Suranjan Ganguly

Constructing the Imaginary: Creativity and Otherness in the Films of Adoor Gopalakrishnan

The essay primarily deals with three of Adoor Gopalakrishnans major films from the 80s: Mukhamukham/Face to Face (1984); Anantaram/ Monologue (1987); and Mathilukal/The Walls (1989). It also includes a discussion of his most recent film, Nizalkutthu/Shadow Kill (2002). The author first provides an overview of Gopalakrishnans life and career and then focuses on the subject of the outsider and the related issue of otherness, both of which he claims are common to all the films. He shows how Gopalakrishnans protagonists are men and women who have been physically and psychically displaced from mainstream society. Victims of choice and circumstance, they grapple with forces that are self-generated but more often than not unleashed by larger historical and social processes. He particularly focuses on the work of the eighties because it is here that Gopalakrishnan attempts to locate otherness within the interior workings of self, within a psychological space that is often associated with the creative process. The male protagonists in these films function in very different contexts and yet their status as outsiders is defined by their engagement with the imaginary which they achieve through their creativity.

Poetry into Prose: The Rewriting of Oudh in Satyajit Ray's The Chess Players

Thus begins Munshi Premchand’s short story, Shatranj ki KhilarilThe Chess Players set on the eve of the British annexation of Oudh in 1856, the source of Satyajit Ray’s 1977 film of the same name. While Premchand’s tone is clearly censorious, blaming the takeover on the collapse of social and moral values, Ray is more restrained in his indictment because he admires the extraordinary culture of this decadent society. After the Mughal Empire disintegrated in the 18th century, Lucknow became the last bastion of its culture a sort of Byzantium where its best traditions flowered. The arts

Excavating the Text: Ray's Adaptation of Pratidwandi/The Adversary

Abstract In his adaptation of Sunil Gangopadhyays Pratidwandi (The Adversary) (1970), Satyajit Ray upholds the right of the filmmaker to deviate from the original and create an autonomous text, which retains its link to its source but is also an interpretation in its own right. Through a series of “excavations,” he unearths ideas and issues that circulate in the novel but often remain understated or underdeveloped—some mere allusions, others key events which acquire a different frame of emphasis in his film. These excavations enable him to make certain conceptual changes that allow for another text—as it were—to emerge, one which lies submerged within the book.

Becoming Father: The Politics of Succession in Satyajit Ray's Pratidwandi (The Adversary)

Satyajit Ray’s Pratidwandi (The Adversary) (1970) opens with a portentous event that occurs within a Bengali middle class home: the death of the father. The sequence, shot in negative, shows the corpse being carried out while the relatives comfort the bereaved mother. Ray then jump cuts to the burning pyre and zooms in to a close-up of the face of Siddhartha, the son. The scene contains the germ of a film that offers one of Ray’s most compelling meditations on the crisis of identity within the middle class family. The father’s premature death destabilizes the home, robbing it of its wage earner and its defining source of power and authority. As per tradition, it falls on the eldest son to take his place and become the provider for his dependents. But the college-going Siddhartha is neither materially nor ideologically qualified to replace his father. And, yet, he has no choice but to accept the role that’s thrust on him with all its built-in conflicts and contradictions. It generates a serious subjective crisis, which threatens to undermine his sense of self and masculinity as he struggles to reformulate his beliefs within the existing hierarchies and relationships of the family. In trying to assert himself within a set of new contexts, invariably linked to power, he not only runs up against the interests of others but also has to grapple with his own repressed fears and anxieties. What is more, outside, in the larger urban world of the Calcutta of the 70s, a raging patricidal war has turned the whole issue of fathers and succession into a sham. Will the Left-leaning Siddhartha simply cave in to the regressive ideology of his bourgeois inheritance? Or will he succeed in radically reconfiguring his newly acquired role? Ray sets out to investigate these issues in what will be his first film in the Calcutta trilogy of the 70s. The prospect of taking the father’s place at the head of the extended Bengali middle class family is daunting for any son as it brings in its wake a whole array of material responsibilities. Often as the sole wage earner, he must provide not only for his widowed mother, wife, and children but also for his younger siblings who may not be financially independent. And there could be elderly uncles and aunts within the family who are largely dependent on him. His own income, supplemented by the often-meager savings of the father, must suffice to pay the bills. However, since the son is usually middle-aged and economically stable at the time of his father’s death, in most cases, he’s ready for the challenge. But built into his succession is also the formidable ideological “clause” of