Satyajit Ray: In Search of the Modern

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Satyajit Ray (1921–1992) was India’s preeminent film-maker, as well as a major figure in world cinema. He made more than thirty films and was awarded the Oscar for Lifetime Achievement in 1992. A truly cosmopolitan artist, he combined elements from his own culture with those of the West, creating a unique synthesis. While his films are deeply culture-specific, they are also profoundly universal. 299 Ray’s major work focuses on India as a new emerging nation, filtered through the experiences of men and women who seek to define themselves in relation to the larger forces of change. These forces manifest themselves through conflicts between the feudal and the modern, tradition and progress, the village and the city, the old and the new. Through his understated, poetic narratives, Ray shows how such conflicts shape new forms of identity within an evolving society. A study of modernity in the work of Satyajit Ray, Suranjan Ganguly’s book examines six major films in depth, focusing on such issues as the nature of human subjectivity, the importance of education, the emancipation of women, the rise of the new middle class, and the crisis of identity in post-independence India. Ganguly provides close readings of Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956), Apur Sansar (1959), Charulata (1964), Aranyer Din Ratri (1970), and Pratidwandi (1970)—films that reflect Ray’s interest in how culture shapes consciousness through its encounter with history and modernity.

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Suranjan Ganguly is from Calcutta and studied at St. Xavier’s College and Jadavpur University before moving to the United States. He received his doctorate from Purdue University, Indiana, and currently teaches European and Asian cinema at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He was chair of Film Studies from 2000 to 2005. His work has appeared in Sight and Sound, Film Criticism, East-West Film Journal, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Michigan Quarterly Review, Ariel, The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad, Journal of South Asian Literature and Asian Cinema. He is completing a study of the films of Adoor Gopalakrishnan.