‘Mahanagar’, Satyajit Ray's feminist masterpiece

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Arati Mazumdar has just received her first salary. She breathlessly enters the ladies room — the sole bastion of uninterrupted womanhood in the office of a company making products for housewives — and takes the money out of the envelope bearing her name, holding the crisp banknotes in the manner of a rummy-player fanning a winning hand.

Unobserved and thrilled, Arati surreptitiously brings the cash to her lips. The heroine of Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar is literally seduced by capitalism. Only for an instant, though.

Soon a colleague enters, complaining about the lack of newness in her own cash, and Arati, smiling wide, trades five of her just-kissed new notes for her friend’s crumpled ones. This gesture earns her a forbidden reward. Her Anglo-American friend Edith presents the middle-class Bengali heroine with a lipstick.

As with the currency, Arati is simultaneously scandalised and fascinated. Edith paints Arati’s lips, and Arati promptly wipes off the colour — but not before catching a glimpse of herself in the bathroom mirror. Lipstick, this foreign and modern object, feels like warpaint to her.

For the first time, Arati has gotten paid, has had her work appreciated, has made a friend at the workplace. She has not only tasted blood, but agency. Made over sixty years ago, Ray’s feminist masterpiece remains bracingly modern.