Kirjahaku

Satyajit Ray is usually credited with ushering modernity into the tradition-bound Indian Cinema. Suranjan Ganguly's book examines six of Ray's major films focusing on issues such as 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. He provides close readings of the following films: Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956), Apur Sansar (1959), Charulata (1964), Aranyer Din Ratri (1970), and Pratidwandi (1970). All six films relate to Ray's interest in how a culture acquires a composite, hybrid shape through the fusion of history and modernity. By placing Ray's films within the socio-historical and cultural contexts of Indian modernity, Ganguly offers a radically different approach, which will enable Western readers to engage more fully with the filmmaker's work.

This first study of Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s feature films offers a compelling analysis of the socio-historical contexts of his work. Suranjan Ganguly examines how Kerala’s abrupt displacement from a princely feudal state into twentieth-century modernity has shaped Gopalakrishnan’s complex narratives about identity, selfhood and otherness, in which innocence is often at stake, and characters struggle with their consciences. Ganguly places the films within their larger frameworks of guilt and redemption in which the hope of emancipation – moral, spiritual and creative – is real and tangible.

This first study of Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s feature films offers a compelling analysis of the socio-historical contexts of his work. Suranjan Ganguly examines how Kerala’s abrupt displacement from a princely feudal state into twentieth-century modernity has shaped Gopalakrishnan’s complex narratives about identity, selfhood and otherness, in which innocence is often at stake, and characters struggle with their consciences. Ganguly places the films within their larger frameworks of guilt and redemption in which the hope of emancipation – moral, spiritual and creative – is real and tangible.