictorial depiction with his famous 1905 painting Bharat Mata (Mother India), which personifies the country as a four-armed, saffron-clad woman. This overlaying of femininity, divinity, and country positioned women’s emancipation as central to that of the nation, and as rooted in Indian spiritual tradition, but it entrapped women in its own patriarchal ideals. As the historian Partha Chatterjee notes, the “new woman” was expected to be modern yet committed to protecting the core realms of Indian culture—family, faith, domesticity—from Western influence, while men could adapt as needed in the fight against the British.

Devi draws on all these sedimented layers of the cult of the Goddess. Doya’s fate seems sealed early on, as Kalikinkar, referring to her as “Ma,” fawns over her nurturing capabilities, while Harasundari envies her for her maternal relationship with her own son. Doya’s anointment as the Goddess incarnate only literalizes—through clever hyperbole—what is already her destiny: to be frozen into an ideal before she can become her own person. Even Umaprasad, with all his newfangled education and conviction, proves unsuccessful in empowering his young wife. When he consults his university adviser about Doya’s predicament, the professor tells him that it is not a question of belief or nonbelief: “The cause is irrelevant. As a husband, you’ve been deprived of your natural rights.” From the realm of religion, the matter is transposed to that of rights—but only those of the husband.