Kirjahaku

India's most celebrated filmmaker in the West, Satyajit Ray has long been admired for his work's revelations of universal truths through the lives and dilemmas of people living in one corner of India. He has been hailed as a master by the likes of Akira Kurosawa and Martin Scorsese and honored with an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement in 1992 - however, few outside India know that filmmaking was just one of Ray's pursuits. A hugely popular writer, designer, lyricist, composer, and children's magazine editor and illustrator, Ray operated virtually as a one-man culture industry in Bengal. Based on years of archival research, including the private collections of the Ray family, A World in a Dewdrop is the first biography to chart Ray's multiple identities and explore their interconnections, contradictions, and cultural contexts. Author Chandak Sengoopta scrutinizes the whole range of Ray's triumphs and setbacks, the cultural forces that both enhanced and limited his reputation in India and abroad, the social contexts that shaped his character, and the ideological underpinnings of his apparently apolitical art. Sengoopta draws from a vast trove of correspondence; drafts of letters, stories, and articles; outlines of unmade films; and an unpublished and previously unexamined first screenplay of The Home and the World written by Ray in the 1940s, ultimately revealing a portrait of Satyajit Ray that dispels old myths to establish his relevance today, nearly 100 years since his birth.

Although the filmmaker Satyajit Ray is well-known across the world, few outside Bengal know much about the diverse contributions of his forebears to printing technology, nationalism, childrens literature, feminism, advertising, entreprenurial culture and religious reform. Even within Bengal, the earlier Rays are often regarded exclusively as childrens writers. The first study in English of the multifarious interests and accomplishments of the Ray family and its collateral branches, The Rays Before Satyajit interweaves the Ray saga with the larger history of Indian modernity and its contradictions. Whilst eager to learn from the West and rarely drawn to simple-minded nationalism, the Rays, at their best, shunned mere imitation and sought to create forms of the modern that were thoroughly Indian and enthusiastically cosmopolitan. Some of the outcomes of this quest such as Upendrakishore Rays innovations in half-tone photography were even appreciated in the West, though the metropolitan careers of colonial innovators, as the book shows, were inevitably constrained by forces beyond their control. Ranging confidently across the history of religion, literature, science, technology and entrepreneurial culture, The Rays before Satyajit is not only a collective biography of an extraordinary family but illuminates the history of Indian modernity from a bracingly original perspective.

Less than a century ago, physicians, scientists, and cultural commentators became fascinated by the endocrine glands and the effects of their secretions on our bodies and minds. Of all the characteristics supposed to be governed by them, the attributes of sex evoked the wildest interest. The gonads, it was revealed, secreted chemicals that not only influenced the biological expressions of sex, but seemed to generate the vitality and energy that made life worth living. Through a series of case studies drawn from Central Europe, the United States, and Britain, "The Most Secret Quintessence of Life" explores how the notion of sex hormones enabled scientists to remap the human body, encouraging hopes that glandular interventions could cure ills, malfunctions, and even social deviance in ways inconceivable to previous generations. Many of these dreams failed, but their history, Chandak Sengoopta shows, takes us into the very heart of scientific medicine, revealing how even its most arcane concerns are shaped by cultural preoccupations and anxieties.