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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
100 Years of Satyajit Ray: a tribute to The Apu Trilogy
May 2, 2021, saw the start of celebrations of the 100th birthday of the great Bengali filmmaker,
Satyajit Ray. Ray’s films were probably amongst the earliest Indian films I’d seen, long before Bollywood would grab my attention. I love many of Ray’s films:
Devi from 1960 (starring the sublime Sharmila Tagore) is a particular favourite, and is a commentary on religious devotion and fundamentalism, and, particular, on a system that both places women on pedestals as goddesses even as it removes their agency and represses them.
Charulata (apparently the film Ray himself cited as his own favourite of all his films) is an exercise in subtle storytelling and gave us the irrepressible Amal, played by Soumitra Chatterjee, who literally stole my heart in so many films. But no Ray film touches my heart so completely as do the three films in the