When Good Turns Bad

Ostensibly a film about famine, Satyajit Ray is once again exploring the charisma and incapacities of caste; its collapse under pressure of massive change; here a Bengal haemorrhaging food to feed the British war-machine. Distant Thunder. When the brightest and the best are untouchable.

Chutki sinks to the floor and touches Ananga’s feet. A woman in despair, debasing herself before a friend, whom she calls a good person, someone who sticks to her principles. Not like Chutki, sacrificing a woman’s honour for rice.

The rural population is reduced to eating wild leaves and pond snails. Many have died, and many still to die; the final scene foreseeing a future where most of these characters to perish: a large family walks towards the Chakravartis; who under a brahmanic compulsion to help, must allow an already small food supply to be eaten to nothing. Symbol to become sign in the last shot, as this family metamorphoses into a silhouetted multitude which in the half-light looks like an army of the living dead. Never has a Ray film felt so bleak.

Until now the Chakravartis have been lucky. Members of a privileged caste, and keeping the respect of the villagers - not all is due to caste status - they have acquired enough food to survive tolerably well. Gangacharan an educated man, with the reserve and sense of honour that elicits more esteem than he perhaps deserves; his occupations – school teacher and priest – are parasitical on the community, while he appears not to be believe in the native theology, a sign of bad faith. Ananga is beautiful. Both men and women treat her with quiet awe. Caste and character combining to protect them from the worst horrors of the famine; until that large family comes to their gate; after Gangacharan gave aid to a starving man. Believing in Gangacharan’s saintly - and magic? - qualities this old man now brings all his relatives to the Chakravarti home hoping for a similar miracle. It’s possible they will survive - I cross my fingers as I walk out of the auditorium - but I suspect death has been brought to this house. Tough being a Brahmin! That guilt of living off a community; then you sink under the expectations your privilege generates.

At times of disaster rigid social stratifications come under severe pressure. We see a Brahmin knocked to the floor during a race riot. Social order, which protects the privileged, ensuring a society functions, is breaking down; the old codes of conduct no longer adequate to help people or maintain moral behaviour. To be good now, it is not enough to follow the rules; these characters must think and act for themselves, to create a new moral code in circumstances that have never existed before. Alas, Gangacharan is morally feeble. When an old servant - an untouchable - dies, he cannot cremate her, although he worries that wild animals will eat the dead body. He worries about doing the right thing, but worry is all he does. Like many men in Ray’s films Gangacharan is weak, too bound up with the habits and customs of the prevailing social order to act upon his own conscience. He can talk. He can fret. He cannot take the initiative; the world going on without him. The Bengali countryside collapsing into anarchy because its natural leaders are too passive; they have no will, lack the intelligence, the insight, to improvise novel solutions to critical conditions. Incarcerated in old codes useless in these extraordinary times. The spirit atrophied, it is not strong enough to adapt to new needs, new behaviours, new ways of thought. Inept is what they are. Gangacharan cannot lead a crowd. No. He is knocked down by a mob. That painful metaphor for impotence.

Impossible to live on ideas alone.

Ananga is stronger. But she also suffers from her subservience to an inflexible moral code. Walking through the woods, after an expedition with her friends for forbidden food, she is sexually assaulted by a stranger. Though rescued by her friends, who may kill him, Ananga has suffered a disgrace, which she asks Chutki not to mention – ‘you are a terrible gossip, you know’. It is a moment of weakness and uncertainty; a lack of trust in someone who worships her. The attack, a possible metaphor for eating (morally) unclean food, occurs while fighter planes are flying over the forest; the sound of the engines at first hiding Ananga’s screams. These planes a motif; here they suggest a cause for the 1943 Bengal famine: the war in distracting people’s attention from the burgeoning catastrophe, allows the famine to “take-off” and become widespread.

Symbols of violence and death, the planes have a range of meanings for the locals. One woman looking up into the sky sees them as objects of beauty. Modern technology’s aesthetic appeal. Other reactions reveal the village attitude to the British: those planes a sign of Japan’s distant conquests, a promise of independence. This is no self-contained community insulated from the modern world. Oh no! Modernity has already moved in. Gangacharan Chakravarti is bringing education to the rural masses; at the same time war and its famine are winnowing out their numbers.

Some do not just resist these pressures, but use them to advantage. Chutki for example. Chutki, the film’s most attractive personality, is full of a wild spirit that kicks against convention. In the opening scene, in a river with friends, Chutki says that she has a charmed life, because the only family member to survive a cholera epidemic. ‘I’ll show you!’ By swimming underwater. Then stays too long under the surface, scaring Ananga, who worries her friend has drowned. ‘Where is she! Where is she!’ ‘Here I am!’ Chutki pops up in an unexpected place, and all is smiles and laughter. A marvellous scene that captures the differences between these women; these differences to determine their fate. Ananga rooted to the river’s bed can only torment herself. Chutki acts on her impulses; ideal for times when you have to improvise every second. Life happens to Ananga, and she has no control over it. Chutki decides her own destiny.

Wildness brings its own problems. Lacking the self-restraint of her friend, Chutki is open to temptation, which she can control during normal times; that free spirit released in innocuous pursuits, like these water games. But in a tough time….Chutki’s husband is not as young nor as fortunate as Gangacharan; our heroine doesn't have enough to eat. Thus that food expedition. But now a worse temptation appears. A man promises Chutki rice if she sleeps with him.

Repelled by the idea, Chutki is also repelled by the man himself, whose face has been disfigured in a firework accident. But the need too strong, her self-control weak, unable to resist that craving for food, Chutki's resolve crumples. Her fall is played out in a virtuoso cinematic display…a long close up of her face, squashed against the side of the screen, as she considers the idea; then pulled back to a distance, we see her wavering by the old kiln as she slowly surrenders to the idea; and finally, the decision made, we are pushed in close again to find that the fireworks have horribly scarred the rest of his body. Afterwards she leaves the kiln, a woman in red; a flame flickering through the countryside.

Ananga will not touch the rice. Chutki falls to the floor. Consumed with shame she tells her friend, ‘you are a good person’; for putting the moral idea before her own cravings. Yet is Ananga’s refusal so noble? Is she freely constraining her desires or just following habit? another kind of instinct, for mental ease. To refuse morally unclean food is here not a sign of moral strength but weakness; Ananga reflexively repeating a custom at a time when that custom is no longer a sure moral guide. She is not judging for herself; testing the moral habit against changed circumstances; checking her revulsion against the horror Chutki feels. A true moral act to encompass the moral worth of her transgression - to eat that unclean food - when set against the moral succour it would give to a lost soul. A spiritual adept to juggle these moral difficulties. Ananga drops the balls. 

We must consider the question of belief. For in one of those paradoxes that religion always throws up, the sinner is turning out to be the holy one…contrast Chutki’s reactions to those of Gangacharan, who practices a religion he doesn’t believe in, and barely understands. Chutki has prostituted her body. Gangacharan has sold much of his soul. And he seems to certain to sell every bit of it, when, in an ambiguous scene, a merchant offers Gangacharan the bags of rice he has criminally hidden, in return for curing a head wound. A Brahmin is a spiritual person, whose life should be guided and restrained by ideas; but these have been hollowed out, both by familiarity and Western progress; so corrupting the caste's standards on which both Gangacharan’s privileged status and identity depends. To accept that rice is to be a Brahmin in name only. Chutki. Gangacharan. Both act from weakness. Both perform an unclean act; but Gangacharan’s fall is greater, because he no longer believes in the spirit behind those standards, while Chutki is tortured by them. Her faith is stronger. While the act can be justified by the severity of the circumstances; the wise and moral action to cleanse her of shame, return her to the moral fold. It is to treat Chutki in just the same way that Chutki treats Ananga after that sexual assault: with spontaneous feeling, an instinctive generosity, a humane impulse. This is the Good. In times of social collapse new moral standards must be improvised, the only way to cope with situations that are unusual and extreme, while keeping that spirit alive. It requires a moral sensitivity to time, place, to person, act, to the whole of one’s moral tradition, reinterpreting it in light of new facts, new demands. Ananga cannot do this. Her brusque rejection of Chutki’s offer is a devastating rebuff, a most unkind response. Ananga like her husband unable to live up to the privileged status of her birth. The spirit has left them. Just ordinary people.

The spirit is as important as the body, but is harder to see. It is therefore easier to camouflage a spiritual corruption than a bodily one. Chutki, bedazzled by her friend’s beauty, cannot see this obvious truth, debasing herself at Ananga’s feet. Yet it is she who has the greater spirit! One that takes her beyond the social norms. Another paradox: the weakness of the will gives the mind the freedom to conceive the inconceivable and act it out. Chutki goes with the flow of the moment, adapting herself to its exigencies.

Ananga is conditioned by the codes of her caste, which protects her against the forces of nature – Brahmin charisma ensures the locals support them. (Thus the film’s last cruel irony: this very quality to destroy them at the end). Originating from actual characteristics, still cultivated by some of its members, the ideals of caste present an image of mental strength which often disguises an inner weakness; that inability to transgress moral habits and do what is right in the moment. Good, ultimately, a spirit not a code, special to each individual. Ananga is no moral heroine. No. She is a creation of the community, copying and pasting its beliefs. There’s something dead in her soul; those fixed ideas that give her status but do not help others; help Chutki. Ananga could have invited Chutki in, talked to her, supported her, discussed the complexities of the case; shown, by word and gesture, that this moral wrong can be redeemed, that it isn’t (morally) irrevocable. But no; Ananga, too bound by caste rules to spontaneously respond to such a desperate need, does none of these things. She is society. Sticking to the forms of morality, adhering to its conventions, not actualising its content; so voiding the spirit of a true ethics that embraces the justice of each situation; and which requires us to exercise our whole being, with careful thought and intelligent sympathy. Ananga is too weak to break out of the mental restraints of custom, so cannot save her friend. Trapped in a code of right and wrong too narrow to instantiate the Good.

A distance grows between the two women.

As the famine intensifies Chutki decides to leave for the city - 'I can eat there’. It is to work, we assume, as a prostitute. Ananga is shocked; but, her sympathy stronger, she tries to persuade her friend to stay. Too late. Chutki has found a way out of this crisis. A woman who lives a charmed life, helped by that spirit of independence, her ability to improvise, that will to act, seems certain to survive in even the worst of places. Although I wonder if, in going so far beyond the bounds of honour, she will last long in a Calcutta brothel. (Such thoughts are outside the frame of the film.) We see Chutki’s pluck. That fighting spirit. Her will to live. While our heroine and hero hang their heads in defeat. Ananga and Gangacharan, lacking such energy, and far too passive, are sure to be overrun by those refugees. Stuck in situ. Hopeless. Ineffective. These Brahmins destined to die; as they worry over a decaying corpse they cannot touch because the wrong caste. A brilliant metaphor for the inefficaciousness of over-socialised lives.

In a time of crisis, when an old order collapses and anarchy reigns, it is outsiders who have the best chance of surviving; for not weighted down by custom and its expectations, they can escape disaster by doing the unthinkable. Chutki is a free woman. Ananga and Gangacharan are prisoners of their caste. She can break out, and live. They must drown in that imaginary cell; the floodwaters rising over the custom-made windows to inundate a tradition’s prison house. If a social order is too rigid to change with the times, the times will break it. Smashed to pieces by events it can no longer control.

Review: Distant Thunder