“Mahanagar”/The Big City

Mahanagar, Satyajit Ray’s enduring masterpiece from 1963exposed the hypocrisies of the middle class Bengali society when it came to empowering its women. The film, which Ray adapted from a short story by Bengali authorNarendranathMitra, primarily sketches the life of the central character Arati(the infinitely graceful and expressive Madhabi Mukherjee)who is the quintessential middle class Bengali homemaker– a perfect wife to her loving husband Subrata, a caring mother to her eight-year old son Pintu, and an obedient, dutiful and deeply respectful daughter-in-law .Subrata is a poorly-paid bank clerk with a degree, a wife, small son, teenage sister and elderly parents to support in a cramped flat. He loves his wife but believes that “a woman’s place is in the home”. Howeveras the household desperately needs more money to keep going, so patronizingly, Subrata finds an advertisement for a sales job that might suit Arati, writes the application letter and sends her off for an interview. This is the turning point of the film and their lives. Her natural charm and intelligence gets noticed by the suave manager of a firm selling expensive knitting machines and she soon becomes the favoured sales woman who visits houses of Calcutta’s nouveaux riches to sell her company’s products. The film depicts how Subrata slowly starts resenting her success, her confident demeanor at work, her ease with the attractive boss. Ray’s attention to minute symbolic details like presence of a lipstick in

Arati’spursethat causes a minor rift between the husband and wife– draws attention to the kinds of suspicion and questions that a working woman from a middle class has to negotiate with. Equally remarkable is the climax when Subrata’s bank suddenly failscreating a situation when the entire family must rely on Arati’s earning and she must not quit. This clearly problematizes the understanding of gender.