When You're a Stranger in Your Own Home

 Beautiful, young and lonely, Charulata, the wife in Satyajit Ray’s eponymous movie, flits about her house indifferent to its opulent decor. This is the nineteenth century abode of a bourgeois Indian, risen to wealth under British colonial rule.Victorian furniture, rococo flourishes and all, dominates the living room. There is a piano straight out of the pages of Austen. The pillowy bosoms of English ladies glow on the walls under the dim light of crystal chandeliers.Persian rugs cover the floors, but like the chintz on the sofas, these native products are not deployed in a native manner. Even more astonishing is the wallpaper, defiant under the onslaught of tropical humidity.Did Charulata herself choose the wallpaper, chintzes, etc.? More to the point, would her husband, Bhupati, a wealthy newspaper publisher, have entrusted the creation of the public face of his family to someone he considered an unsophisticated naïf? (Recall he didn’t even trust her to pick her own reading.)

Like his wife, Bhupati has never been to England. Still, he clearly admires the English culture and wants to be seen as an equal of the English gentleman. The odds are that he was the key driving force behind the house’s Victorian décor.

And yet the house is an accurate reflection of neither Bhupati nor Charulata. In one telling scene, Bhupati and his male friends have a very Indian-style gathering in the Victorian living room -- but most of them ignore the chairs in favour of the floor, the piano in favor of an indigenous instrument.Meanwhile, Charulata confines most of her movements to her bedroom. Here she has charmingly laid a woven mat over the mattress and linens on her bed, all English imports since Indians till recently slept on woven mats. The concept of “taste” had arrived in bourgeois India by this time, to be understood here as expressing one’s (refined) personality through one’s possessions. But the very concept of a “personality” one cultivates in the modern, individualistic sense is at odds with a traditional, corporatist culture. Throughout the movie we see the protagonists struggle with this challenge, expressed beautifully by Ray and his set-designer, Bansi Chandragupta, through the movie’s home décor. (These issues remain unresolved today and are  fodder for contemporary design blogs like Rang Décor.)Poor Bhupati! Where should he sit? Up, down or in-between? Who should he be: loyalist Englishman or seditionist Indian? Poor Charulata! Which part of her house should she claim as her home? The outer chambers of the living room or the inner chambers of her bedroom? Who should she be: docile partner or independent bluestocking?