The outmoded director: Satyajit Ray’s urban films and the crisis of historicism – Rochona Majumdar (Chicago)

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 Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago.

Film: JANA ARANYA (The Mediator), India 1975, 131 min.