Devi

Devi (1960) is a Bengali drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Satyajit Ray. The setting is a prosperous household in rural Bengal in the 1860s. One night the family patriarch Kalikinkar Roy wakes from a dream certain that his daughter-in-law Doyamoyee is the earthly form of the goddess Kali. Her husband is away at university in Calcutta. She has no one to intervene.

The old man orders the household to worship her. Pilgrims arrive. A dying child recovers at her feet. The village takes it as proof. Sharmila Tagore plays Doyamoyee with a stillness that says everything — a woman dissolving under the weight of devotion nobody asked her to carry. Ray uses the supernatural premise to ask a precise, uncomfortable question about who gets to decide what a woman is. Stream Devi (1960) online on iFILM.