TIME IS THE HEALER, BUT WHAT IS THE DISEASE?
After Monihara we are faced with another somewhat elusive character in Samapti. While the character of the shrew-ish woman may appear familiar at first, there’s a feeling aroused that by taming her something essential has been lost. Many of us have lost parts of ourself when we entered adulthood, parts that we are occasionally nostalgic about. Somewhere we know the child in us dies when we become too prim and proper, and many years later we struggle to recognise ourselves from the way we used to be.
Thus, while it may not be possible to hold on to our untamed younger selves forever, yet we resist admitting that we have forever shut the door on that side of us. We resist that conclusion.
Born Free
Everybody seems to have it in for Mrinmoyee. She’s a handful for her mother, not to mention for anyone who piques her interest. There is a mischievousness in her that feels like its outlived its welcome. She laughs raucously at others’ accidents, pulls juvenile pranks like stealing shoes, and even interrupts very ‘serious’ social events like the display of a child bride to her prospective adult groom.
In short she is a wild child, and as such somebody needs to tame her.
Or at least that’s how these stories usually go, and this one feels no different at first. But the thing about writers like Rabindranath Tagore and filmmakers like Satyajit Ray is that they don’t deal in simplistic stories. And their audience, us, shouldn’t either.
How different is Mrinmoyee, whose name means moulded from mud (like an idol of Durga), from other children her age? One direct comparison can be with the aforementioned child bride – that girl is trained to perform, dressed in adult (almost bridal) clothes, and sings and cooks well enough to please a husband. For that time, even maybe now, that was seen as an ideal girl child. And we should note that this was a universal expectation for women, which just stayed around longer in some cultures than others.
How ridiculous it sounds to us now, but how often do we take a woman’s expectations or needs into account when it comes to appropriate behaviour and marriage. A girl didn’t have to be rambunctious like Mrinmoyee to be considered ill-tempered. Even today there are many who struggle to complete studies, especially higher studies, because a very educated woman is a drag on the marital institution.
Mrinmoyee’s fault, if we are forced to put it like that, is that she doesn’t want to grow up yet. And while she does indeed have some bad qualities, like pranking others, this wouldn’t appear so intolerable if she were a boy. She can’t claim the “boys will be boys” defence.
Literature often shows us women who need to be disciplined, or to put it bluntly, broken in. A wild woman is like a wild horse – she needs to be saddled, whipped, and ridden. Mrinmoyee is just too difficult to be married off the way she is.
On the other hand, a wild boy also needs to be tamed, but not for domesticity. The most famous example, Mowgli, doesn’t need to be brought back to the human fold because it’s mandatory that he should be quickly registered in the marriage books. The clock is not ticking on his eligibility. For him it’s about nature and nurture, about his mental wellbeing, about his physical health.
Wildness is seen as a disease in society, and many times more so in women. Think about what image we have of a man with uncombed hair and then imagine a woman like that. Could a woman scientist pull off Einstein hair as proudly? Can she sit with her legs sprawled apart, even if she is full covered?
Mrinmoyee’s exasperating behaviour is not something we have to approve of, I certainly don’t, but how we treat it needs some more nuance than just to beat it out of her. Like with Manimalika, we don’t look for probable cause, instead we seek crime and punishment. It’s quite likely that Mrinmoyee behaves like this because she is terrified of marriage. She cannot bear to enter into a relationship with a stranger, as was the way back then, especially one so many years older. There aren’t any positive male role models in her life. There is no evidence for this in the film, but I imagine she may even have singled Amulya out for torment with the explicit purpose of making herself undesirable for any wandering grooms like him.
Amulya himself is a man of contradiction, but we are unlikely to even recognise that, leave alone judge him for it. He likes to think he is enlightened and above the petty match-making instincts of his mother. He wants to find his own bride, he doesn’t believe in arranged marriage. However, his words are not backed up by his actions.
He does indeed choose his bride, but based on what knowledge of her? He doesn’t engage her in any conversation, doesn’t ask for her interest or consent. His interest is born from some sightings of her, and it’s not far-fetched to say that her more revealing clothing and mature body, compared to the child bride he had gone to see, and physical uninhibitedness may have had a role to play in his attraction.
And once he has chosen her, he sends his mother to do the needful. The match is fixed up between two mothers for the pleasure of one son. Mrinmoyee doesn’t even get a chance to air her grievance to her new husband until their first night together as a married couple. Amulya may have turned his nose up to the old ways, but he is very comfortable using the fait accompli of marriage to his convenience.
Yet for this hypocrisy he is never questioned. He remains smug in his sense of enlightenment. He is the generous groom, who plucked such an unmarriageable girl and changed her fortunes. She is the luckiest girl in the village, as her life is about to be changed by being in his august presence.
Amulya’s civilised nature is in direct contrast to Mrinmoyee’s wildness. But what we see in this contrast is just how unconvincing he is when it comes to playing the aggrieved party. When Mrinmoyee runs away after their first night, we may pity him, but we also accuse him for having chosen such a girl in the first place. If she was a wild one, it was he who ignored all her warning colours and hissing. If he ended up bitten then how can we blame the cornered animal?
Space And Time
After Amulya abandons his wife and returns to Calcutta, his mother, Mrinmoyee, and her mother, have a lot of time to think. Both the mothers soften towards the girl, feeling her pain and wishing that her husband would return to her. Suddenly Mrinmoyee is not the rascal child, but a married woman. Her status has changed overnight.
Mrinmoyee also goes through a phase of despair. She has been vilified for something she had not wanted in the first place. If people looked at her earlier as a trouble-maker, she is now a home-wrecker. One day her pet squirrel dies in its cage from not being fed. She has deprived it of nourishment and now it’s gone. That’s the day we feel the wildness in her spirit also dies. It’s hard to say that’s a good thing, because it was such an integral part of her nature that she will appear forever changed.
Slowly she begins to find some occupation in her listless days by learning how to read and write. She wants to compose some loving lines for her absent husband. She embroiders, writes letters, all for him. She looks so happy and lovely, but who has she become? Her dress looks like a large tent wrapped around her, no longer the athletic wrap from before. She has become civilised. She need no longer walk barefoot in the mud.
To see it in a positive light, time has achieved what coercion could not. Every individual needs to make their own journey from childhood to adulthood, from immaturity to maturity. This is a wonderful journey, which creates actualised individuals of us all. By leaving Mrinmoyee to herself, her own thoughts, her own company, she makes the journey on her own and meets Amulya at the destination. Now the married life is what she wants and she is ready for it. She doesn’t have to be locked in, she enters on her own.
Patience, even if inadvertent as in this case, allows someone to make up their own mind. He should have given her the time she needed before marriage instead of thinking the ritual itself would change her. And if she didn’t change her mind then he could have parted ways and also avoided humiliation. If he were truly modern and enlightened, he would have trusted his qualities to win her over, not his position.
One has to remember, no matter how common child marriages were, it went against the mental nature of a child or teenager. A human body may reach puberty when it does, but a human mind doesn’t follow the same schedule. After all, civilisation has given the human mind a lot more heavy lifting to do, thankfully so. Therefore, just the physical maturity of a person is not the sole determinant of a stable married life. A couple must be in resonance with each other, before which they need to have achieve some reasonable degree of mental maturity. That’s the time Mrinmoyee needed all along – time enough to become who she was meant to be. And if she needs a little more time than others, that’s perfectly fine and healthy.
It was fortunate for everyone that what Mrinmoyee had was most likely a youthful angst. She needed to feel free to be happy. It could have been much worse. She may have developed phobias or disorders, like Manimalika, and that could have led everyone down a dark road. Just a little time was needed to restore order in her world.
By the end of the story we can see that the enormous chasm between the couple has been reduced to nothing. Their hearts and minds have harmonised. They are all smiles at each other.
But one question still remains – has Amulya also matured? Mrinmoyee has found a better balance between her physical and mental spheres, has he? After time had changed his wife, even his mother, he was still keeping away. His mother had to trick him into returning so their marriage could get a second chance. For all the head start he had in life, has Amulya fallen behind on his own journey? Is he ready to take on a marriage of equality and not one-sidedness? Perhaps the conclusion of this inner journey of Mrinmoyee should be the start of his.