Charulata

Charulata by Satyajit Ray, Based on Nashtaneed By Ravindranath Tagore,
With Madhabi Mukherjee, Saumitra Chatterjee


If one knew nothing about Ravindranath Tagore and his works, if one weren't enamoured by his writing and didn't care about changes made for the worse by a renowned director just to say he can, then one can sincerely say that this film is quite good.

But the original story is so innocent, so filled with beauty that the changes here not only destroy but do so quite deliberately and viciously, just to go from an unfortunate consequence of circumstances to a conscious decision by a young adult married woman to take steps in a direction she knows she should not, that one cannot possibly say both are equally good. One cannot love a live person and dissect that one's lifeless cadaver just to create a work of art to frame for show.

Why being self-labelled a leftist intellectual must make some itch quite so to destroy the beauty inherent and replace it with an ugliness that wasn't there in the first place, is perhaps a far bigger subject of study. And Ray has done it elsewhere too, but this one is the worst in this regard.

Ray was a celebrity that no one dare speak against without being labelled with most derogatory epithets beginning with a whole basket of whatever is thought of as opposite of intellectual, but in reality he never got the fair impartial criticism his work deserved, for the two reasons related to his first lauded and much awarded film Pather Panchali - West lauded and awarded that one for the same reason they did the more recent Slumdog Millionaire, which in both cases was because India is shown as poor, starving, etcetera.

West would like to wipe out the reality of history, which is that colonial invaders came to loot, not out of charity, and this merciless looting was the reason India was reduced to the starving land replete with what were euphemistically labelled famines, but were thefts by the colonial regime to the tune of allowing over a million deaths in India while the harvest they had was stolen to feed the British soldiers.

That was bad enough, but refusing to allow the aid ships from US sent to India to proceed further than Australia, was the far more deliberate decision, and if that wasn't bad enough, it was accompanied with a comment about it being of no consequence if "natives" starved in millions in India since India had no reason to be saved. This was later repeated, much more explicitly, by a republican president who instructed to the effect that if necessary, let India die, save pakis. Of course, that was the military bases for use against USSR that they needed kept camouflaged as a country.

So Ray was lauded, applauded and awarded for his Pather Panchali in West, and India promptly followed suit in doing so, defying him to the level where he probably was almost embalmed alive. Colonial slave mindset flourished after independence since it was supposedly indicative of how friendly India was post victory in having chased away the British without firing a shot. That none of this was quite true was conveniently kept under the rug, to the level most believed every part of the fabric of lies.

Charulata, meanwhile, was assassinated without any lament, from the original very young teenage and a naive wife of a much older decent man, to a conscious adult aware of her adulterous feelings and one who acts on them as far as she can under the circumstances.

In short, Ray murdered original Nashtaneed by Tagore.  Another copy of the film on yt, where hopefully this comment won't be gotten rid of, below:-

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SVuZLVrPq98


https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QO5uSqmxQdA