Durga Puja in Bengali cinema: How Satyajit Ray and Rituparno Ghosh portray the goddess

From Devi and Parama to Utsab and Antarmahal, Bengali filmmakers have used Durga’s image to explore women’s agency, patriarchal control, family tensions and the contradictions between the goddess’s power and women’s lives

Published - October 20, 2026 08:12 pm IST

Rakhee Gulzar in Aparna Sen’s Parama ( 1985) | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

In Bengali cinema, the goddess can be more than a marker of the festive season. What matters is what her presence does to those around her. Does Durga become a witness to transgression, a counterpoint to human cruelty, an ideal that a woman is asked to embody, or a mirror reflecting a household’s contradictions? In films such as Satyajit Ray’s Devi, Aparna Sen’s Parama and Rituparno Ghosh’s Utsab and Antarmahal, the goddess’s image becomes part of the drama. Through framing, light, sound and the camera’s gaze, she shapes the characters’ lives without ever speaking.

Sharmila Tagore in Satyajit Ray’s Devi ( 1960) | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

To look closely at Durga in Bengali cinema is to look beyond the spectacle of Puja and ask how an unmoving image alters the meaning of everything unfolding before it.

A goddess and the women who resemble her

In Aparna Sen’s Parama (1985), the goddess appears before the story has properly begun. Cinematographer Ashok Mehta’s camera approaches Durga’s face through a viewfinder, then slowly pulls back to reveal the idol. Soon after, we encounter Rakhee Gulzar as Parama, a middle aged woman whose domestic life is unsettled by an affair.

The visual association is suggestive. The goddess’s face is composed and confident; Parama’s, framed by a red-bordered sari and vermilion bindi, carries a similar presence. As cinematographer Supratim Bhol observes in the Bengal Film Archive’s essay Idol Watch, the opening establishes a visual relationship between the goddess and a woman who will insist on her right to desire, independence and a life beyond domestic expectation. Though the Puja recedes, its imagery lingers as a way of looking at Parama.

A poster of Aparna Sen’s Parama Parama ( 1985) | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

The comparison is not that Parama is divine, but that the film places the two faces in conversation. The goddess, conventionally invoked as a figure of feminine power, becomes a counterpoint to the restrictions imposed on an ordinary woman. Does her image liberate Parama from judgement, or sharpen the contradiction between the power celebrated in the goddess and the freedom denied to women? The film leaves the tension unresolved.

The idol at the centre of a divided family

In Rituparno Ghosh’s Utsab (2000), Durga becomes the still centre around which a family’s fractures emerge. An extended family gathers for its ancestral Puja, but beneath the celebration lie resentments, strained marriages, financial anxieties and the prospect of selling the ancestral home.

Rituparna Sengupta in Ritiparno Ghosh’s Utsab (2000) | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

Bhol points to the contrast in cinematographer Avik Mukhopadhyay’s visual language: wide-angle compositions establish the completeness of the idol, while tighter shots of family members make them appear like separate islands within the same home. The goddess embodies togetherness; the people gathered around her struggle to sustain it.

Ghosh also complicates the way cinema looks at the festival. Joy, a young family member, records the celebrations on a camcorder. His footage becomes a film within the film, drawing attention to the familiar visual vocabulary of Durga Puja — red and white saris, rituals and carefully composed images of Bengali identity. The camera watches the watchers. What appears harmonious in an image may conceal a different emotional reality.

Prof. Sanjoy Mukhopadhyay, former dean of the Department of Film Studies at Jadavpur University, places this relationship between the goddess and the social world within the wider history of Bengali cinema. “For filmmakers such as Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, Puja was not merely a religious occasion but a cultural space where different classes and communities could mingle.In Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955), the village’s social world is shaped by such encounters, with rich and poor coming together before the goddess’s image. In Ghatak’s cinema, the goddess assumes a more mythic and political resonance. Prof. Sanjoy points to the climactic tribal dance in Jukti Takko Aar Gappo, whose imagery evokes collective consciousness amid political upheaval, connecting individual lives with agrarian revolution, social struggle and belonging,” say Sanjoy.