Calcutta and the Modern Woman: Reading the Films <em>Mahanagar</em> and <em>Kahaani</em>

Abstract

In the history of Indian cinema, Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar (1963) and Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani (2012) are among the all too few films with strong, resilient, and resourceful women as their protagonists. Ray’s Arati Mazumdar and Ghosh’s Vidya Bagchi are the heroines with the men cast in supporting roles. Each woman finds her own way in the same city: Calcutta/Kolkata (the latter being the Bengali name in use since 2001). That Calcutta/Kolkata itself plays a central role in these woman-centric films is especially apt given that female emancipation became a contested issue there between British colonizers and Indian nationalists. As the capital of West Bengal, Kolkata today is a stronghold for chief minister Mamata Banerjee, the woman who defeated the Communist Party of India after thirty-seven years in power. Moreover, Durga Puja, a celebration of the Mother Goddess Durga, has been the city’s most important religious festival for the last two hundred years. Analyzing women’s negotiations of tradition and modernity, these two films imagine and intervene into the spaces and communities of post-independence Calcutta and neoliberal Kolkata.