Charulata

What is also notable is that 1870s was a time when girls getting married at eight or nine to a man who was more than ten years older than her (which was both the configuration in the original novel the movie was based on, and the marriage situation of the author of the novel, whose life story was said to be the basis of the novel) seemed to be a custom in India. This suggests that Charu’s loneliness was not an idle boredom but really came from a lack of libidinal responses in multiple layers in her marriage and noetic life: in thinking, in emotional sensitivity, in the passion of sexual desire, and in a fresh and non-ideological enthusiasm for life in general, which all had some connection to that marriage custom. Such a custom can certainly be understood as designed exactly for avoiding the necessity to think about that “horrifying, complex abyss” of female desire altogether, by throwing girls into their sexual and marriage life before they could even develop any clear idea about their own desire. This was no doubt strong sexual repression, and what CHARULATA has probably shown is that such repression became a problem more sensible, recognisable and unbearable to women only when they started to have access to other initiators of their desire besides their husband, that is, reading and writing. This is exactly the predicament and ordeal Charu found herself in: with her young passion brought out both noetically and sexually in a little sphere of intellectual and sensitive sharing and flirting, she quickly found herself trapped in a social and cultural situation that, despite its seeming openness to women’s brain, wasn’t prepared at all for a full-scale blossoming of female desire in an entwinement between the noetic and the sexual. This lonely (more-than-)tragedy of female desire, despite the specificity of the historical and cultural context Satyajit Ray presented it in, is, however, in no sense dated, and remains highly relevant (if not more relevant than ever) to girls’ and women’s situations today, especially in countries like China.