SATYAJIT RAY BIRTH CENTENARY: A BLUEPRINT FOR ACTION

AbstractA lonely wife in Kolkata and a bachelor in London have a virtual affair, but are forced to re-think their relationship when they discover he is her brother-in-law. Charulata 2011 is an ingenious post-millennial adaptation of Tagore’s novella, Nastanir (The Broken Nest, 1901), already immortalized by Satyajit Ray in his classic Charulata (1964). This intertextuality, especially with Ray, lends an added dimension to the film, allowing Chatterjee to contrast two modernities in Bengal – the colonial and glocal – over the course of a century. Both these women gain temporary respite from their suffocating marriage through an affair, but their circumstances are vastly different. While Tagore/Ray’s heroine (like Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary and Lady Chatterley) could only bond with a man she knew, technology expands Charulata’s choice in 2011. She romances the strange and the unknown – an unseen tall dark stranger with a gift for words. While the nineteenth century Bengali heroine had to reign in her erotic impulse, her twenty-first century counterpart submits to it, though with an overwhelming sense of guilt. But there are similarities too – both are childless homemakers; have a literary sensibility; and though a 100 years apart, in both their cases, the lover eventually departs, and duty ultimately wins over passion, bringing back the duly chastened wife to the wronged husband. Charulata 2011 thus dramatizes a glocalized South Asian narrative, where the protagonist negotiates an uneasy juxtaposition of a globalized outlook on the world with the entrapment of age-old social obligations in her self.

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Black Ants and Bones: Nehruvian Science and Third-World Environment in the Fiction of Satyajit Ray

A Global History of Literature and the Environment ◽

10.1017/cbo9781316212578.026 ◽

2016 ◽

pp. 377-392

Author(s):

Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee

Keyword(s):

Third World ◽

World Environment ◽

Satyajit Ray

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Sound and the masters: The aural in Indian art cinema

Studies in South Asian Film & Media ◽

10.1386/safm_00037_1 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 12 (1) ◽

pp. 49-66

Author(s):

Indranil Bhattacharya

Keyword(s):

Textual Analysis ◽

The Other ◽

Sound Recording ◽

Art Cinema ◽

Indian Cinema ◽

Contested Terrain ◽

Point Of Departure ◽

Previous Scholarship ◽

Satyajit Ray ◽

Indian Art

The study of art cinema has emerged as a richly discursive, but, at the same time, a deeply contested terrain in recent film scholarship. This article examines the discourse of art cinema in India through the prism of sound style and aesthetics. It analyses the sonic strategies deployed in the films of Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen and Mani Kaul, in order to identify the dominant stylistic impulses of sound in art cinema, ranging from Brechtian epic realism on one hand to Indian aesthetic theories on the other. Locating sound as a key element in the discourse of art cinema, the article surveys the different modes through which aesthetic philosophies were translated into formal strategies of sound recording, designing and mixing. Using previous scholarship on art cinema in India as the point of departure, this study combines theoretically informed textual analysis with new historical insights on Indian cinema.

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Awards Won by Satyajit Ray

Satyajit Ray on Cinema ◽

10.7312/ray-16494-026 ◽

2013 ◽

pp. 164-165 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Keyword(s):

Satyajit Ray

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Brain Attics and Mind Weapons

Criminal Moves ◽

10.3828/liverpool/9781789620580.003.0011 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 179-194

Author(s):

Michael B. Harris-Peyton

Keyword(s):

International Development ◽

Crime Fiction ◽

Critical Studies ◽

Arthur Conan Doyle ◽

Satyajit Ray

This chapter on the crime fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle, Satyajit Ray and Cheng Xiaoqing examines the central role of adaptation in the international development of the crime fiction genre in order to present a more complex understanding of the genre’s international connections and mobility. The chapter questions the distinction between original and reproduction that has typically informed critical studies on the genre’s international spread through an analysis of the works of these three writers from Britain, India (Bengal) and China. In demonstrating the ways in which Ray and Cheng adapt what is typically considered an archetypically British genre to their local settings, the chapter deconstructs the preeminent position granted to Holmes as the originator and, instead, draws attention to how Doyle himself adapted the genre in a transnational dialogue with his literary forebears.

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The Trauma of Partition

Studying Indian Cinema ◽

10.3828/liverpool/9781906733681.003.0005 ◽

2015 ◽

pp. 69-86

Author(s):

Omar Ahmed

Keyword(s):

Historical Context ◽

Art Cinema ◽

Indian Cinema ◽

Unique Position ◽

Film Maker ◽

The Family ◽

The Uk ◽

The Relationship ◽

Satyajit Ray ◽

Indian Art

This chapter shifts the focus to Indian art cinema with the Marxist work of Bengali director and iconoclast Ritwik Ghatak. The impressive Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud Capped Star, 1960) is his best-known film. Dealing directly with the trauma of partition and its effects on a Bengali family, Ghatak's cinema is bold, uncompromising, and occupies a unique position in Indian cinema. Although his work is still somewhat overshadowed by that of Satyajit Ray, another masterful Bengali film-maker, and though many of his films are still sadly unavailable on DVD in the UK, Megha Dhaka Tara is now recognised as one of the key works of Indian art cinema. The chapter discusses numerous aspects, including Ghatak's position as a film-maker; the wider historical context such as the partition of Bengal; the relationship between melodrama and feminist concerns; the film's categorisation as an example of 1960s counter cinema; and the thematic importance of the family to the film's narrative.

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