Locating an efficacy of the humane time in Ray’s Agantuk: a travel beyond the object

Abstract

The ontology of time and space has always been a subject of materialist prospectus bearing a halo effect of ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’. The enquiry into the sign of modern is a mechanical category of production where substantial copies of ‘progress’ have religiously been equated with a break from the past. This breaking away from the centre (soul) is, of course, associated with a desire for the non-native design. Simultaneously, the past becomes historicized as primitive dangers while the present/‘modern’ morphs into a non-past spectacular diffusion. Satyajit Ray reloads his artillery of the cerebral one last time in his masterpiece titled, Agantuk (The Stranger), where he pits the idea of a spectral past having an agency to redo the class binary against the totalitarian time(s) in a modern urban space which prides itself on the abuse of power-as-civility. Ray introduces a nuclear family of three (a married couple and their son) where the protagonist, Manmohan Mitra, returns as an archived data in the body of a forgotten relative. His entry into the house ruptures the canny knots of the ‘home’ where the director exposes limits of the modernized time. This paper tries to analyze how Ray uses the motif of ‘travel’ in its cinematic cloth to critique the ingestion of global progress as nothing but an accumulation of fallen spectacles that commodify both a subject who is consuming the object-in-time (progress) and also the object that is all the time getting alienated from its own subjective merit. Mitra becomes the mouthpiece of the director for conveying the paradoxes of time-as-capital in the burgeoning of speculative modernity.