‘What if I really am a goddess?’ Satyajit Ray’s ‘Devi’ and the politics of patriarchal control in South Asia

On a quiet evening in Satyajit Ray’s film Devi (1960), a young woman sits draped in silk, her face lit in the warm light of lamps as devotees bow at her feet. To them, she is no longer just an ordinary woman but a living goddess, the embodiment of the divine mother. Yet in her eyes flicker fear, confusion, and the slow realisation that this is entrapment disguised as devotion. 

Set in 19th-century rural Bengal, Devi is frequently celebrated as a critique of religious dogmatism in a society caught between tradition and reform. However, more than 60 years after its release, the film resonates far beyond its historical context, functioning as a mirror held up to contemporary South Asia. Even today, women inhabit a paradoxical social position: symbolically glorified as mothers, goddesses, or bearers of cultural honour, yet constrained in their personal agency and autonomy under the pretext of religious faith and traditions.

This essay revisits Devi to pose a critical question: What happens when reverence becomes a tool of control? By tracing connections from Ray’s chilling narrative to contemporary sociopolitical realities—from the rise of Hindutva politics in India to the growing influence of conservative Islamist movements in Bangladesh—this piece will explore how the film’s central allegory remains strikingly relevant even now. The protagonist Dayamoyee’s fate is not simply a cinematic tragedy but a political commentary on how symbolic idolisation of women can obscure and enforce systemic silencing, a cautionary insight that continues to resonate across South Asia. 

In order to understand the stakes of Devi, it is important to situate the film within its historical and cultural context. The narrative unfolds during the Bengal Renaissance, a period known for its growing intellectual dynamism, social reform, and cultural innovation. However, even amid these progressive ideas, patriarchal norms and strict religious traditions continued to shape and restrict the lives of women and marginalised communities. Movements such as the Brahmo Samaj challenged practices such as child marriage, caste hierarchies, and gender division, but these efforts soon met resistance from conservatives intent on preserving traditions. 

Against this backdrop, Ray directs the story of Dayamoyee, a young woman who becomes the object of religious devotion after her father-in-law interprets a dream as a divine prophecy. Her deification isolates her socially and emotionally, ultimately erasing her individuality and agency. Through this narrative, Ray inspects the tension between rationalism and superstition, portraying how unquestioned beliefs can shape and constrain human lives. Simultaneously, Devi also draws a clear picture of the ways patriarchal structures exploit symbolic veneration to control and silence women by depicting them as passive vessels for male fantasies of purity, devotion, and power.

At the core of the film lies a profound irony involving the act of worship, which elevates Dayamoyee to a divine status while stripping her of humanity. This transformation becomes a metaphor for the dangers of symbolic idealisation, illustrating how reverence can be used as a tool of control rather than empowerment. Once declared a living goddess, her identity as a wife, daughter-in-law, and human being begins to dissolve. Her role as an autonomous subject in society ceases to exist; instead, she becomes a sacred icon only to be gazed upon and served. 

This process could be described as the gendered violence of sanctity. Dayamoyee’s supposed divinity isolates her physically and emotionally. Halfway through the film, there is a crucial scene where we see her husband, Umaprasad, returning home and attempting to reclaim her from this enforced divinity. By the riverbank, he pleads: ‘Don’t you believe you are human anymore? Don’t you think you are my wife?’ This dialogue is a perfect example of Ray underscoring the extent of her alienation. While responding, she hesitates with a tremor of doubt: ‘What if I really am a goddess?’ This exchange helps paint a clear picture of how badly Dayamoyee’s sense of self has been manipulated, absorbed by the collective belief imposed upon her. Her freedom is confined, her voice reduced to near silence, and her agency surrendered to ritual demands. In a cruel paradox, the more sacred she becomes, the less human she is allowed to be. 

Ray highlights this theme continuously through visual motifs that render her oppression unmistakable. One of the most significant shots in the entire film is the close-up of Dayamoyee’s face during the puja sequence. Her expression—riddled with discomfort and terror—stands in stark contrast to the divine setting. The visual dissonance between the grandeur of ritual and the bleakness of her inner despair dramatises the violence hidden beneath the beauty. By lingering on these moments of stillness, Ray turns Dayamoyee’s silence into a powerful critique of the structures that transform women into symbols at the cost of their autonomy. 

Devi does not only represent a bygone era; the primary conflict of the film persists in strikingly modern forms across South Asia. Ray’s film investigates a contradiction that still defines gender politics. Across South Asia, this tension continues to shape political discourse and cultural practices. 

In present-day India, the rise of Hindutva politics has only provided a platform for this contradiction to be amplified. The figure of Bharat Mata, aka ‘Mother India’, dominates nationalist iconography, representing womanhood as a sacred emblem of the nation. However, when real women demand bodily autonomy or equal rights for coexisting in the same society, the rhetoric of sanctity quickly turns into mechanisms of control.

The Sabarimala temple controversy is a prime example of this. Women of menstruating age were traditionally barred from entry to the temple under the pretext of religious purity; however, when India’s Supreme Court declared the ban unconstitutional in 2018, the decision sparked mass protests by traditionalists. Devotees claimed women’s exclusion as essential to preserve the temple’s sanctity, even going as far as imposing physical violence on female devotees who attempted to enter the temple.

This is just one of many examples of how women are still marginalised in India. From the hijab ban in Karnataka to campaigns against ‘love jihad’, India continues to be a regressive society for women. As Devi warned, idealising women as abstract symbols ultimately strips them of their personal freedom.

Similar patterns can be observed in neighbouring Bangladesh as well. Fundamentalist Islamist groups are constantly wielding religion to challenge women’s participation in society. Women of all classes and positions routinely face harassment every day, in real life and online. These attacks mirror the cultural logic in Devi, where a woman’s body becomes a battleground for competing visions of tradition and modernity, demonstrating that symbolic deification does not translate into substantive empowerment. 

Across these contexts, the connecting thread is unmistakable. Whether through nationalist imagery or populist campaigns, women continue to be cast as symbols of purity and devotion—figures to be revered but not heard. Just like Dayamoyee, they are celebrated as ideals yet denied the full dignity of autonomous citizenship. The relevance of Ray’s film lies precisely here, in its exposure of a patriarchal logic that thrives by merging worship with power and subjugation. 

It is vital to acknowledge that Dayamoyee’s sanctification is the very reason for her erasure, a dynamic known in feminist theory as the double bind of symbolic power. This system of control extends beyond the household realm into the institutional sphere. Governments across South Asia mobilise religious discourse to reinforce gender hierarchies, framing women as custodians of morality and culture. The idealised purity of womanhood is weaponised to justify restrictions on their mobility, sexuality, and choice. 

Efforts at secular reform often face cultural obstacles. Such initiatives are frequently considered existential threats to tradition. This resistance is not accidental, but integral to the politics of symbolic devotion. By ruling out equality as blasphemous, patriarchal structures ensure that reforms aimed at developing women’s agency are perceived not as rights but as violations of a sacred order. Devi does not merely narrate a personal tragedy but also anticipates a political script still in circulation. 

After all these years, the film continues to serve as a critical lens through which to interrogate the political uses of religion in shaping gender roles. Today, moral policing is no longer confined to temples and households; it has been integrated into our everyday lives and now thrives in every form across all platforms. Legal and social controls continue to dictate what women can wear, where they can go, and whom they can love in the name of modesty and honour. The rhetoric may have shifted, but the system remains intact, disguising dominance as devotion. 

It is urgent to revisit Ray’s work not only for its cinematic brilliance but also for its prophetic clarity. Devi warns us against the allure of ideals that mask control, urging us to recognise how religious and cultural narratives can normalise gendered violence. The film operates as a historical warning, underlining the continuities between past and present and demanding that we confront them. 

The story of Dayamoyee is not simply the story of a woman trapped in 19th-century Bengal, but a parable of how cultures glorify women as symbols while denying them agency. The rituals that imprison her are echoed in the laws, traditions, and social practices that still police women’s choices across South Asia today. Her tragedy lives on to this day every time a woman is asked to embody honour and purity at the expense of her own autonomy. 

This challenge is not just cultural but deeply political. Until women are acknowledged as citizens with full agency rather than icons of tradition, the cycle of deification and domination will continue undisrupted. This leads us to ask an important question: Can societies break free from the violence of veneration without confronting the political authority of religious dogma itself? Ray offers no resolution, just the cold truth that sanctified silence remains patriarchy’s most enduring tool of control. Now the real question is whether South Asia is ready to finally view women as people, and not just as goddesses.