Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri

In modern Bengali cinema, few film-makers have brought together historical memory and contemporary experience as effectively as Srijit Mukherji did in Jaatishwar (2014). The film moves between two timelines to explore the persistence of memory, identity and love across lives. At the emotional centre of one of Bengali cinema’s finest musicals is ‘Jay Jogendra Jaya Mahamaya’, a song that brings the world of the nineteenth-century kabiyaal Hensman Antony, better known as Antony Firingi, vividly back to life. Composed by Kabir Suman and sung by Srikanta Acharya, it is not merely a devotional song or a piece of period recreation. It becomes a meditation on faith, hurt and belonging, and one of the film’s most powerful links between past and present.

An Unforgettable First Encounter

I remember the first time I watched Jaatishwar. When ‘Jay Jogendra Jaya Mahamaya’ began, something happened that I was not prepared for. I felt the goosebumps almost immediately. And then, before I quite understood why, I found tears in my eyes. It was not simply the beauty of the song, or the hypnotic percussion with which the song begins, or Srikanta Acharya’s voice, or the extraordinary sight of Prosenjit Chatterjee as Antony Firingi standing in that darkness, surrounded by the flickering light of the mashaals. It was the feeling that seemed to arrive all at once: of longing, hurt, devotion and a kind of loneliness that the song seemed to have carried across time.

It is a moment I have not forgotten. I have watched the sequence many times since. I know when the song begins, how the images unfold, when the film moves from Antony’s world into contemporary Calcutta, and how the two timelines begin to speak to each other. Yet the effect has not diminished. The sequence still makes the hairs on my arms stand on end. The lump still rises in my throat. There is something about the song that bypasses the distance between watching and feeling. I know what is coming, and still I am moved by it.

Perhaps that is because ‘Jay Jogendra Jaya Mahamaya’ is doing much more than serving the narrative. It reaches into something older and more elemental. Antony is not singing to a distant goddess. He is addressing a mother. He calls upon her, pleads with her, and then, almost shockingly, reproaches her. There is faith in the song, but also wounded faith; devotion, but also anger. The more he asks for her mercy, the more his words reveal how deeply he feels abandoned by her.

That emotional contradiction is at the heart of the song. Antony is an outsider who has made Bengal his own, who has learnt its language and its music and mastered the tradition of kobigaan, yet remains marked by the fact of his origins. His appeal to Durga becomes, in that sense, larger than a devotional address. It is the cry of someone asking to be recognized, to be accepted, to be allowed to belong.

This is what Srijit Mukherji’s picturization understands so completely. The darkness around Antony, the fire lighting his face, the sudden movement between nineteenth-century Bengal and the Christmas lights of contemporary Calcutta: the images do not illustrate the song so much as deepen it. Past and present seem to share the same wound. Antony’s loneliness finds its echo in Maya’s, while the song itself becomes a bridge between lives separated by time. And in that bridge lies a quiet irony: a Christian sings to Goddess Durga, even as ordinary people, ostensibly Hindu, celebrate Christmas.

But all of that came later for me. The first time, there was simply the song. It began, I felt something move through me, and I had tears in my eyes. Even now, knowing exactly what awaits, I cannot quite defend myself against it. Perhaps that is one of the things music can do at its most powerful: it can turn memory into something immediate, so that each listening feels, strangely, like the first.

The Historical and Narrative Context: A Stranger’s Offering

To appreciate the force of the song, it is important to understand its place in both Jaatishwar and the history that informs it. Antony Firingi, a man of Portuguese origin, became deeply immersed in Bengali language and culture and fell in love with Saudamini, a Hindu widow. In a society marked by caste divisions and religious orthodoxy, his presence itself challenged established boundaries. He went further by mastering kobigaan, the highly competitive Bengali tradition of poetic contests conducted through song.

In the film, ‘Jay Jogendra Jaya Mahamaya’ becomes an intimate link between Antony’s past and the contemporary story. This is not a public contest. Instead, the song gives form to an inward struggle: Antony’s conversation with the divine at a moment of anguish. His relationship with Bengal has gone far beyond that of an outsider who has adopted another culture. He has made it his own, even as the conflicts surrounding his identity, love and faith continue to haunt him.

The Lyrics: A Dialogue with the Mother

Unlike devotional songs built entirely around praise, ‘Jay Jogendra Jaya Mahamaya’ draws on the more intimate traditions of Bengali Shakta poetry, in which the devotee can address the goddess as a child addresses a mother – lovingly, but also with anger and reproach. Specifically practising a form of devotion known as Ninda Stuti (praise through blame), the devotee addresses Goddess Durga not with fearful submission, but with the raw, angry intimacy of a child confronting an indifferent mother, accusing her of being cold-hearted because she was born to the mountain king.

The song begins with an invocation:

জয় যোগেন্দ্র জায়া মহামায়া, মহিমা অসীম তোমার,

একবার দুর্গা বলে যে ডাকে মা তোমায়, তুমি করো তায় ভবসিন্ধু পার

Jay Jogendra jaya mahamaya, mahima ashimo tomar,

Ekbar Durga bole je daake ma tomay, tumi koro tay bhobo sindhu paar.

(Hail, the Goddess, Infinite is your glory.

Whoever calls upon you even once, you carry them across the ocean of worldly suffering.)

But the tone soon changes. The devotee is no longer simply praising the goddess; he is questioning her. This movement from devotion to accusation is characteristic of the Ramprasadi and Agamani traditions, in which the goddess may be approached not as a remote divine power but as an intimate, sometimes seemingly indifferent mother. Antony sings:

মা তাই শুনে এই ভবের কূলে, দুর্গা দুর্গা বলে বিপদ কালে

তবু সন্তানের মুখ চাইলে না মা, পাষাণে প্রাণ বাঁধলে উমা?

Ma tai shune e bhober kule, Durga Durga bole bipod kale

Tobu sontan er mukh chaile na maa, pashan e pran bhandbe Uma?’

(Your children call out your name in times of peril on this earthly shore.

Yet you do not look upon your child’s face. Have you turned your heart to stone, Uma?)

The challenge becomes sharper in the final stanza:

অতি কুমতি কুপুত্র বলে, আপনিও কুমাতা হলে

তোমার জন্ম যেমনি পাষাণ-কুলে, ধর্ম তেমনি রেখেছো।

Ati kumoti kuputro bole, apnio ku mata hole

Tomar jonmo jemni pashan kule, dhormo temni rekhecho.’

(They say a son may be wicked, but a mother can never be cruel.

You were born of a house of stone, and you have remained true to its nature.)

And then comes the most direct reproach:

দয়াময়ী, আজ আমায় দয়া করবে কি মা, কোন্ কালে বা করেছো?

Doyamoyi aaj amay doya korbe ki maa, kon kaale ba korecho?

(O Compassionate One, will you show me mercy today? When have you ever done that?)

The power of these lines lies in their mixture of love, hurt and defiance. Antony invokes the myth of Durga as the daughter of Himavan, the mountain king, and turns it into an accusation: if she has been indifferent to his suffering, perhaps she has inherited the hardness of the stone from which she was born. It is an expression of abhiman, that difficult mixture of affection, wounded pride and grievance that allows the devotee to reproach the very deity to whom he remains devoted.

Composition and Arrangement: Kabir Suman’s Modern Classical Approach

For Jaatishwar, Kabir Suman was an especially apt choice as composer. His work has long brought together the intellectual and the emotional, and his engagement with the jibonmukhi song movement gave him a particular understanding of the relationship between contemporary sensibility and Bengali musical traditions.

The composition of ‘Jay Jogendra Jaya Mahamaya’ draws on the vocabulary of Hindustani classical music, with the raga, Mishra Bhairavi, providing its principal melodic foundation, evoking an atmosphere of deep humility, prayer, surrender, and spiritual longing as also bittersweet memory, or intense emotional yearning. The arrangement is largely acoustic, built around tabla and pakhawaj, with the esraj and harmonium adding depth and atmosphere. Rather than overwhelming the voice with elaborate orchestration, the music allows the lyric and its emotional progression to remain central.

The composition also follows the movement of the song’s argument. It begins quietly, almost as a prayer, and gradually gathers force as Antony’s appeal becomes a confrontation. The percussion acquires greater urgency without turning the song into a conventional dramatic crescendo. Suman’s achievement lies in making the composition immediately accessible while retaining the texture of a much older musical tradition. And as the song moves between the past and the present, one of its most striking features is the way Suman makes the musical language of the past feel at home in the present, giving it a contemporary immediacy without diminishing its character.

The Rendition: Srikanta Acharya

If Suman provides the musical framework and Antony the emotional core, Srikanta Acharya gives the song its particular vocal character. Known for the warmth and refinement of his voice, Acharya adopts a different register here. There is little of the romantic smoothness associated with his more familiar work; instead, the singing carries restraint, fatigue and a sense of contained anguish.

His command of the Bengali diction is crucial to the song. Words drawn from an older devotional vocabulary need to sound natural rather than ornamental, and Acharya achieves that without making the performance mannered. When he sings ‘Tobu sontan er mukh chaile na maa’, the line acquires the quality of a personal accusation. At the end, in ‘kon kaale ba korecho’, the reproach is delivered without any theatrics. The restraint makes the lament more affecting. The voice sounds less like that of a performer addressing an audience than that of a man asking a question to which he already fears he knows the answer.

The Picturization: Fire and Ice

Srijit Mukherji’s visual treatment gives the song another dimension. Listen to the song independent of the film’s visuals and you will realize what the film-maker brings to it. Instead of confining it to a temple or a conventional period setting, he creates a dialogue between two eras, allowing the same emotional experience to reverberate across time.

The principal image is Prosenjit Chatterjee as Antony Firingi, standing in a vast, dark landscape illuminated by the flickering light of mashaals. The setting is stark and elemental. The fire catches his face as he sings into the darkness, turning the performance into something closer to an invocation than a staged musical number. Though he is singing for an audience, Antony appears entirely alone, a stranger demanding an answer from a world in which he has tried to make a place for himself.

The film then cuts between this nineteenth-century world and the modern city of Calcutta during Christmas. This is done to great effect through a contemporary chorus harmonization on the soundtrack that replaces the percussion of the agamoni being rendered by Antony. The warmth of the torches gives way to the cold brightness of Park Street, its festive lights and crowded streets. Against this celebration, Swastika Mukherjee’s Maya is seen in moments of quiet introspection. Her stillness creates a striking counterpoint to the energy around her.

The contrast is more than visual. The Christmas lights, which should suggest celebration, acquire an undertone of melancholy. Antony’s anguish in the darkness and Maya’s loneliness in the brightly lit modern city begin to resemble two versions of the same unresolved emotion. The song thus becomes the thread connecting the two timelines.

The context in which the song appears is crucial. I have already referred to a touch of pensiveness that informs its picturization. The film has been steadily moving towards this moment.

The story begins with Rohit (Jisshu Sengupta) being rejected by Maya (Swastika Mukherjee), partly because of his Gujarati origins and her sense of Bengali intellectual superiority. She challenges him to compose a Bengali song about her if he wants her to take him seriously. This becomes Rohit’s driving force, leading him to the life and times of Hensman Antony, and eventually to Kushal Hazra (Prasenjit Chatterjee), who claims to be Antony reincarnated.

The narrative now moves between three strands. Maya prepares for the climactic concert, carrying a sorrow she cannot quite articulate. There are a couple of telling moments. One, when she absent-mindedly comes across a Gujarati channel on the TV, and later pauses over Rohit’s Facebook page, unsure whether to add him as a friend. Rohit researches Antony through Kushal even as he prepares for the concert and composes his own songs. Kushal, meanwhile, remains suspended between his present and the past he believes he has lived. The sequence at Firingi Kali Badi is a particularly dramatic example of how the director visualizes this conflict.

What binds these characters and lends the sequence its melancholy is a longing to be accepted. Rohit wants Maya to accept him even as he tries to find his place in a cultural world different from his own. Maya may not even be conscious of the source of her sadness; it exists somewhere beneath the surface. Kushal is driven by his visions of a past life and by the need to have them believed. Antony’s longing mirrors Rohit’s. He may have bested the celebrated kobiyaals of his time, but he remains an outsider in a culture he has made his own, repeatedly having to prove himself more Bengali than those around him.

The song, with its inherent pathos, its pleading with and accusation against the Goddess, gives expression to all of this. It speaks not only of personal longing but of the deeper need to belong, to be recognized and, ultimately, to be accepted.

The Overall Effect

‘Jay Jogendra Jaya Mahamaya’ brings together many of the central concerns of Jaatishwar: memory, cultural identity, love, displacement and the persistence of the past. It connects two lives separated by time without reducing their relationship to a simple device of reincarnation. The song suggests instead that certain emotions can survive their original circumstances and return in different forms.

For the listener, its most immediate force comes from the relationship between a child and a mother: the child seeks protection, feels abandoned and finally demands an explanation. For the film, that emotional confrontation becomes a way of connecting Antony’s unresolved suffering with the grief of the present.

What makes the song memorable is precisely this tension between devotion and reproach. Antony does not turn away from the goddess even as he questions her. His anger is inseparable from his faith. The song therefore becomes less a conventional devotional offering than an intensely personal act of address.

In Jaatishwar, music is central to the film’s meditation on memory and identity. In fact, the soundtrack, one of the finest of Bengali cinema, requires a separate essay of its own. ‘Jay Jogendra Jaya Mahamaya’ is its most concentrated expression of that idea. Kabir Suman’s composition, Srikanta Acharya’s restrained rendition, Prosenjit Chatterjee’s performance as Antony and Srijit Mukherji’s intercutting of two eras come together to create a song in which history is experienced not as something distant, but as something still emotionally alive.