ABSTRACT
This is a significant category in itself because the women pursue illicit love in spite of obstacles that society sets up for them, whether it be through purdah (the practice in certain Muslim and Hindu societies of screening women from men or strangers, especially by means of a curtain or even separate living quarters), or the fact that they are married and, in the case of Seema, the fact of being a mother. They stand out in Ray’s cinema as women who are “modern” in many ways, although in the case of the former two, they nominally belong to the colonial period and not independent India. They are ushered into modernity by their sensibilities and intelligence to internalise the winds of change.
