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Devi (The Goddess), 1960 |
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Production:Satyajit Ray Productions |
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Screenplay and Direction:Satyajit Ray |
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Based on a short story by Prabhat Kumar Mukherjee |
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Music:Ustad Ali Akbar Khan |
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Photography: Subrata Mitra |
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Art Direction: Bansi Chandragupta |
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Editing: Dulal Dutta |
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Sound: Durgadas Mitra |
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Duration: 93 mins |
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Date of release in India:19th February, 1960. B&W |
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Dayamoyee plays with her sister-in-law's three-year-old son. |
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| The enraged son,standing near open window,protests against the irrational orthodoxy of his devout father. |
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Cast: Chhabi Biswas (Kalikinkar Roy), Soumitra Chatterjee (Umaprasad, his younger son), Purnendu Mukherjee (Taraprasad, his elder son), Sharmila Tagore (Dayamoyee, Umaprasad's wife), Karuna Banerjee (Harasundari, Taraprasad's wife), Arpan Chakravarty (Khoka, child), Anil Chatterjee (Bhudeb), Kali Sarkar (Professor Sarkar), Mohammed Israil (Nibaran), Khagesh Chakravarty (Kaviraj), Nagendranath Kabya-byakaran-tirtha (Priest), Santa Devi (Sarala). |
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| Awards |
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President’s Gold Medal, New Delhi, 1961 |
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| The Story |
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Dayamoyee, overwhelmed with grief after the little boy's death in her own lap, requests her husband to help her wear the gold necklace for shedding her godliness. |
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| The action takes place in 1860 at Chandipur, in Bengal, in a rural setting. Kalikinkar, the master of the house and local zamindar, has a revelation during a dream: his daughter-in-law Dayamoyee has manifested herself to him as an incarnation of the goddess Kali. Installed in the family temple, she cures the sick child of an itinerant man who seeks her help. Her husband Umaprasad, who has received a western-based education at a Calcutta university, finds himself dispossessed of his wife who has become a "goddess." In a critical scene, Umaprasad attacks tradition and tries to reason with his father, although unsuccessfully. The cure seems a miracle, which demonstrates the truth of the traditional beliefs, and a crowd of worshippers comes to venerate her. |
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Dayamoyee disappearing into mist rising from the river. |
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Dayamoyee's beloved nephew, the child Khoka, falls ill. He is placed in the care of his aunt, but she is unable to save him. His death shatters her and she is overwhelmed by madness.
In this film, as well as in Charulata ( The Lonely Wife , 1964) and Ghare Baire ( The Home and the World , 1984), Ray explores the cultural emergence of the idea of the "modern woman" in the upper class of colonial India, showing with striking sensitivity the pressures this new ideal placed on individual women whose self-identities were also moulded by traditional expectations.
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| Contributed by DKB and AKD |
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