Page 18 - THE CHANGING WORLD OF RAY
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concepts can be used and ence, as she is left alone in
abused for personal interest, her golden cage, just like her
offering a modern moral tale birds. Instead, he has hired
of disillusion with the past an English teacher to edu-
and re-enchantment with cate Charu in English songs
the future. and good manners. But his
perfect, bourgeois world is
Objects of Modernity shattered in a kind of Pen-
Objects of Modernity
ter-ian way, by the arrival of
his younger cousin, the sen-
Ray’s adaptation of
Tagore’s Nastanirh (‘Broken sitive, carefree, and poetic
Nest’ written in the 1880s) Amal (Soumitra Chatterjee)
in Charulata (‘Lonely Wife’ with whom Charu falls in
filmed in 1964) offers anoth- love.
er critical disillusion with
the emancipating promise The film begins with
of modernity. In Charulata, Charu walking around an
this is expressed by the libi- empty, but heavily decorated
do of Charu, a bored bour- house, surrounded by Vic-
geois wife played masterful- torian furniture, a French
ly by Madhabi Mukherjee. mirror, a clock, a romantic
Charulata is set in Calcut- painting of Venus, and her
ta in the 1880s. Charu is closest companion: the bin-
married to Bhupati (played oculars, through which she
by Sailen Mukherjee), the looks at the world from her
publisher of the progressive half-shut window of her bed-
journal The Sentinel -simi- room (see Table 3.1 ‘Opening
larly to Ray’s grandfather-. Sequence’ in Appendix). The
He smokes a pipe, uses En- binoculars offer a new way
glish phrases, and is totally of constructing knowledge
devoted to the publication about the world outside her
of his journal. However, he room; a modern (i.e. ‘eman-
completely ignores her pres- cipating’) way of looking, re-
cording, and understanding
