Aranayer Din Ratri at Cannes: How Satyajit Ray broke down the hollowness of masculinity

Indian Express

17-05-2025

When a film gets resurrected after 55 years, for all its contemporary resonance, it is a testament to its maker's vision. Aranayer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest) may have not been understood back in 1970 but the fact that it has been remastered and makes its debut at Cannes shows that filmmaker Satyajit Ray had a pulse on the more subtle conflicts of transition and change, whether civilisational, post-colonial, gendered or environmental.
Often dismissed as a coming-of-age story of four big-city boys, its layered subtexts continue to be unpeeled. Ashim (played by Ray's favourite actor Soumitra Chatterjee) is a corporate slave, conscious of his affluence and intellectual elitism, who takes four of his friends to a forest in Palamau to take a break from the rigours of city life. His friends include a literature-loving labour welfare officer, a struggling sportsman and an unemployed and self-deprecatory jester. They may be a motley group, but they are united by their ego and the presumptuousness of their city-bred, brown sahib behaviour.
When they illegally occupy a forest rest house, bribe the watchman, distrust the tribals, but fall for their hooch and women, Ray asks if their wild but hypocritical behaviour is the real fear in the wilderness. In fact, as the boys renegotiate their moral standards far away from the city (one of the characters actually says, 'Thank god for corruption'), little did we know that Ray would question and unpack them further in the city trilogy that was to follow — Seemabaddha, Jana Aranya and Pratidwandi.
Cinematically, Ray holds up the unspoiled lives of Santhal tribals, giving them agency and the power of rebellion instead of just looking at their exploitation from a distant, sympathetic lens. Taken in today's context, and in times of climate change, the film could be a metaphor for urbanisation eating into our forest cover. In fact, with no technology and tools, Ray's sweeping panorama of the Palamau forests and languorous afternoons under sal trees can be a point of reference of what it was before deforestation.
But the film will always be remembered for its loud female voice, with Ray allowing them complete command in the traditional battle of the sexes scenarios. Mini (Sharmila Tagore) and her widowed sister-in-law, who are on a break too, confront the men and expose their flimsy liberalism. The young widow, who is unabashed about vocalising her desire to one of the 'interested' men, debunks him when he fails to take so much as a first step. She laughs out loud, hollowing out his saviour complex.
Many had even wondered why Ray had cast Simi Garewal in body paint as the tribal woman instead of casting a local or any other actor. Perhaps that was Ray's way of unmaking stereotypes, of showing that women were more malleable than men and that a cultured thoroughbred like Garewal could transform herself into a village girl and still not look out of place.
It is Mini, though, who emerges as the film's conscience keeper. She is the one who asks how the men could be so lost in their hedonistic pursuits while being impervious to their caretaker's sick wife living in their backyard. During a memory game at a picnic, she chooses to let Asim win, exposing his childish competitiveness while resetting the rules of gender roles with her self-assured grace and maturity. But it is the scene when Asim asks her for her telephone number and she writes it on a rupee note that is the film's strongest punch. What's money to Asim is a useless piece of paper to her. What matters to her is the weight of character. This signoff, subtle and bold at the same time, is one of Ray's finest feminist statements questioning the maleness of power. Perhaps that's the reason why Tagore and Garewal will be introducing the film to the audience at Cannes.
Normally, polarities — urban-rural, rich-poor, corrupt-idealistic, perfect-imperfect, materialistic-altruistic — were sharply etched out in the arthouse films of the 70s. But Aranyer Din Ratri hides them under the foliage of the Palamau forest, waiting to be found and understood. They collide but also, strangely, co-exist. It is because the characters are mimics of our own confused value systems that we do not condemn their failings. Instead, as they drive back to the city, they are uncomfortably self-aware. The director leaves us with a question: Will they be able to own their real identities? Isn't this also the post-millennial angst?
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