“We have a fairly backward audience,” Satyajit Ray infamously said about Indians in a 1989 interview with French journalist Pierre-André Boutang, while discussing his film ‘Devi’. As a vast number of Indians once again seem enthralled by new-age “babas”, I have been thinking about how Ray saw Indians’ obsession with religious and spiritual figures, and how he satirised the cult of personality that often mushrooms around such individuals in his 1965 film ‘Mahapurush’.

Adapted from Parashuram aka Rajshekhar Basu’s short story ‘Birinchibaba’, the film follows Gurupada, a recently widowed man, who falls under the influence of Birinchi Baba, a charismatic self-styled holy man who boasts of extraordinary spiritual knowledge and immortality — claiming he taught relativity to Einstein, debated Plato on time, and knew Gautama Buddha and Jesus Christ personally. What begins as a satire of one fraudulent guru gradually becomes a portrait of a society willing, even eager, to surrender its critical faculties in the presence of religious authority.

In ‘Mahapurush’, Ray’s did not treat gullibility as the exclusive property of the uneducated or the impoverished. Birinchi Baba’s inner circle includes lawyers, professors, and members of Bengali genteel “bhadralok” society who are eager to suspend rational thought. His followers are therefore not only victims of an elaborate con; they are active participants in their own deception. They want to believe. Birinchi Baba offers them something rationality alone cannot: the promise of certainty, transcendence, and the assurance that someone with secret spiritual knowledge can make the mysteries of existence intelligible.

India has a long history of producing so-called saints, gurus, godmen and spiritual leaders, while simultaneously trying to develop a modern public organised around scientific temper, higher education, and rationality during the post-Independence years. Ray found this contradiction rather ironic. He was all too aware that the desire for a charismatic spiritual intermediary does not necessarily disappear with education — an idea echoed by the works of radical Bengali poets, writers, and playwrights.

But Ray also understood why this works. As Karl Marx wrote in his 1844 work ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, “religion is the opium of the people.” Faith can be socially useful. A religious leader provides followers with a community, a hierarchy, and a shared vocabulary through which they can understand themselves and the world — especially during periods of great social upheaval. Babas and films glorifying Babas are experiencing a cultural high right now because so many of us feel helpless and hopeless about the future, both ours, individually, and the world’s, collectively.

Here’s more from Homegrown:

India’s Most Interesting Babas And Their Rather Bizarre Stories

What Does Our Obsession With Godmen Reveal About Us?

Kinky Kashayam’s ‘Portable Black Cat Radar’ Satirises Superstition Through Design & Tech