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Reviled by contemporaries as apolitical, Satyajit Ray's films nevertheless open up radically new ways of theoretically conceptualizing post-colonial presents and futures. JANA ARANYA (The Mediator) shows the extent to which historiography and, in particular, historians' reflections on temporality are anticipated in Ray's films and also enriched by them. Rochona Majumdar is a professor in the […]

"This film could not have been a novel...": this is how Satyajit Ray spoke about KANCHENJUNGHA from 1962, which tells a family story from a summer retreat in Darjeeling and was only lukewarmly received in India and beyond. In light of the colonial legacy and the complex modernity of the Indian novel, the strangely reserved […]

DEVI, which Ray filmed after the Apu trilogy, is a family drama about the conflict between faith and reason. Ray fearlessly and critically tells a reversal of the Oedipus myth, in which a feudal landowner declares his beautiful daughter-in-law to be the incarnation of the Hindu goddess Kali and claims her for himself in the […]

The films of Satyajit Ray's Calcutta trilogy, made between 1970 and 1976, illuminate the educated, urban burgeoisie of his hometown. Realized between PRATIDWANDI (The Rival, 1970) and JANA ARANYA (The Mediator, 1976), SEEMABADDHA (Restricted) criticizes the corruption, exploitation and moral laxity that Ray saw as accompanying the rise of a new middle class. Daniel Fairfax […]