TURNING GOLD INTO LEAD
Monihara is probably Satyajit Ray’s most disastrously misread film. Almost no one who watched it over the years understood what the film tried to say about the main character of Manimalika, and instead just vilified her entirely. I would imagine this would have caused Ray some amount of anguish, and maybe it was for the best that this film would have been sandwiched in an anthology. But, then again, maybe people didn’t get Samapti either.
The Spirits Of Marriage
When the married couple of Phanibhushan and Manimalika come to live in Phanibhushan’s countryside estate we marvel at the beauty and grandeur of this mansion. They have left Calcutta to come live here, which we gather is for the fresh air and peace.
Manimalika’s face expresses the relief and joy she feels right from her first step off their carriage. She quickly makes herself at home and starts to add personal touches to their rooms while her husband starts work from his local office. Contrary to what most viewers feel, it seems plain to me that the couple are very much in love and that their happiness can only grow in these charming surroundings. When she keeps moving away from his physical closeness it is not because she doesn’t love him but because she is distressed in her mind in ways she cannot share with him. Unfortunately, viewers seem to base their reading of her entire character just on these movements.
The first inkling that there is a source of pain in their past comes when Manimalika recoils at even the mention that they may return to Calcutta someday. She cannot go back, not at all, because she cannot face the barbs from people about her barrenness. That she cannot bear a child seems to have brought on a lot of criticism, even meanness, into her life. This is an extremely sensitive matter to her which is splashed across her face at the very thought of returning into the clutches of those people. She asks Phanibhushan for his word, as she undoubtedly has done many times before, that he will never turn against her like them and stop loving her.
These scenes are played out quite briefly, just giving a glimpse of the key to the entire story. Most viewers fail to grasp the importance of this exchange – this is the ghost. Manimalika is haunted by her childlessness and that is something that follows her like a suffocating shadow. A woman, any woman, is judged very acutely for her child-bearing abilities. In traditional aristocratic families this may be the only thing she is valued for – producing an heir for the dynasty. If she has failed at that then she is nothing but a husk of a wife fit to be discarded.
Value is directly attached to her womb. Manimalika is, by this definition, valueless. To escape being surrounded by this toxic air she has come away with her husband, the only one who truly loves her despite that. And she tries to be happy, and succeeds for some days. But the first mention of returning triggers her trauma, and that is what we are shown. This woman cannot escape her PTSD, she cannot leave behind the taunts because somewhere she has internalised them. She is constantly at risk of hating herself for the same reason others may have hated her.
And this brings us to why she loves the gold jewellery her husband showers her with. They show how much he values her. Value, but this time in the form of gifts. That the jewellery is worth a lot of money means nothing to her, but that they are worth a lot shows how much her husband loves her – that is what she’s after. She needs that validation. She needs to know he still thinks she’s valuable.
In modern psychology we may call this retail therapy, or maybe hoarding, depending on the professional reading of Manimalika’s condition. Either way the belief would be that she covets jewellery because she is trying to stock up on self-worth. It is an emotional hole she is trying to fill, and her husband is more than happy to fill it. He doesn’t realise how this is not a healthy desire on his wife’s part. But he is too loving and naïve to realise the harm he does by enabling her.
When Phanibhushan loses his factory in a fire, Manimalika tests his intentions by mentioning that some jewellery can be sold for cash. That he doesn’t immediately turn this suggestion down confirms her worst fears – under some conditions he may retract his love for her. Of course, this is not what he meant at all, but her sick mind saw what it wanted to. Despite all his promises, Manimalika was just waiting for him to slip up and admit he will take his love back, that he will strip her of her jewellery and abandon her.
Once convinced, she makes plans to escape while he is away in Calcutta on work. She gets a distant relative to help her in her plan, except that this relative has eyes on her ornaments. He is truly the one who is swayed by the monetary value of the gold, and not her. She never wanted to sell the jewellery. Her sickness is her attachment to them. Viewers incorrectly, slanderously, read her character as some kind of scamming gold-digger.
What happens to her after her escape we don’t know, but now we are left alone with Phanibhushan. This is where he finds he is haunted. Not by the ghost of his wife, but by the ghost of abandonment, the same as which haunted his wife. When he realises Manimalika has left him without a word and taken all the jewellery, he will assume it was because his wealth was in danger. After so many years of showering her with love, to be cast aside without a word puts him in a situation not unlike his wife’s.
Society values men for their income and status, like they value women for their fertility. Just as he is down a couple of notches at work, the departure of his wife could send him down a dark road in his mind. Of course, unlike in Manimalika’s case, none of this is mentioned explicitly. But if we are to understand what can haunt a marriage so cruelly, we must try and imagine the couple goes through.
Abandoned and alone he starts to imagine sounds of footsteps, clinking of jewellery, at night. Of course there is no one, but Phanibhushan keeps thinking it is his wife who has returned. He has not heard from her in a while and we don’t know what happened to her. One night, as he lies awake, the door to his room mysteriously opens and a dark, shrouded figure walks in. When Phanibhushan asks if it is Manimalika come back to him, it shakes its head and goes instead for the last box of jewellery he had bought for her. During this encounter Phanibhushan sees her ghostly form and dies from fear.
This is a beautiful moment of horror, one that would have terrified thousands of viewers like me, but on repeat viewing it bears some further examination. Like Bishu Pagla in Postmaster, Manimalika was not some kind of vindictive woman, rather one who is deeply mentally unwell. She would not be one who comes back from the dead to kill the only person who gave her unconditional love. That is, if she’s dead at all.
As mentioned, we never see what happens after she leaves, and her death may well be a trick played on us by the film. Instead, I see this as the mental illness that infects Phanibhushan’s mind. He has internalised his failure as a man just as his wife had done as a woman. Both of them are victims of toxic social mores and haunted by them.
Gothic Bengal
In Henrik Ibsen’s 1881 Norwegian play Gengangere (Ghosts), we are shown a family’s state of peace crumble when faced with the ghosts of their past. Ghosts, we eventually realise, aren’t just disembodied spirits haunting us, but also the shameful remnants of the past that cannot stay buried.
Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote Monihara in 1898, was steeped in European literature as much as he was in Bengali. It would be quite safe to assume he was aware of their literary trends as well as new studies in psychology which he infused in this story. Ray was also evidently a fan of Ibsen as he adapted his other play En Folkefiende into his 1990 film Ganashatru.
With such influences Monihara is Ray’s most European film (either this or Charulata). There are many details in the film that attest to this and make it one of his most visually distinct and stunning works. She has a lot in common with literary heroines like Miss Havisham, or even Emma Bovary.
The setting of the film, the countryside mansion, is heavily European in appearance, and even more so in furnishing. This was not uncommon among wealthy Bengalis of the time. There is a mist that hangs around the house and sprawling emptiness. This is directly inspired by eighteenth and nineteenth gothic fiction.
One can also spot many stuffed taxidermy birds around the house, à la the Bates Motel. While that film was released at almost the same time (and hence would not have been a direct influence on this), both could have had common ancestry. The taxidermy birds are also common gothic horror tropes, like the famous Raven. They represent the living dead, with their glassy, creepy eyes and dishevelled feathers. They are also symbolic of a hole being carved out inside and filled with stuffing, just like Manimalika was trying to stuff her emotional void with jewellery.
The countryside itself, the little we see of it, also becomes disturbing in the architecture of the film. Its idyllic temperament also takes on a more sinister touch. For Ray, this is a departure from his previous works, or even from the other two films in this anthology, where such country life is one of simple pleasures and only natural tragedies.
All of these are tropes more familiar in western storytelling tradition than Indian. Ghosts, conventionally, don’t appear in Indian stories in the form of a vengeful spirit of a recently deceased person. Instead, we have supernatural beings like witches or demons, or evil rakshash. Ghosts are encountered during journeys or when sleeping under haunted trees, to take a couple of examples, and they usually don’t come into human homes to haunt them. They are like wild jungle animals, and not home invaders.
Bengal, as the centre of colonial British-India for about two centuries, was rich in cultural cross-pollination. Western language, dressing, education, all made their first institutional appearances here, followed by western art. The novel, a particularly western mode of storytelling, influenced many Bengali writers who went on to write some of the earliest Indian novels during this period. Tagore himself was in the line of such cosmopolitan litterateurs and wrote some of the best-loved Bengali novels. As such, it was easy to transpose such modes and genres into a Bengali setting because Bengal, particularly Calcutta, was very British (and to a much lesser extent, French) influenced.
Adapting western horror tropes offered a very different palette for Ray to work with, and also gives the viewers a very different exposure to Ray’s range. Much of the performance is so far removed from the usual naturalistic style we are used to seeing in his films as to almost appear to be a parody. But it’s not. It’s a loving recreation of appropriate styles of horror. Audiences would see more of Ray’s love for genre films when he would make the Goopy-Bagha and Feludaseries, and also in his many science-fiction writings.
Monihara stands out even among his already diverse corpus. It is the most psychological film and which is also why most audiences failed to grasp what it was trying to show. It is the most outright European in sensibilities and tropes. It is also a test, I would like to think, of how much he could push his viewers into inhabiting the worlds he presented.
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On a personal note, as I was writing this essay I had a strange experience. After I re-viewed the film, I was convinced the version I watched had cut out an important sequence I had seen many years earlier. After Manimalika runs off with her covetous companion, I remembered that the film showed her on a boat during the escape journey. Partway through she is attacked by the companion who wants to take the jewellery off her (she was wearing it all) and in the ensuing struggle she falls into the water. The weight of all the gold drags her down to her doom. After this she returns to haunt the mansion.
This entire scene was missing. So I looked for other versions of the films, and even tried to search in the original short story. But everywhere I came up empty. But how could that be? I was absolutely certain I’d seen it. I even complained to my wife about how the film had been carelessly chopped and left out such a crucial connecting sequence. How then was there no trace of it anywhere?
As you can guess, for a moment I felt a shiver run up my spine. Was it possible I had imagined it all? That I saw something that was never there? I was a child when I saw the film first so it was unlikely I discussed character arcs with anyone. Maybe I was hopelessly scared by it and I saw it in my nightmares. Maybe I heard others talk. Or, maybe it was none of these and the scene vanished inexplicably from the film and nobody except I know that.
It doesn’t matter what is true. What matters is how I felt nervous once again because I was unable to explain what happened. Such is the nature of ghosts. Most often they exist only in our minds, and that’s the most frightening thing of all.