Goddess in a trap
Updated On: 04 February, 2024 06:44 AM IST | Mumbai | Meenakshi Shedde
But on reviewing the film again recently, I was equally powerfully struck by the foot massage scene
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Illustration/Uday Mohite
It is fascinating how our relationship with the same film can evolve with time and life experience. I’ve long been an admirer of Satyajit Ray’s films. I revisited many of his films, including Devi (The Goddess, 1960), when I curated the retrospective “Satyajit Ray, His Contemporaries and Legacy” for the Toronto International Film Festival’s TIFF Cinematheque in 2022. It struck me forcefully then, that the film was about how patriarchy and religion can be a fatal combination, swiftly causing the downfall of reason. It is uncanny how Ray seems to have anticipated in 1960 the triumph of patriarchy and religion today, with the national crescendo accompanying the inauguration of the Ayodhya Ram Mandir on January 22, perfectly timed just before the general elections.
But on reviewing the film again recently, I was equally powerfully struck by the foot massage scene. I’d been invited to lecture on Satyajit Ray’s Devi at the Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum (German Film Institute & Film Museum, DFF), Frankfurt, on January 18, as part of the series Ein Auge fur Die Welt: Die Filme von Satyajit Ray (An Eye for the World: The Cinema of Satyajit Ray), a landmark, 10-month lecture and film series curated by Vinzenz Hediger, Ritika Kaushik and Daniel Fairfax. And they screened a gorgeous 35mm print from the Academy Film Archive, of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, AMPAS. My lecture, titled “Devi: Goddess in a Trap”, had a sub-title, “Me Too via Religion”.
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