If one was looking for Bollywood counterparts, it might be fair to say that Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar (1963) was the Abhimaan (1973) of its decade, and though the comparison remains a tad preposterous, it was, in some ways, the Queen (2014) of its age. Like both these films, Mahanagar sees its female protagonist carve an identity that extends the confines of an expected domesticity. Played to perfection by Madhabi Mukherjee, Ray’s Arati decides to ignore the conservative edicts of her patriarchal household. She takes on the job of a salesgirl to supplement her family’s modest income. She befriends her Anglo-Indian colleague Edith, and as they go knocking from door to door, Arati acquires an urban boldness that her role as dutiful homemaker never seemed to afford. It is this juxtaposition that provides Mahanagar its drama, and somewhat tragically, its pertinence.

Digging through the newspaper archives of just the past two years leads us to a rather troubling conclusion. Not only does the discourse of a film made half a century ago still seem relevant today, many of our political luminaries remain squarely on the wrong side of its gender politics. In Mahanagar’s opening sequence, Arati’s husband Subrata starts by declaring that a woman’s place is in the house, more specifically in the kitchen. By this point, Mohan Bhagwat would certainly have been hooked. In January last year the RSS chief decreed, “A husband and a wife are involved in a contract under which a husband has said that you should take care of my house and I will take care of you.” Though Bhagwat specified that any violation of the contract by the wife could be ground enough for her to be disowned, he failed to detail the game’s rules fully. A perennially hard-pressed Subrata might possibly ask, “What if I can’t take care of the missus... then what?” Ray has an answer. Help her get a job and when she returns home with her first salary, go into a sulk.

One of Mahanagar’s most important props is the tube of lipstick that Arati brings out when at work and hides carefully when at home. Having discovered it, the horror of Subrata’s reaction has perhaps only ever been matched by President Pranab Mukherjee’s son Abhijit, who had famously referred to protestors in Delhi as “pretty women”, all “dented and painted.” While the average Bengali man’s unchanging attitude towards makeup does seem troubling, it seems more important to note that the Congress MP’s comment was made in the context of the outrage that followed the brutal December 16 gang rape of a 23-year-old girl on a moving Delhi bus. The year 2012 changed the complexion of the gender debate. Emancipation wasn’t being measured by breaks in the glass ceiling anymore. Crime statistics were telling their story and in the case of West Bengal, an ugly one.

According to a National Crime Records Bureau report, West Bengal reported 30,942 cases of crime against women in 2012, the highest in the country. Given the fact that Kolkata itself was adjudged the third most unsafe city for women, one is forced to wonder if Arati would still consider the metropolis a land of infinite opportunity. It isn’t only her husband who’d frown at her sitting in a restaurant with another man. Mamata Banerjee would be just as disapproving. In October 2012, the West Bengal chief minister attributed the rise in cases of rape to freer interactions between the sexes — “Earlier if men and women would hold hands, they would get caught by parents and reprimanded but now everything is so open. It is like an open market with open options.” A man of constant laments, Arati’s patriarchal father-in-law would surely have raised a toast.

Mahanagar ends with Arati and Subrata disappearing into the busy, commercial Dalhousie Square. Just a few crossings away, a woman was gang raped on Park Street in February 2012 and then thrown from a moving car. While Banerjee claimed that the victim was part of a larger conspiracy against her, a Trinamool Congress MP helped clarify this stand. Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar dubbed the incident “a misunderstanding between two parties involved in professional dealings, between a lady and her client.” Arati’s boss is just as quick to brand her colleague Edith promiscuous and degenerate.

There is much in common between Edith and the Park Street rape victim. They are both Anglo-Indian. Much like the sassy Edith who can talk back to her employer when she chooses, Suzette Jordan decided to shun anonymity and make her battle against injustice public. They are both independent women who chose to dress and act how they pleased, but both found it impossible to find their rightful place in a city that’s riddled with unfortunate discrimination.

Mahanagar was never free of controversy. Accusing Ray of prejudice against his community, an Anglo-Indian MP had raised the issue in Parliament. He had not seen the film. But its prints have now been restored. There should be no reason for our political class to again miss out. Since Mahanagar was her debut film, perhaps Jaya Bachchan can arrange a little screening for the likes of Mulayam Singh Yadav and Abu Azmi. With all their talk of ‘boys making mistakes’ and ‘women being hanged’, they are the first who need to see the gendered paradigm in plain black and white.

A digitally restored version of Mahanagar was released across the country on April 18.

(Shreevatsa Nevatia is a freelance writer based in Kolkata)

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