Satyajit Ray Research Articles

Calcutta and the Modern Woman: Reading the Films <em>Mahanagar</em> and <em>Kahaani</em>

In the history of Indian cinema, Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar (1963) and Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani (2012) are among the all too few films with strong, resilient, and resourceful women as their protagonists. Ray’s Arati Mazumdar and Ghosh’s Vidya Bagchi are the heroines with the men cast in supporting roles. Each woman finds her own way in the same city: Calcutta/Kolkata (the latter being the Bengali name in use since 2001). That Calcutta/Kolkata itself plays a central role in these woman-centric films is especially apt given that female emancipation became a contested issue there between British colonizers and Indian nationalists. As the capital of West Bengal, Kolkata today is a stronghold for chief minister Mamata Banerjee, the woman who defeated the Communist Party of India after thirty-seven years in power. Moreover, Durga Puja, a celebration of the Mother Goddess Durga, has been the city’s most important religious festival for the last two hundred years. Analyzing women’s negotiations of tradition and modernity, these two films imagine and intervene into the spaces and communities of post-independence Calcutta and neoliberal Kolkata.

Some Brief Reflections on Technology, Cinema, and the Postcolonial Uncanny

This article is interested in understanding how an aesthetics shaped by postcoloniality both draws on and reveals anew the uncanny relation of sound to the image in cinema. If postcoloniality is structured by a desire for synchronicity, and technology is viewed as a means to this end, synchronization has typically been the ideal of film sound. Thus an examination of some postcolonial uses of film sound affords us the uncanny pleasures of exploring the reality of one phenomenon through the technology of another. Two examples are taken from Indian cinema—first, how Satyajit Ray’s internationally renowned Pather Panchali (1955) conceives of technology as development by embracing a mode of sonic realism unprecedented in Indian cinema. In so doing, he not only proposes an alternative to the uncanny assembling of technology and representation that characterizes Indian cinema but also suggests that the aesthetic of realism can mitigate anxieties of postcolonial doubling. The second instance is taken from Ashim Ahluwalia’s self-described science-fiction documentary John and Jane (2005), an exploration of Indian call centers. Once again, the relation of sound and image in this film allows us to intuit how the postcolonial uncanny mutates in the era of global electronic technology.

Scouting for the Reaper by Jacob M. Appel

60 WLT JANUARY/ FEBRUARY 2015 fiction Jacob M. Appel. Scouting for the Reaper. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Black Lawrence Press. 2014. isbn 9781937854959 After publishing several novels, a volume of essays, and over two hundred short stories in literary journals and anthologies—winning a number of prizes along the way— Jacob M. Appel rewards readers with a collection of seven new short stories. The book has won the Hudson Prize, awarded by the Black Lawrence Press. The title story is narrated by a teenager who dresses in a Girl Scout uniform (too small), pretending to be eleven, to help her father sell gravestones. She lugs the sample case of different kinds of stone to each house. The pretense that she has just come from a Girl Scout meeting with her father helps establish his credentials as a caring parent. She says nothing, of course, while her father builds on this impression in making his pitch. The twist in this story, and in several other stories, is that a youth, sometimes narrating years later, realizes that one of his or her parents has had a relationship with another person, and it still matters, even if the formerly beloved is obviously using the parent. This relationship impinges on the youth’s own sexual awakening. The youth is at the age when he or she can actively imagine that some just-met person “will become my husband (or wife).” Fathers loom large in many of these early stories, whether in crisis or impacting the youth’s own life. Mothers and marriages are fretful; where they are protagonists, women are older, childless, or with grown children who are distant. They react emotionally, but understandably, to separation from what they know or have chosen, whether it be a longtime yardman or a pet rabbit suddenly gone blind. Apart from the title story, “Ad Valorem” and “The Vermin Episode” stand out for creating discomforting sympathy with each protagonist —a woman recently widowed and a rabbi, respectively. The woman is attracted to an accountant who has been doing the couple ’s taxes for years. Before she commits to a relationship with this man, also widowed, she wants to double-check his work. It’s easy enough to do, given that her deceased husband kept photocopies of all the business receipts. But she worries about what she will do if she finds the accountant has cheated them. The second story is both a delightful and serious riff on Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis .” What can a well-meaning rabbi do with the remains of a large dung beetle after he has promised Mr. Samsa that he will have Gregor buried in a proper cemetery? Whether they realize it or not, the narrators of these stories explain themselves well, no longer the silent children listening to their parents or less assertive adults imposed upon. All seek or cling to something that affirms their lives, even while waking to unforeseen responsibilities. After reading so much contemporary fiction that is fretful, laboring in the shadow of modernist complexity or postmodern minimalism, there is solace in reading stories that beckon one into the lives of characters in situations that naturally evolve from satisfying plots. W. M. Hagen Oklahoma Baptist University World Literature in Review Janko Ferk’s historical tightrope. Fiction, page 64 Linda Hogan’s remedies. Verse, page 75 Satyajit Ray’s literary inspirations. Miscellaneous, page 78 ...

Vernacular Modernism, Film Culture, and Moroccan Short Film and Documentary

Moroccan cinema, when it is present at all in anglophone film discourses, most often appears through the lens of national film history. Underpinned by postcolonial theory's emphasis on concepts of resistant nationalisms, critical discourse on Moroccan cinema tends to view it in terms of a struggle for the emergence of a coherent national practice in the wake of colonialism. This essay takes a different tack, foregrounding cinematic and artistic discourses of modernism as they emerged in Morocco after independence. In so doing, it hopes to contribute to the reformulation of the way that cinema in Morocco and across the Arab world is conceived of in relation to Europe and the United States, long understood as the centers of modernity and modernism. Understanding the nature of modernist experimentation in this period allows us to appreciate the ways that modernity in the Moroccan context is not simply reducible to a phenomenon imposed by colonialism, be it the French or Spanish imperialism of geopolitical practice or the imperialism of the imaginary sustained by European or American cinemas which, along with Egypt, historically dominated Moroccan screens. While French colonialism radically affected Moroccan society and leftnot only the technology of cinema but also an institutional production infrastructure in the form of the Centre Cinematographique Marocain (CCM), the modernism of Moroccan culture during the postcolonial period relied upon the active embrace of ideas and aesthetics within an international (not only French) modernist realm. While nationalist film discourses have tended to obscure the fact, this essay shows that such internationalism was manifest at multiple levels and in varying contexts: in the film text itself and its aesthetic characteristics; in the film culture of the moment, including the critical discourse around cinema, the cine-club movement, and the development of film festivals; and in the broader artistic and literary scene of the time.That the debates and interventions that took shape in these contexts reveal a strong interest in fostering a postcolonial national culture to recuperate what was suppressed or lost under the Protectorate should not prevent us from measuring the considerable distance between the interest in Moroccan culture and histories evinced by artists and intellectuals of this moment and the official nationalism of the era, a nationalism that often turned violently against those very same actors. Tracing the connections between the experimental film production of the 1960s and 1970s, much of it emerging around the margins of the CCM's program, and the film and artistic culture of that same moment, this paper argues that Moroccan cinematic modernism was a transnational phenomenon whose circuits of influence did not obey the expected France-Morocco or even Europe-Morocco axis. To understand the place of these films in a transnational modernist avantgarde is to refute the idea that modernism is either, at best, an imitation of artistic movements proper to Europe or America or, at worst, an example of a colonial legacy that should be replaced with something more authentically popular, indigenous, and national. Further, it is to argue that film discourses on cinematic modernism and the avant-garde are impoverished to the extent that they do not take account of practices such as those in Morocco and across the global South, practices that are equally a response to the effects of a global capitalist modernity, as Keya Ganguly has recently argued with respect to Satyajit Ray's cinema.1 Rather than seeing such practices in Morocco as constituting something other to the main event of European modernism, I argue that they be understood as important examples of a modernism without borders. To reinsert these films into a transnational framework of modernism is also to prize them out of cinema discourses whose borders are hermetically Moroccan, Arab, or Middle Eastern and North African to instead allow them voice as radically transcultural texts that respond in particular and historically situated ways to a situation of global reach. …

Translation as Allegory: Adaptation of Premchand’s “Shatranj Ke Khilari” into Film

Roman Jakobson's idea that adaptation is a kind of translation has been further expanded by functionalist theorists who claim that translation necessarily involves interpretation. Premised on this view, the present paper argues that the adaptation of Premchand's short story “Shatranj ke Khilari” into film of that name by Satyajit Ray is an allegorical interpretation. The idea of allegorical interpretation is based on that ultimate four-fold schema of interpretation which Dante suggests to his friend, Can Grande della Scala, for interpretation of his poem Divine Comedy. This interpretive scheme is suitable for interpreting contemporary reality with a little modification. As Walter Benjamin believes that a translation issues from the original – not so much from its life as from its after-life – it is argued here that in Satyajit Ray's adaptation Premchand's short story undergoes a living renewal and becomes a purposeful manifestation of its essence. The film not only depicts the social and political condition of Awadh during the reign of Wajid Ali Shah but also opens space for engaging with the contemporary political reality of India in 1977.

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed. Indian Films, British Networks and the Sikh Diaspora in Italy

This article draws upon a small-scale research undertaken between January and March 2010 amongst a community of Indian Sikhs living in Novellara, a small town located in north-central Italy. The purpose of the research was to examine the role of Indian films in the shaping of what could be called, following Stuart Hall, the positioning of an Indian diasporic identity in the Italian context.2 The idea for this study began to take shape almost ten years ago, when I was writing my master’s thesis on Indian cinema. At the time, finding Indian films in Italy was extremely difficult. Even Bollywood was still a largely unknown phenomenon and, apart from the few of Satyajit Ray’s films available in selected film libraries, it was impossible to buy or rent Indian films. I thus sought help from an Indian immigrant who ran a call centre in the city in which I lived. The call centre was also a clandestine DVD shop, where immigrants of South Asian origin could buy, or rent, pirate copies of all sorts of Indian films, from the classics of the 1950s and the 1960s to the latest Bollywood hits. As I was the only white Italian renting Indian DVDs there, whenever I entered the shop my presence created excitement amongst customers: everyone was ready to discuss with me the films I rented and to suggest new titles. The owner even decided that I should pay just the symbolic price of one euro per week, no

Patterns and Links in Satyajit Ray's Fairytale Trilogy

A TRIUMVIRATE: KALEIDOSCOPIC PATTERNS AND THEMATIC LINKS IN SATYAJIT RAY'S FAIRYTALE TRILOGY AbstractThis fantasy trilogy demonstrates that the fairy tale is a very fluid form of narrative. It travels from village to town to city, and from country to country, thereby gaining and losing some outstanding characteristics. Magic always prevails, the most distinguishing feature. It can be used for various purposes because its fantasy lends itself to various forms like allegory, satire, parody, symbolism and even realism, the most opposing genre. We see how the progress of the films and the collaboration of several Ray family members make this trilogy so complex, from fairy tale and slapstick comedy to contemporaneous political satire and necromancy....

Mad Tales of Tollywood : Psychiatry in Bengali Cinema

There are reviews about portrayal of Psychiatry in Hollywood and Bollywood movies. Impact of cine media is extremely important in regional movies where actors and actresses are being worshipped as god. Initial stigmatization about madness is gradually changing to some strong social messages. Tollywood or Bengali movies have incorporated the mental illness way back from the era of Satyajit Ray and Riitwik Ghatak. The newer Bengali movies have extreme importance in spreading awareness and reducing stigma of mental illness.Keywords : Tollywood movies, Mental Illness, Stigmatizarion, Social messages.

Satyajit Ray on Cinema. By Satyajit Ray. Edited by Sandip Ray. pp. 171. New York, Columbia University Press, 2013.

Satyajit Ray on Cinema. By Satyajit Ray. Edited by Sandip Ray. pp. 171. New York, Columbia University Press, 2013.

Fire, Water and The Goddess: The Films of Deepa Mehta and Satyajit Ray as Critiques of Hindu Patriarchy

Fire, Water and The Goddess: The Films of Deepa Mehta and Satyajit Ray as Critiques of Hindu Patriarchy

Satyajit Ray on cinema

Satyajit Ray on cinema

Vision of Tagore through Applicability in the Spectrum of Ray and Ghosh: Reflection of Feminine Approach in two Bengali Movies

Rabindranath Tagore had an enormous influence on Satyajit Ray, one of the great directors in India's long tradition of art house cinema who directed Charulata, and Chokher Bali is made by a director much influenced by Ray in turn, Rituparno Ghosh. The film Charulata affords a dazzling view of Satyajit Ray's mastery of the medium and gives vital proof of his ability to explore universal themes without compromising his uniquely Bengali sensibilities. Ray's script gracefully follows the maturing of Charu's artistic and feminine identity. The Bengali filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh writes and directs the costume melodrama Chokher Bali: A Passion Play which focuses on the situation of women. Set in the early 1900s, the film draws parallels between the British colonization of Bengal and the domestic situation of a Calcutta household. This paper tries to analyze the representation of Indian Bengali female characters, written by Tagore in the early 20th century, through the above mentioned two movies.

The Changing World of Satyajit Ray: Reflections on Anthropology and History

The Changing World of Satyajit Ray: Reflections on Anthropology and History

Beyond the subaltern syndrome: Amitav Ghosh and the crisis of the bhadrasamaj

Using some of Amitav Ghosh’s influential non-fictional writings to understand his own novels, this paper problematizes Ghosh’s works in terms of the crisis of the bhadrasamaj or the middle class makers of the nation and civil society in India. Indeed, we may detect a direct line of literary and cultural descent from the two iconic figures of recent Bangla culture, Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray, to Ghosh’s complex career. But instead of a continuity, Ghosh’s works are a record of epistemic ruptures engendered by the breakdown of grand narratives of nations and the eruption of civic violence. The crisis in Tagore is a combination of private and public failures exemplified in a text such as Nashtonir, filmed so eloquently as Charulata by Ray. A similar crisis in the private and public domain is seen in Ray’s Ganashatru and Agantuk, his last works. While versions of similar crises are visible in Ghosh’s novels including The Shadow Lines, The Calcutta Chromosome, and The Hungry Tide, I argue that instead of confronting them head on as his predecessors did, Ghosh tends to be evasive, either by not allowing them fully to develop or escaping into coincidence, “doubling”, or romanticism. Does such a retreat into narratives of exodus or romanticized celebrations of failed experiments such as the Morichjhapi settlement signify a shift in both the self-confidence and the priorities of the bhadrasamaj, whose product and representative Ghosh is?

The possibilities of the past: Two routes to a past and what they tell us about professional power

Walter Benjamin's 1940 essay ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ offers a basis for assessing the current engagement with history within the field of organizational studies. In this paper I argue that the past remains under-theorized within such engagement, including in two well-known historical projects in organization studies: institutional studies of knowledge formation and postcolonial studies of organizations. Benjamin's essay helps us recognize the possibilities of the past for understanding organizations and those trained to run them. Through examples drawn from the historians Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Rajnarayan Chandvarkar, a film of Satyajit Ray, and the contemporary Occupy movement, I discuss the possibilities of the past, that is, routes to understanding the historical manager, and alternatives to managerialism.

Becoming Father: The Politics of Succession in Satyajit Ray's Pratidwandi (The Adversary)

Satyajit Ray's Pratidwandi (The Adversary) (1970) opens with a portentous event that occurs within a Bengali middle class home: the death of the father. The sequence, shot in negative, shows the co...

The Contours of Affinity: Satyajit Ray and the Tagorean Legacy

This paper seeks to demonstrate the complexities of the Tagorean legacy through a re-examination of Tagore's influence on the filmmaker Satyajit Ray. Reappraising Ray's brief period at Santiniketan and some of his most celebrated engagements with Tagore, the essay argues that contrary to conventional wisdom, Ray was not a wholehearted follower of Tagore but a critical and creative interlocutor. The nuanced interpretation of his relationship with Tagore that Ray himself proffered in his last film Agantuk (1991), the essay suggests, is more persuasive than the exaggerated notions of Ray's Tagoreanism propagated by the vast majority of his biographers and critics.

Picturing <i>The Postmaster</i>: Tagore, Ray, and the Making of an Uncanny Modernity

Picturing The Postmaster: Tagore, Ray, and the Making of an Uncanny Modernity Mrinalini Chakravorty (bio) The true image of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability and is never seen again. —Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”1 People also complain that I have never treated a really contemporary subject, the sufferings, poverty, and struggles of today. But I want to show, not just single aspects of our life today, like contemporary politics, but a broader view of Indian history, which has not been explored properly in the cinema. —Satyajit Ray, “The Artist in Politics”2 Satyajit Ray’s celluloid portraits of Bengali modernity are perhaps the singular most celebrated filmic representations of the syncretism and contradictions of British influence in India. Ray has persistently traced the long trajectory of colonialism’s impact on India, making films that capture the milieu of anticolonial struggles, as well as the fresh novelty of independence. In films as various as Ghare Baire/The Home and the World (1984), Charulata/The Lonely Wife (1964), Devi/The Goddess (1960), Jalsaghar/The Music Room (1958), and Shatranj Ke Khiladi/The Chess Players (1977), Ray returns us to thresholds of the Indian anticolonial movement. These films evoke both the epochal sensibilities and the cultural confusions facing those swayed by newly radicalized struggles for political autonomy at a time when much of their quotidian lives are still steeped in the enduring habits and postures of British colonialism. In other films yet, most notably the Apu trilogy (1955, 1956, 1959),3 the Calcutta trilogy (1970, 1971, 1975),4 Mahanagar/The Big City [End Page 117] (1963), and Aranyer Din Ratri/Days and Nights in the Forest (1969), Ray grapples with the heady changes of the postcolonial era. At stake in the transitions between the colonial and postcolonial epochs that Ray traces in these films is an effort to seize the turbulent images of a fast-fading colonial past in order to reckon with the discontinuities of the present. In Ray’s cinema, the present moment is rarely conveyed as the culmination of a stable synthesis of past history. His use of montage, for instance, suggests the extent to which breaks and disruptions become constitutive of how contemporaneity is rendered in his films: the arrival of an unidentifiable missive in Agantuk/The Stranger (1991); the passage of a convoy of military trucks that interrupts the long-lost lovers’ conversation in Kapurush/The Coward (1965); the spliced images of the protagonist in a formal suit waiting in an English rose garden in Pratidwandi/The Adversary (1970), when in fact he waits half-dressed for his pants to be repaired at a tailor stall on a busy alley in Kolkata; the close-up of a power grid and framing shots of a locomotive cutting its way across vast grain fields in Pather Panchali/Song of the Road (1955); the musical interlude in Devi, where the camera lingers on an aged devotional singer rather than on the forcibly deified girl, Doya; the opera glasses Charu uses that constantly shift the camera’s gaze in Charulata; and the eruptions of a madman amid the tranquility of a village in The Postmaster (1961).5 These and myriad other such interruptions endow most of Ray’s films with a sense of montage.6 Montages of this kind reflect the films’ framing of history as allegory. If, for Walter Benjamin, allegory materially disrupts narrative unity or a singular sense of continuous history, by keeping alive a vast field of associations that comprise historical truth, Ray’s filmic montages secure a similar end.7 These filmic moments, in their associative articulation of the past, reorient the viewer’s mnemonic relationship to history, which, as Benjamin notes, “does not mean recognizing the past as ‘the way it really was.’ It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger ... [which] threatens both the content of the tradition and those who inherit it.”8 Thus, in many of Ray’s films, the tumult of the postcolonial moment is variously framed so as to highlight a deep ambivalence with the past...

19th Century Bengali Women and the Films of Satyajit Ray: A study

The present study has determined to explore the condition of 19th century Bengali women by analysing the cinemas of Satyajit Ray. In the 19th century social life of Bengali women was marked as a transition period of their developments. In the first half of this century the women as was confined to social disciplines, on the contrary it was evident that in the works of contemporary Bengali stalwarts social upliftment of women was seen. Although starting of women's liberation from social disciplines started in the second half of the 19th century, the Bengali writers published important truth about these liberations in their contemporary writing. In the composition of 'Debi' of Pravat Kumar Mukhopadhyay and 'Nastanir' of Rabindranath Tagore two different types of pictures were found. In 'Debi' story in the first half of the 19th century social discipline of Bengali women and on the other side in 'Nastanir' novel in the second half of 19th century social liberation of women was pictured by Satyajit Ray centering these two subject 'Debi' and 'Charulata' cinemas. In this research article I have chosen two films of the great director Satyajit Ray such as 'Debi' and 'Charulata' to compare them with the condition of the 19th century Bengali women.

Debating Radical Cinema: A History of the Film Society Movement in India

AbstractThis paper offers a history of the creation and development of film societies in India from 1947 to 1980. Members of the film society movement consisted of important Indian film directors such as Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Shyam Benegal, Basu Chatterji, Mani Kaul, G. Aravindan, Kumar Shahani, Adoor Gopalkrishnan, and Mrinal Sen, as well as film enthusiasts, numbering about 100,000 by 1980. The movement, confined though it was to members who considered themselves film aficionados, was propelled by debates similar to those that animated left-oriented cultural movements which originated in late colonial India, namely, the Progressive Writers Association in 1936, and the Indian People's Theatre Association in 1942. By looking at the film society movement as an early and sustained attempt at civil-social organization in postcolonial India, this paper highlights the two distinct definitions of ‘good cinema’—from an aesthetically sophisticated product to a radical political text—that were debated during the time of the movement.