Devi

Satyajit Ray's most contentious film, from a story by Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay. In nineteenth-century Bengal a wealthy landowner dreams one night that his daughter-in-law Doyamoyee is an incarnation of the goddess Kali. In the morning he falls at her feet. The village hears, the sick begin arriving, one of them recovers, and after that there is no way back. Doyamoyee is installed before a shrine and nobody asks her what she thinks. The real subject is not faith but a person being swallowed by other people's faith. She can neither refuse nor accept; her husband, educated in the city, objects, but cannot oppose his father either. Sharmila Tagore plays Doyamoyee at sixteen, with Soumitra Chatterjee as her husband and Chhabi Biswas as the father-in-law. When it opened in Calcutta on 1 February 1960 it drew fierce reaction in India; orthodox groups accused Ray of blasphemy and there were moves to keep it from being shown abroad. Prime Minister Nehru intervened, defending it as an examination of superstition rather than an attack on religion, and the export permission followed. One of Ray's harshest and darkest films, with nothing consoling in it.