Hindu orthodoxy until, significantly, Nehru intervened and released the film to foreign audiences.
The film is based on a story by Prabhat Kumar Mukherjee (1873-1932), a well-known short-story writer, beholden to Rabindranath Tagore for his literary achievements : the actual idea and motif of the story we are concerned with was given to Mukherjee by Tagore. The story is set in late nineteenth-century Bengal, around 1860 or so, in the grand zamindar household of Kalikinker Roy who is a devotee of Kali and after the recent death of his wife somewhat besotted by the ritual of worship. He has two sons and two daughters-in-law
Tarapada's wife Harisundari is strong and astute and impatient of the cowardice which such a hierarchical household produces; her little son Khoka is attached to his aunt, Dayamoyee, the wife of Umaprasad, who is not only very young but doll-like and beautiful and everyone's favourite. She is her husband's beloved; but she is also the obsession of the old widower, Kalikinker, whom she devotedly looks after, arousing in him as it turns out, sensual desires and religious delusion.
He dreams one night that Daya is the incarnation of the goddess he worships and forthwith deifies the girl, putting her up as the goddess incarnate in his domestic temple and exposing her to the priests and populace ofChandipur as a beneficient deity to whom they must appeal in their need and suffering.
A disbelieving Umaprasad returns home to find his Daya besieged by pilgrims from the entire countryside; he sees her perform a 'miracle' and save the life of a dying child. He protests to his father against the stupidity of such superstition and persuades Daya to run away with him to the city to escape this farce. She agrees but then revokes her decision because of fear — the fear of denying her destiny should it be truly divine.
The story then quickly moves to its tragic end. The little newphew, Khoka, falls ill and despite his mother's protestations is put into the lap of Daya who must save him. The child dies, the distraught mother accuses Daya of witchery, the father-in-law reverts to the clay deity and wails in bewilderment, and Umaprasad returns to find his wife deranged by the stress. Even as he calls out to her human self she runs to her death out across a sunlit meadow.
27. See comments on Devi in Chidananda Das Gupta (ed.),Film India : SatyajitRay, Directorate of Film Festivals, New Delhi, 1981, pp. 44-48.
28. In The Interpretation of Dreams, included in The Basic Writings ofSigmund Freud, The Modem Library, Random House, New York, 1938, pp. 321-322.
29. Chidananda Das Gupta, The Cinema ofSatyajit Ray, Vikas, 1980, pp. ix, x, 43, 48, 69.
30. Bazin, The Evolution of the Language of Cinema*, in What is Cinema ?, op. cit. pp. 23-40.
Daya who has gone mad rushes to her death