A marked shift in realising this moral decay on screen is apparent from
Aranyer Din Ratri to his Calcutta trilogy
Pratidwandi,
Jana Aranya. In
Pratidwandi, Dhritiman Chatterjee’s Siddhartha declares that he doesn’t want to leave Kolkata, no matter that he is unemployed, with his mind unable to find an ideological footing. The film coincided with the Naxalite movement that began in Bengal, with the caste system and land rights at its root.
Still from ‘Pratidwandi’.
It’s no coincidence that the trilogy charted the course of Indira Gandhi’s India as it inched towards Emergency, creating a swelling anger at the state. Ray’s films still focused on capturing the Bengali Brahmin’s, or more importantly, India’s ruling class’s frustration with itself and the country. The trilogy’s protagonists Siddhartha in