Satyajit Ray's 'blackface' moment at Cannes 2025

Mint

29-05-2025

At the screening of Satyajit Ray's 1970 classic, Aranyer Din Ratri, at the Cannes film festival earlier this month, the audience gave a standing ovation to the celebrities on stage—Wes Anderson along with Sharmila Tagore and Simi Garewal, the only surviving members of the cast. Restored by the Film Heritage Foundation, the movie was presented by Anderson, an ardent fan of Ray.
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Tagore played the urbane and sophisticated Aparna, beguiling four young men who arrive in Palamau (now in Jharkhand) for a break from their busy and troubled lives in Kolkata. Critic Pauline Kael once described her presence as 'incomparably graceful", a sharp contrast to Garewal's Duli, a Santhal woman, who plays a pivotal role in the denouement.
For the first few days of the shoot, Ray had Garewal observe tribal women at a local watering hole. Once she had absorbed the nuances of their demeanour, she had her body blackened. On her website, the actor says it took four hours for her to become Duli, and three hours to remove the paint afterwards.
In the 1960s, when Ray shot Aranyer Din Ratri, featuring a 'blackface" (an actor whose face and/or body are darkened to represent someone unlike them) on screen was par for the course. Through the 1960s, Hindi movies embraced the blackface trope with impunity. From Ashok Kumar in Meri Surat Teri Aankhen (1963), where he played the dark-complexioned Pyare with fanged dentures and a wild wig to boot, to Meena Kumari playing Rajni in Main Bhi Ladki Hoon (1964), examples of such misuses abound. Sadly, the tradition remains unbroken to this day, albeit with a shift more towards 'brownface"—Alia Bhatt in Udta Punjab (2016), Hrithik Roshan in Super 30 (2019), and Bhumi Pednekar in Bala (2019), the examples are plenty.
It's disappointing, though not entirely surprising, that mainstream cinema is yet to rid itself of such regressive traits. After all, misogyny, homophobia and Islamophobia, in various degrees, not only continue to be part of India's commercial cinema, but have led to blockbusters like Kabir Singh (2019) and Animal (2023). The baffling part is that a director like Ray, widely lauded for his humanism and aestheticism, should have fallen for the same problematic trope.
When questioned about her choice to play a Santhal, Garewal spoke of the exigency behind the decision: 'You needed a professional to play the role." One wonders if Ray would have taken the same line to defend himself. The irony is heightened, considering that the film (inspired by a novel by Sunil Gangopadhyay of the same name) lays bare the hypocrisy of upper-caste elites towards those they regard as less 'civilised" than them.
The word sabhya (civilised) appears several times in the original Bengali novel, especially in the context of the young men who want to momentarily relinquish all decorum of modern life to immerse themselves in the 'wild" freedom of the forests. Their distance from civic rules gives them an unfettered licence to behave like overlords in the land of the oppressed. They demand to be served, sexually and otherwise, and remain largely oblivious to the inconveniences they cause to the dwellers of the forest.
A couple of these men do feel periodic stabs of conscience, triggered by the fragile political ecosystem of the 1960s, when the novel was written. Sanjay, who is in charge of labour relations in a factory, is particularly pricked by the disgraceful behaviour of his friends. Back home in Kolkata, as the ultra-left Naxal movement upturns systems of governance, in the so-called idyll of the forests, Sanjay and his well-educated friends hanker for a taste of the lives of the nobles savages—by partaking of their food, liquor and women, while refusing to give up their daily necessities, like having boiled eggs for breakfast.
Did Ray internalise this mindset while casting Garewal as Duli? Or was he, in fact, mocking himself as a member of the same elite as the protagonists, by putting her in the role? From the distance of 55 years, we can only speculate on these questions, while reckoning with our discomfort, either way.
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