A Tightrope

I’ll risk it. The three stories in Satyajit Ray’s Three Daughters are really about one woman, in different stages of her life. Adolescent. Young maid on the eve of marriage. Wife. Not so much real characters, although their characterisation is rich and complex, but archetypes, of Woman and Mother India, when thrust out of Her ancient ways into a modernity both attractive and repulsive. To imagine the film thus is to do great violence to its structure; especially the third and last story, which is about Mrinmoyee, the wild girl, who enjoys a happiness denied the others. And yet the social background so close, it feels wilful not to recognise the similarities; three girls living in the countryside, who face life’s precariousness when they experience first love; that domestic apocalypse.

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The Postmaster

In the first and richest of the stories, Ratan falls in love with the new manager of the post office, who treats her kindly and with respect. Very quickly she blossoms into a new kind of woman, vital and confident. Although, as usual with Ray, characters change while keeping their essential personality; Ratan to remain the stubborn, aloof child; her protection against the slights and indifference of a family-less home. It is why, in the last wonderful scene, she refuses to look at Nandalal; walking past him, her head bowed, as with hand outstretched he offers her a rupee (to buy writing materials, the symbol of progress). Such strength! Such independence! Only through such stubbornness can she survive this life, cope with its inevitable defeats. A poignant moment - members of the audience were crying behind me - which forces the postmaster to recognise Ratan’s feelings, and reflect on what he has lost.

After establishing himself in the village, and growing a relationship with this young woman (as surrogate brother or potential lover?) he severs all links immediately and with complete insouciance as to its effects. A fateful decision decided as if throwing dice. Albeit there are good reasons to resign and return to Calcutta; for after catching malaria, he finds this isolated location, with its minimum of pleasures, too much for his fine-tuned sensibility. Poor Ratan! Poor village; its qualities taken for granted. Ratan, the people, their cultural pursuits, mere background to this city man’s musing; those touches of local colour to decorate his mental life. What a dunce! But it is now, as he recognises Ratan’s feelings, and follows her vanishing form, that Nandalal knows what he has done. The pathos is deep, as, the camera lingering over his face, we watch the sadness slowly infiltrate his consciousness, before exploding into heart-wrecking insight.

On first viewing Nandalal is a typical official, with the usual officiousness. Hardly settled in and he’s ordering Ratan to clean his dirty quarters; the previous postmaster boorish and uncultivated. Soon, however, and with the help of Ray’s long shots, we intuit a sensitive side, as we watch an attractive fellow, alone in his quarters, coming to terms with this life’s loneliness.

Nandalal is a Calcutta man. At first the countryside unnerves him. On the first day he is scared by the local mad man; while during the night the jungle sounds terrifying. ‘Why did he come here!’ Life soon settles down. For the locals are warm and welcoming; this postmaster a new source of interest, as they encourage him to tell stories about the city’s famous entertainers. Such attention polishes up the big city ego, confirming its superiority, as the source of all wonder and enlightenment; Nandalal foolishly assuming this village bereft of quality entertainment; a belief the old men flatter out of shyness and respect. It is to mistake innocent curiosity with a lack of sophistication. But this will change. His sojourn its own peculiar Bildung, as he slowly discovers the village’s riches.

A tale of a cultivated man blinded by his own cultivation. We put blinkers on the educated, who are taught to believe that only subjects of a formal education are of interest. Thank goodness Nandalal is more than a graduate! Our first insight into his true character when he writes a postcard to his family. That concentrated look and radiant smile, suggestive of a sensitive intelligence, is confirmed by his joy in writing, a sign of an expressive soul, far richer than a petty official’s memorandum mind. Ratan is enraptured. Love so loves to imitate! She wants to learn to read and write. It is his turn to be delighted. On discovering a disciple he becomes Ratan’s guru. For Nandalal is a poet; the job’s attraction its promise of peace and leisure to write his verses.

Transformations are slow and erratic; for every sprint over flat territory, there are high climbs over steep valleys, and slow zigzags around impassable cliffs. Journeys in strange territories rarely short and straight. Moments of happiness here likely to trigger even happier memories back there: talking about his family Nandalal mentions that his sister sings. ‘So do I!’ says Ratan. He is not interested, and lies down to fall asleep with his dreams. She starts her song. What happens next is one of those rare moments that transforms one’s sense of place and person. Ratan’s voice enters his consciousness, and Nandalal is wide-awake, captivated by her performance. Beauty and art even in the roughest of spots! But do not forget the poet, who engenders these situations.

His ideas are changing. On first arrival Nandalal refuses to go to the old men’s musical soiree. His excuse: ‘I spend my evenings improving my English by reading Sir Walter Scott.’ Oh no! The old problem of the jejune student preferring books to people, with all its attendant pretensions. But he can’t resist forever; the place too small for that. One evening he is the sole guest at a performance. The old man’s voice is broken, but conveys the song’s sentiment to Nandalal, who feels it with all his intelligent sympathy. The charm of this country is dawning on him.

This love affair ends suddenly. Recovered from the malaria, Nandalal decides to leave, without a thought about the locals or Ratan. Deep down he hasn’t changed. The villagers remain at a distance; not friends nor family nor big city people, they do not share the same status as those in Calcutta. They are “characters”, akin to strangers met on holiday, not “real” people we treat as equals of ourselves. This attitude doesn’t preclude sensitivity and sympathy and good works - Ratan has prospered under his affection - but there is something brutal in such detachment, which voids the substance of others. It is revealed in the casual way Nandalal leaves the village, with no formal or ceremonial goodbyes. Only when he recognises Ratan’s pain does the enormity of his actions strike him. Only when we feel what is lost - that harshest, most penetrating of examinations - do we truly understand its depths, its richness. Nandalal is alone on the path. Awash with emotion, he is flooded with sadness. A quiet counterpoint to that first scene inside the post office. For a new kind of loneliness has entered this man’s soul. The poet’s fate. Always to live off a past that is no more; though this loss deeper and richer than the rest. Ratan, we are certain, to become his vanished paradise; an enchanted place, a muse.

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The Lost Jewels

Ghosts inhabit this story, whose outline, as in all such tales, is easily told. A sensitive man marries a woman who doesn’t love him. Unable to bear a child, and believing herself cursed - this is a fallen woman - Manimalika seeks refuge in obsession: her jewels. One day there is an accident, which wipes out the profitable jute crop; and to save the estate Phanibhusan travels to Calcutta to raise the necessary money. Manimalika, in a rare moment of tenderness, offers her husband these jewels. He is ecstatic – not for the money: he rejects her gift – thinking it a sign of her love. Alas, it is but the sympathetic magic of a shared loss, and doesn’t last. Worried by his reaction, convinced that when Phanibhusan returns he’ll take her precious possessions, Manimalika quickly loses her mind. She leaves the house for destination unknown. On arriving back home husband finds her missing and goes insane.

An old school teacher tells this tale to a man he meets on the stairs of the ruined estate. He says it is a mix of fact and fiction, and, in the way of amateurs, awed by their own creative capacities, is both embarrassed and proud of this conceit. As he tells the tale he adds his own value judgements, makes asides on what he thinks are the characters’s defects; such glosses putting the story into a local context, where we intuit the couple’s unworldliness, their lack of fit in a place where even teachers cannot transcend the conventional prejudices. ‘Too sensitive’, he says; ‘Phanibhusan should have beaten his wife; she the sort who only loves strong men.’ At tale’s end the teacher asks the stranger for his opinion. ‘Good, but it has a few false things.’ This shocks the old man: ‘but how do you know?’

Not told what is false, we are unsure if the stranger speaks as local historian or aesthete. The old teacher instinctively thinks of the literal truth, believing this man knows the couple. This visitor might have other ideas, about the quality of the tale, its tone and atmosphere; that lacking the necessary artifice, and with those gross and intrusive asides, it does not ring true. Too much added. Something essential missing. The supernatural elements, the moralism, that caricature of Manimalika as insane, suggest the conventional folk story, with its crude motifs and demons. They reflect an indelicate narrator not the refined sensibilities of hero and heroine, whose personalities are beyond this man’s ken. Nuances of feeling lost in the telling; a subtle work of literature turned by a simple soul into a simple country tale, playing to stock tropes and obvious ploys.

Essence. It is hidden in the intricacies of the relationship. The teacher cannot conjure it up out of his own resources.

Ignorant of his wife’s history, Phanibhusan has married for love someone who cannot love him in return. In trying to win this love, by buying ornaments, he intensifies the indifference, her feelings switching from humans to jewels. Then Phanibhusan tries a different tack. They move to the countryside, for which he imagines she pines. A mistake! Living close to her old lover, who even visits, asking for a job, intensifies the obsession; that flight from a past intruding every day; each sight and sound ripe with associations of love and loss. The pressures enormous, Manimalika retreats into a private world, which increases her fragility. A nuance the teacher misses. Phanibhusan’s adoration turns his wife into a precious stone, destroying the bond of human feeling that should be invoked in other ways. Too precious to live the imperfect life. If only confess and drain off that guilt...impossible! Diamonds must have no flaws. Manimalika’s madness is Phanibhusan’s own, he has created it.

Something else the teacher overlooks. Manimalika is an artist. Her gifts and beauty both embodiment and metaphor of the artist’s inhumanity; the emotional coolness and that false promise of art, its illusions of intimacy and intoxication. A sorry but familiar tale! Phanibhusan the bewitched disciple, confusing effect and cause, artist with artwork. The lay person meets a professional, and has no idea of the alien behind that familiar visage. The artist not a typical woman, with a woman’s ordinary feelings; her detachment too great for the mundane affections, that easy, unconscious embrace. No! Emotions are suffused with the cold and the clinical; for how else judge the perfection of a performance, correct the wrong notes falsifying the source feeling, carefully calibrated to note and chord. We admire a jewel, can even fall into love with it; but madness to believe it returns our love. Another source of strain: the incomprehension of those who adore us. Yet the artist needs understanding as well as love; communication as necessary as food, as drink. Poor Manimalika! She is in hiding. This artist not allowed to tell her truth. This adds to the usual problems of the unstable ego; for artists, lacking the ballast of simple human sympathy, their emotions suffused with self-consciousness and self-reflection, are fragile, risking the sanity of both themselves and those too close to them. Performance occupies a world of excess, which is liable to collapse at any time. It collapses here.

Is the stranger Satyajit Ray, who, on a trip out of town, picks up a local legend and turns it into a meditation on the artist; their distance and loneliness; that beauty and power; its compulsions and fatal attractions? A warning to himself....

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The Conclusion

The last story is the oddest and funniest. A student from a prosperous family returns to his country home for the summer holidays. His mother wants him to marry, and arranges a meeting with a prospective wife. Amulya is not interested, and rejects the girl. However, his mother’s nagging stimulates the marriage idea, and he falls for the local tomboy, whom he decides to engage...to his family’s disgrace.

Amulya is a curious character. Well-educated and weak, he is rather stupid, with no grasp of others; it is why he rejects his mother’s advice, and insists on attending the matrimonial viewing alone. Amulya has a tin ear for the niceties of human feeling and local custom; a fault less of his genes than his education; which erects a room-block of print between him and everybody else. Books not people! Blinded by white pages...it is to put dull ideas and crude ideals before the intricacies of feeling and atmosphere. Surely why he falls for Mrinmoyee; this wild child, devoid of finesse. It is the appeal of the ‘natural’, the ‘primitive’, the ‘forbidden’, to somebody with a veneer of sophistication, with its superficial skepticism of the familiar and parochial. So quick to mock. Too easy a cynic of the customary. Such characters yet to learn the craft, exercise the hard labour, of a civilised existence, with its accompanying humilities. A sad but secret truth: college is apt to reduce intelligence. Taught to read signs, we miss the complex feeling that surrounds and informs the surface of things. It is to mistake a town square for those who occupy and transform it. Observers not participants, we do not belong to the scene, have no feel for the place and its characters; so miss what can only be felt. It is to learn things in a flash. And what things! Cheap goods from the West. Amulya stumbles along the platform with his heavy load.... Time to board a train and switch metaphors. Travelling India by long night and long day, the journey comes to bore us; vitality draining out of the experience. Accidie. Let’s get a woman to spice us up! Mrinmoyee.

Ignorant of the local customs, which he refuses to learn, and too weak to impose his will, Amulya is reduced to a figure of fun. Foolishly indifferent to the social codes, which protect such characters from ruin, our man is made to look ridiculous by a woman stronger than himself. ‘Marry him! You must be joking!’ Mrinmoyee's rejection is adamant and aggressive, although she is not indifferent to Amulya’s charms; which she could enjoy for an evening’s entertainment. Her objections do not count. With his riches he forces the marriage. It is the aloofness of wealth, enhanced by the new education, which finds good new reasons to justify a rich man’s arrogance. A new man, a man alone, who believes old customs can be ignored with impunity. Bye bye Old India! Silly Amulya. You are not strong enough to play the enlightened despot. One name on the marriage register doesn’t make a bedmate.

Mrinmoyee tries to get out of the marriage. She cuts her hair, runs away, refuses to conform to her mother’s wishes. She fails. There can be no escape; the village too small, Amulya’s family too respected, for her fate to be avoided. After the wedding Mrinmoyee is taken to the couple’s bedroom. Even now she will not surrender. Like a wild animal put in a cage she goes berserk. Amulya hardly notices as he pontificates on their future, the changes it will bring, the responsibilities that’ll inseminate their maturity. Oblivious of Mrinmoyee’s rage and pain! Such egoism is a kind of madness, to which the educated are especially prone; when the ego is projected onto some impersonal idea. It is the stupidity of the college kid, padding out an empty intelligence with fluffy but vacuous concepts. Amulya is weak. Mrinmoyee, losing control, destroys the contents of his bedroom, which includes his prized possessions: his books. It is a moment of clarity; showing where his true affections lie. The Book a religious idol or fetish through which he worships an image of himself (as a superior soul, its selfish idealism). Amulya asks her kindly but forcefully to put the books back together and stack them on the shelves. The marriage is over before it has begun. ‘I am going away’, he says; ‘I’ll return if you write asking to be my wife.’ The first time he recognises Mrinmoyee as an individual. Also the first touch of humility and understanding. Naturally, it has effect. With time Mrinmoyee falls in love with this fool.

Tricked into returning by his mother, we witness a happy ending, with its wise moral: life is a better educator than books. The new India of town and college cannot dragoon the old place into submission. The village has its own strength and resources. Show us respect! Amulya does, and Mrinmoyee rewards him with a belated marriage night. The doors are locked, and we are left to imagine what happens next....

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The three stories form a triptych. As with such panels, I assume it is the central one that carries most meaning. But let me deal with the side bars first. Both show the limits to the city and its progressive ways. The countryside - old India - cannot isolate itself from the modern’s influence - the city is too big and dynamic - however it can accommodate some of the changes to its own advantage. Harmony a clever mix of the old and the new. To choose only one side is court loss and loneliness; while there can be no return to a “pure” state, for too much has happened to go back. Do not let the new override the old. ‘And you, Old Man, don't reject us out-of-hand.’ Much of what’s modern is tawdry, more likely to lead astray than fulfil. Yet custom and habit can stultify and oppress; Ratan only a servant until the arrival of the poet. She gains so much! Yet there are risks.

Nandalal loses love because he won’t take the village seriously. Amulya lucky because the villagers resist him: women are powerful inside the home (modernity very much a public and male affair). It is why Mrinmoyee triumphs in the end. Comedies must have happy endings. Ratan and Nandalal have no such luck. The gap between city and village, old and new India, too great to achieve a balance; and Ratan, without a family, is powerless to impose herself on this man.

Tricky times. Dangerous times. Manimalika and Phanibhusan do not survive them. An old love, intimate with the countryside, is too great an obstacle to be safely set aside. Culture clash! with its inevitable, disastrous consequences. Overwhelmed by the scenario, these characters cannot reconcile their differences to form an harmonious whole. Nothing quite fits together, to produce a pervasive feeling of inauthenticity, with its need of illusions and obsessions to keep the truth at bay. A shaky facade hides a crumbling building. It takes but one crisis to bring everything down; wrecking both souls. Unstable times. Insecure people. A parable of traditional societies when thrust under the high pressure hose of the modern. Some heads pop up ecstatic. Some cry out in agony. These heads hit the pavement, then stand up insane.

Review: Three Daughters