Short Sight

What! You want to be obtuse? Surely not. Surely you’ll not treat this film as a mere character study, a tragic story of three individuals, a family melodrama. No, I can’t believe you’d do Satyajit Ray such a disservice; for like all great artists his characters exist not for themselves, but represent the wider society, delegates for a space and time; here India on the cusp of modernity. An imperial power has the answers to all questions. Ha! What if those questions are beside the point, foolish, simple-minded? The Lonely Wife. When ideas blind us to realities.

_______________

Two plots run in parallel. The one - it concerns a fraud - seems to comment on the other: a love affair between siblings-in-law. Both are betrayals, but a crime debases what is an honest error, a natural instinct, a lofty passion; it is to daub a courtly love with shabby colours. There are resemblances, clearly, but concentrating on them is to make the mistake of the film’s hero, Bhupati Dutt, who thinks along the surface of things. Keen on the West’s ideas, he believes in them too literally, succumbing to the enthusiasm of all fantasists who confuse an idea with what it represents. Even in the West the West’s ideas are not quite what they appear - each has a history, and it is this history we have to comprehend. Not the idea itself but how it works in practice, is changed by people, by institutions, this is what must be understood. And when the same notion is transferred to India…never overlook the differences between these societies; nor the issues, problems, mistakes such translations always throw up. Ideas. So easily fool the unwary. An idea produces the illusion of similitude; an abstract noun a roof that covers all dissimilarities no matter how incompatible.

The period setting suggests the dilemmas of contemporary India; the collapse of honest relations less about criminal behaviour than a change to the customs and morals of the country; as a culture built around a set of noble values dissolves under the pressure of new ideals and their disastrous temptations. In a film full of ironies, it is the noble belief in these new concepts that brings our hero down: Bhupati unaware that their success due not to honour and virtue but to calculation and cash (and military power). He should have invited Karl Marx to his library along with John Stuart Mill.

Bhupati Dutt is enormously rich. Such wealth, which we assume has been accumulated over many generations, has produced a highly cultivated man. Well educated, filled with public-spirit, he has imbibed the high-minded values of the Victorian age. Impractical with money he lives in a world of practical idealism; the world of politics, progress and good works. To be more precise his world one that commentates on the world of politics - Bhupati Dutt is a journalist. Or to be absolute in our precision: he is the editor-proprietor of his own newspaper: an organiser of interpretations. He thinks to bring the morality of his caste and culture into the business of journalism and politics: thus no adverts in his paper, for they, he believes, pollute the purity of its political discourse. You smile, for already you see the weakness. Although very intelligent Bhupati is intellectually narrow - a positivist in the mould of Comte. Facts just facts. When listening to his brother’s poems he understands them only in their literal sense - the symbolism is lost on him. Ideas are treated in the same way: complex metaphysical organisms are reduced to atoms of fixed meaning. Bhupati’s liberalism is that of the political column and dictionary; the idea ‘liberal’ believed as tangible as a chair or table. But concepts are not things! Strange creatures, vague and amorphous, as plastic as clouds, should not be mistaken for solid objects. This the encyclopaedia mind, on the rise since the Enlightenment, and all pervasive today, when vast numbers seek labels to attach to things.1 Such simple belief in definitions and facts makes our hero naive. It is why although smart he is unsophisticated; an innocent in love, business and politics. A perfect establishment journalist for writing along party lines.… No, not some cute paradox. Every political system needs idealists to validate its beliefs and self-image, which are rarely actualised; thus the critics, who attack individuals in the name of those beliefs, those images. (It is the critic who is the pipe-dreamer.) Somebody who sees only the surface of life - the words of the politicos - therefore fulfils their role to the letter(!). A propagandist without knowing it. Bhupati Dutt is a clever man. He’s also ignorant of the world he writes about.2 This saves his political dreams - he can be idealist with a good conscience - but will destroy his personal life. For in the public arena it is useful to believe in illusions. In private the hard facts of reality demand to be heard.

Bhupati Dutt is a modern man; an Indian who worships the British Liberal Party. His high-minded morality, with its blindness to the facts of life (his facts are ideas), makes him stupid in worldly affairs. Business. Politics. Love. These require a good grasp of the instincts and passions; we need a seventh sense to divine the forces lurking below appearances. Bhupati needs the intuitive insight of the artist; and one of life’s ironies is that his otherworldly brother understands this world better than him. Underneath the high moral gloss politics is full of hypocrisy and deceit that plays to the worst instincts of men. To change his world, to improve it, one most know how to manipulate the double-dealers and manage the worst passions; it is to willingly but scrupulously compromise one’s self. Lacking such insight we’ll not impose our views on the social field. A successful politician uses ideas to control men. The cynical journalist twists words until they snake around their party’s flag pole; the cobra hiss of moral outrage the best means of gaining attention for self and newspaper. Poor Bhupati! He takes the rhetoric seriously, believes words alone can change things. The curse of all outsiders, who have no feel for the unwritten codes of a culture; these to determine who wins and loses. Bhupati Dutt an outsider? But of course! The super-smart and high-minded usually are.3

Bhupati Dutt has called his paper The Sentinel. A title oozing with irony: its proprietor the last person to notice what’s going on. In one scene he is so engrossed in a book that he walks past his wife without seeing her. So beautiful! Waiting to greet him, she now lets him walk past, then picks up her binoculars to watch his back departing down the corridor. I can’t resist this quote….

As late as the eighteenth century, students would often be taught by a single tutor, who would be responsible for teaching subjects as disparate as classical languages, chemistry, astronomy, philosophy, geometry and theology. In addition to being repositories for all that counted as learning, university teachers were also expected to instil appropriate moral standards in their young charges. In their turn, students would hope to leave the protected world of the university, equipped as young gentlemen, ready to take their place in society. A few might remain in university life. They would tend to lack private incomes as well as the means to find useful employment in the service of their social superiors; they would also be likely to be social misfits who preferred the company of books to that of young women.4

This is Bhupati’s mistake. He has been educated to live in a scholar’s hermit cell. But in the modern world, where knowledge is supposed to be practical and progressive, this scholar goes out onto the public plaza, unaware that here sophists rule; books no longer masters but servants, who often abused, are always discarded when success and riches call. It is to learn a very different lesson. 

What if he doesn't adapt to this new ecology of beliefs and actions….

Charu is cleverer than her husband. She has the artist’s ability to see below the surface to intuit how things really are - thus those binoculars. It’s not just sensibility. Charu is an artist, who’s been reduced to being just a wife. Bored and lonely, lacking the purpose to which her natural gifts instinctively push her, she is aimless. She has no children. This marriage is sterile. Charu is a woman who needs to grow; to make things, do stuff, create her own existence. Bhupati is not wholly obtuse. One day, noticing her mood, he suggests a relative visit for an extended stay. Well-intentioned, for sure, but husband doesn’t know wife: Nisikanta is too stupid to be a friend for a cultivated lady. 

Who does our hero understand? No-one! He employs Nisikanta’s husband to manage the business; this Umapada a lazy man, easily corrupted. The sentinel sits in his high tower and dreams of his distant utopias, while close at hand the villains and ragamuffins blithely walk through the open gates.

Charu is saved by the arrival of Amal; a talented and charismatic young man, Bhupati’s younger brother. An artist, living inside his imagination, Amal has no interest in politics and business; for him these are fairy tales. When Bhupati talks about the foolishness of an acquaintance who couldn’t sleep because of a (silly) story Amal’s response is subtle and acute: would you sleep if the government suddenly raised taxes? Amal may be a dreamer, but he understands the nature of men.

Bhupati wants to save his brother, by turning Amal into a practical man of affairs: he gives him a job as proof-reader on his paper. Later he asks him to encourage and support Charu to write - he has noticed her talent for it. Amal, expecting the dilettantism of the rich, does this grudgingly; but then quickly builds a rapport with a woman who shares to an uncanny degree his interests and sensibility. Both are writers. It is to see things in a similar though not an identical way.

Charu falls in love with Amal. He doesn’t notice! Like his brother he too can be blind to other people. Companions in art, poetry and music, he does not think of her as a woman and lover but as fellow artist and aesthete, who is also his sister-in-law. He misses even the most obvious signs: Charu gives him a beautifully decorated notebook, and asks him not to publish any poems he writes in it. This book clearly a love gift; as art now a substitute for physical passion - Bhupati is sexless, while any relationship with Amal is taboo. Not grasping the significance of the gift he publishes its poems in a magazine. Art is art, and it exists to be expressed…to all who can read it. Poetry is public property.

Again we see this confusion between the private and the public. Such a tricky border to navigate!

Charu is furious. In revenge she publishes her writings - in a prestigious literary journal. In an amazing scene she sits on a swing and gazes into the distance, looking for her muse…who arrives!…bringing characters from the old village, who dance and sing before her swinging feet. When The Philanthrope publishes this story she uses a copy of the magazine to bash Amal over the head. But still he doesn't realise the significance: so enraptured, is he, by the quality of her prose.

Later the truth drip-drops into his consciousness. However, because he doesn't share these feelings, and lives a sexless life of the imagination, he ignores such sentiments. A terrible mistake. Charu’s love can only increase through his indifference.

His brother is trying to arrange a marriage for him. Because a liberal he’ll not force Amal to make a decision; instead he highlights the advantages of the match, which includes a long sojourn in London and Europe; the unfulfilled dream of his life. For Bhupati Dutt it is London, and particularly the Houses of Parliament, that is his ideal home, which, to his regret, he’ll never see: when younger he was denied a passport.

Love. It either grows or dies, it cannot live forever in a flower pot….

The machinations of Umapada are revealed - he has defrauded Bhupati Dutt of much money and besmirched the name of the newspaper. These acts destroy Bhupati’s political faith, and he folds up the business which is his vocation.  

Moments before this revelation Amal discovers Charu loves him. A disturbing discovery that disturbs even more when he listens to his brother’s despair, which includes a disquisition on trust, integrity and betrayal. How keep his equanimity? He can’t. With Charu in the background, the resonance with their own behaviour, so loud, so insistent, forces him to reflect on a different sort of disloyalty. He leaves the house that same night.

Evidence, Bhupati says, that his brother has at last matured; by which is meant that Amal is now a practical man. A large slop of irony on a pontifical plate; but it contains a truth of which he is unaware: Amal has matured. Not because he has decided to earn a living and take a wife, marry his brother’s choice; no, this young man has grown within himself; has understood the nature of his relations with Charu and has done the honourable thing. It is to be wise, and act as a conscious moral agent.  

Charu’s love, though unwelcome, has broken his childish naivety. It could be the making of Amal as an artist; able, finally, to combine the powers of the imagination with insight and wisdom; and thus, matching feeling with intellect, to penetrate the reality of things. Charu’s love is the smashing of idols; but such destruction is necessary for the immature artist, who, enamoured of Mr Fake and Ms Pastiche, needs to grow out of a younger self too full of false dreams. Then an artist is a responsible person; in this sense, and this sense only: he has to confront the truth in full consciousness of the consequences. His relationship with Charu is a kind of treachery, though the polar opposite to fraud and robbery. The problem of the artist in the world, whose noble ideas are apt to lead to bad consequences. An artist’s lot. Their gift to express such tragedies.

Charu? Her love is not base desire. It too has its nobility, represented by her poems. Its origins not discreditable but sad, due to her loneliness and sexual and spiritual poverty (many of the scenes take place in a bedroom; surely a comment on her condition: bed no longer a place of intimacy and passion but of entertainment, talk and dreams). To love is a noble passion. Her love full of sophisticated and delicate feeling, but, and here is the tragedy, like all such love, it desires descent from the spirit’s mountain top to the body’s valley floor. As with art such love exists in words and feelings which demand embodiment, flesh its page. Charu is too well-brought up to give herself to Amal, but she has broken the spirit if not the form of her marriage. This, alas, is the worse kind of betrayal for a man like Bhupati Dutt, who puts such a high price on the mind’s treasures.

Even now he is oblivious to what is happening. Only when he receives a letter from Amal and Charu collapses in tears does he grasp what has happened. It destroys him. A man who believes in facts has, in fact, built his life on faith - on politics, on the newspaper, on his wife’s feelings. All collapse under the weight of reality. Charu’s ‘betrayal’ the most devastating of all. To know that his wife loves another man. It is a Christian seeing God killed before his own eyes.

The last scene is extraordinary (the whole film is extraordinary). After being away all day Bhupati returns, and waits outside the doors that divide the public from the private parts of the house. He tarries…should he enter…. Charu walks to the doors and opens them. She stretches out her arm and he responds, their arms almost touching when…the film freezes, and a series of still shots, taken from different angles, fill the theatre.5 Then the words A Ruined Nest appear on the bottom of the screen. The End.  We don’t know if there will be a reconciliation, but we do know that a faith has been lost. The naive trust on which Bhupati has built a life is gone. Never again to live so innocently. Although, if he’ll acquire greater understanding of life’s complexity, capture something of his brother’s sensibility, he’ll realise that Charu still loves him in her own way. There is a future for them, if only he finds the means to look closely at the facts he has recently discovered.

Before the collapse there is a moment when the future seems secure: Charu suggests they resurrect the paper; he writing in English on politics, she in Bengali on literature. He thinks it a wonderful idea…. The meaning here resonates with other Satyajit Ray films, which explore the tensions between purely public and purely private spaces (think of The Big City or Home and the World). In this film it is private life that undercuts and slowly destroys the public role; which is revealed as superficial and flimsy (the tension increased because these worlds are inflected by gender; the private overwhelmingly feminine, the public dominantly male). Charu’s idea offers a bridge between them. An idea that allows for a fruitful compromise between the new - English politics - and the old - Bengali culture. Is this synergy possible?

We don’t know. The still shots leave this attempt frozen. Charu stands in the doorway between the private and public apartments; her husband stands completely in the public area. To take her hand and join together and become a new kind of couple, of the sort that offered him so much excitement when she suggested this collaboration on the beach? We hope. Oh how we hope….

Review: The Lonely Wife

_______________

1. Although Bhupati Dutt is a literalist he is also a fantasist, because the facts take on the aspects of religious faith, a theological dogmatism. To believe something literally is an act of belief, for it is to imagine something that is impossible: a fact isolated from all causes and contextual meaning. It is to turn a fact into an idea, thought to be an absolute truth. Thus no accident that this man - so up-to-date and modern - is the most religious person in the movie. A character we see repeated time and again over these last centuries.

2. The definition of a journalist?

3. There is a passing resemablabnce to Pierre in Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

4. Michael Billig, Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences. My emphasis.

5. There are many scenes in this film that have the quality of still photography - there are very long shots that concentrate either on the face or on characters standing in a room.  However, and what is extraordinary about them, is that these scenes never feel static. A long shot on Charu’s face produces in us a sense of intense intellectual movement - we are looking at a face think. It is a wonderful achievement.