The ‘Othering’ of Duli: Performing Indigeneity in Satyajit Ray’s Aranyer Din Ratri

Abstract This article revisits Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s renowned 1970 film, Aranyer Din Ratri ( Days and Nights in the Forest ), to discursively analyse the representation of Indigenous identity through the female Santhali character, Duli. The author argues that Ray submits to a worldview shaped by the politics of ‘othering’, reducing Duli to what Fatimah Tobing Rony (1996. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle . Duke University Press) terms an ‘ethnographic spectacle’. By infusing Duli’s character with a reductive exoticism and subjecting her to an aggressive ‘male gaze’, the film fails to articulate her deeply fissured identity – a failure exemplified by the actor’s ‘performance’ of Indigeneity in blackface. The article thus interrogates how the film places its representation of a passive subaltern woman at the crossroads of a heteronormative, colonial visual narrative. It seeks to establish Duli’s multiple positionings as the quintessential ‘other’, suggesting that the director’s own class position serves as a catalyst for this stereotypical and hegemonic visual discourse.