Ray’s brahmanic suture: ‘Sadgati’ (1981)

Satyajit Ray is an internationally acclaimed master of film, the first Indian director to have attained such a distinction from quarters outside India. The Apu trilogy of films, made by him over a span of eight years from 1952 to 1959, are routinely ranked among the greatest films ever made. They are considered universal documents of human struggles against hardships, of both natural and entirely human origins. My purpose behind enumerating these facts is merely to show that they are well-known and indisputable.

What is lesser known, or rather lesser remarked upon, is that the Apu trilogy, while being a superbly rendered portrait of tragedies that befall a family in rural Bengal and the coming-of-age (physically, mentally and emotionally) of its protagonist Apurv or Apu, is not as universal as it is often proclaimed to be. Indeed, whatever pretensions of the filmmaker and the votaries and commentators of the film might have, the film itself is much more specific than that. 

The tragedy of the film is, first and foremost, the tragedy of a brahmin family. The poverty of the family in the film results from them having been duped of their property by their unscrupulous relatives, as revealed in the first 15 minutes of the film. The tragedy, then, is not about having to survive in continual want and privation, but about having to do so despite being having been prosperous and well-to-do once, not too long ago. Which, one would agree, is very different from the tragedy of having always been deprived of basic human dignity and needs, systematically since time immemorial. At a few points in the film, the behaviour of Apu’s father, the brahmin Harihar Rai, is patently casteist, scrupulous as he is in the observance of caste rules in the matter of selecting patrons to perform priestly duties for, despite desperately needing money. These facts, then, are equally indisputable.

Ray’s only other feature film set in the Bengali countryside is the 1973 film ‘Ashani Sanket’ (based, like ‘Pather Panchali’, upon a novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay). Its protagonist, Gangacharan Chakraborty, played by Soumitra Chatterjee, star of ‘Apur Sansar’ (1959), is the only brahmin in a village whose social order is destroyed by the onset of the Bengal famine of 1943. An event of such cataclysmic proportions makes him regard and reflect on the ways in which social structures, untouched for centuries, collapse into anarchy. By the end, he is forced to reconsider everything he has always accepted to be ordained by the universe, most notably his own innate superiority.

The third of Ray’s films to be set entirely in the rural countryside is also his least discussed and remembered. It is 45 minute film named ‘Sadgati’ (1981) that Ray made for Doordarshan. Starring the best of actors that the realist cinema of the 70s threw up, it is also the only film that Ray made in Hindi, apart from ‘Shatranj ke Khilari’ (1977). The story, about the travails of an untouchable family in its efforts to invite a brahmin priest for their daughter’s wedding, is well known, written as it is by Premchand himself. It is in the context of Ray’s depiction of brahmin tragedy in his most celebrated films, then, that a film like ‘Sadgati’ must be seen.

The brahmin (played by Mohan Agashe), upon seeing Dukhia the father of the girl (played by Om Puri) at his doorstep, beseeching him to come to his house, casually orders him to sweep his courtyard, manually transfer sacks of sawdust from a nearby go-down to his cowshed, and finally, chop a thick tree trunk into fine pieces. The brahmin’s wife (played by Gita Siddharth) holds up her end with a barrage of slurs, ominous mutterings and as well as a few burning coals. Eventually, taunted and goaded on by the brahmin and frustrated at his own inability to appease him, Dukhia musters all his remaining strength and expends it in a frenzy of chopping that transfixes the brahmin’s young son and a sympathetic onlooker, a man who is identified in the film as a Gond. Such a paroxysm of activity proves too much for Dukhia and suddenly, in an instant, he drops to the ground, dead.

The brahmin is more flabbergasted than aghast as his death. Meanwhile, the Gond who knows of the arrangement between Dukhia and the brahmin, is overcome with rage and disgust and immediately goes to the ‘chamar’ colony in the village and announces his death, laying the blame solely on the brahmin. Among the onlookers of course is Dukhia’s wife (played by Smita Patil), who breaks down at the news.

Whereas the narrative was merely a record of occurrences until now- apart from focusing pointedly at overt symbols and marks of power and injustice such as the sacred thread, sandalwood paste, tilak, the brahmin’s “debate” with his wife over feeding the ‘chamar’- it assumes a more active role by advancing towards the resolution determinedly. Beyond the cries of Dukhia’s wife as she rails at the brahmin’s family at their doorstep, there is nothing else that she is shown to do.

Dukhia’s corpse, meanwhile, has become a logistical problem for all the upper caste folk using the thoroughfare. None are worried more by it than the brahmin and his wife. Amidst panicked   arguments against each other, the brahmin and his wife come to the conclusion which forms the denouement of the film. Ray depicts the exact moment of the brahmin arriving at a solution in dramatic fashion: a telling look, straight into the camera. In the very next shot, the brahmin raises the leg of the corpse with a curved branch, lassoes it with a piece of rope and drags it along to a dumping ground littered with animal skeletons.

What emerges from the narrative, in effect, is not just the abrupt silencing of the outcaste woman and indeed the entire community, but the insinuation that it was the defiance of the outcastes themselves, provoked by the Gond man, that resulted in such a sordid disposal, the ‘sadgati’ (deliverance) of the title, at the hands of the brahmin. The Gond man, the mute outcastes in the village, even Dukhiya’s wife are never seen again. What emerges also is the treatment of the problem of disposal of Dukhiya’s corpse as merely a logistical one. One would think it’s a fitting comeuppance for the brahmin: to carry a chamar’s corpse himself. Some may even read the ending as being penitence for the brahmin, having fulfilled the rather labourious and outrightly taboo task of ferrying the dead body of a “chamar”. But what was it that enabled such an utterly despicable chain of events to come to pass? What was it that prevented the brahmin from paying heed to the chamar’s pleas of food and his daughter’s betrothal until he could plead no more? What was it that drove the brahmin to perform, against himself, such a strenuous and unsavoury task that is clearly infinitely more than just a logistical problem? This, neither the brahmin nor the narrative, as a whole, even attempts to ask.

Premchand’s story, written originally in 1931, was a short, sharp one, its language dyed in the fatal inevitability of its end. The story advances towards its end without respite, propelled by the terseness and casual cruelty of dialogue of the brahmin couple about Dukhia’s corpse, much of which has been left out of the film. The last line of the story sardonically speaks of Dukhia’s reward for his toil, in the form of his corpse in the open field with the birds of prey feasting upon it; the end, thus, resolutely stays with the corpse of Dukhia, affording the reader no closure whatsoever in its unslaked pain. With its merciless end, Premchand, no doubt, wanted to convey a fraction of the brutality of brahmanical oppression. Despite lacking rigour in his actual interrogation of the iniquities of the caste system via the story, Premchand, at least cognitively, understood its inhumanity.

In contrast, Ray ends the film with a shot of the brahmin muttering purificatory rituals and sprinkling holy water on the block of partially hewn wood, with a relieved look on his face. This shot follows that of Dukhia’s corpse lying in the dumping field. The theory of suture, an endlessly fascinating one, has been imported into film studies from Lacanian theory. It would be instructive to apply it in this context. Suture, simply put, is the process by which subject positions crystallise in a given discourse. The lack (of identification) that a reader or viewer feels with a given discourse is fulfilled by inserting a signifier, one that facilitates identification (and making meaning) for the viewer by placing him in the position of the subject in that discourse. It is important to note that in the process of suture, the viewer, by assuming a subject position in the discourse via a signifier, gains entry into the symbolic order (a semiotic term for the prevailing social order underlying the discourse), but only after subsuming his own needs and drives; which is to say, that what the viewer gains in meaning, he loses in being.

In case of films taken as discursive texts, cinematic syntax or the actual sequence of shots, is the equivalent of language. Thus Ray, in effect, employs the final shot as suture, implicating the viewer in the subject position of the brahmin in order to fulfill the lack of identification with the fate of Dukhia and the resultant discomfort, the guilt at his own complicity in such a pernicious scheme of things that the viewer feels. By implicating the viewer in the brahmanical subject position, Ray admits the viewer into the symbolic order of the discourse, which is nothing but the caste order of society with its ascendancy of the brahmana, while ensuring the viewer makes meaning at the expense of his own being. Premchand was content to let the reader feel the lack of identification, of closure at the end, to his lasting discomfort: an open, festering wound. Ray, on the other hand, simply sutures it, fester and all.