Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar, a trenchant tender tale of the woes of a Kolkata housewife, who becomes a working woman to subsidise her husband’s inadequate income, is not regarded as highly as the Master Creator’s Apu trilogy or for that matter, Charulata.
But Mahanagar remains remarkably relevant even today when double-income households are the norm rather than the exception. In Mahanagar Ray’s favourite actress (no, not Sharmila Tagore) Madhabi Mukherjee is every bit the conflicted diffident homemaker disinclined to step out of her home as a wage earner.
Ms Mukherjee plunges into her character seamlessly and without any artifice. She is every bit Aarti Muzamdar, the cotton sarees, bleached to their final level of existence, help. But there is more here. Madhabi Mukherjee creates a climate of empathy around her character without trying, or crying. She is too busy living life to rebuke or rue it.
ALSO READ: Sujoy Ghosh On His Close Affiliation To Satyajit Ray: Pick Up Any Film Of Mine, He Is There In Spirit | EXCL
Ray’s detailing of the household chores is so organic we never feel we are led into the characters’ lives. Mahanagar was the first of the two classics that Ray created with Madhabi Mukherjee. She never made the same impact outside Ray’s world. Looking at Mahanagar we can see why. Ray works his way around her shortcomings (for example, the uneven stained teeth) ensuring that she is pitch-perfect in every frame.
Anil Chatterjee as Aarti’s beleaguered husband caught between the traditionalism of a typical Bangla family and the progressiveness demanded by the economics of his existence, is also very effective.
But the natural-born scene-stealer of the show is the teenager named Jaya Bhaduri. She plays Bani, Aarti’s spunky sister-in-law. We are surprised Jaya was never part of any other Ray creation. When askedRay had mentioned that he never found the right character in his films to do justice to Jaya.
Interestingly, Mahanagar ends with a shot of a streetlight in Kolkata with one of its two tubes out of order.
Critics went berserk with their deep metaphoric interpretations of the streetlight sequence. Ray laughingly admitted he had no idea that the streetlight was only half operational: a rather telling comment on how we tend to over-analyse Ray’s works.
An actress who would have liked to see herself in a Ray-creational mode is Raakhee Gulzar. Interestingly, Raakhee played Madhabi Mukherjee’s part in the poor Hindi remake of Mahanagar. The Hindi remake entitled Humkadam came sixteen years after the original and was directed by Anil Ganguly.
Recalling the experience, Raakhee Gulzar told Zoom, “Humkadam was planned as a follow-up to my superhit film Tapasya by the same producers(Rajshri Production). It was loosely based on Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar. But I think somewhere we lost the essence, the spirit of the original. I learnt my lesson. One should never touch Ray’s creation. They cannot be recreated as they are flawless. Just like Lataji’s songs.”