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Karuna Banerjee would have celebrated her 104th birth anniversary on December 25. Who is Karuna Banerjee? Karuna Banerjee in a scene from Aparajito, the second film in Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy. Among these is an interview published in the Indian Express, an unpublished letter to Dileep Padgaonkar in response to his editorial in the Times of India on the student …

Published : Aug 10, 2023 11:00 IST - 4 MINS READ As we approached Mrinal Sen’s birth centenary earlier this year, we saw a rash of celebrations. So, going back to my earlier point, do these celebrations reignite the interest in Mrinal Sen and his work? I feel that in the pantheon of Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak, …

Published : Aug 10, 2023 11:00 IST - 3 MINS READ Mrinal Sen put India’s new wave cinema on the world map. If Satyajit Ray is one of my bibles of filmmaking, I draw inspiration from Mrinal Sen’s presentation of realism. I grew up in Delhi, and amidst the onslaught of Bollywood productions and Bengali potboilers, Mrinal Sen’s stark images …

Unstated politics: The political statements in Satyajit Ray's films

Soumitra Chattopadhyay, who starred in 14 of Satyajit Ray’s 30 full-length feature films, once wrote a message for a very young fan on a DVD cover of Hirak Rajar Deshe : “One day you will grow up and start seeing these films in new light. There is a theory that the “Calcutta trilogy” was Ray’s answer to a point being …

Subterranean parallels: Common threads between Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak

For decades, the cine culture of West Bengal has shown a couple of apparently contradictory symptoms: upholding the ‘Ray-Ghatak-Sen’ triumvirate as a sort of holy pantheon within which the cinematic glory of the region is limited and, in more intellectual circuits, pitting Satyajit Ray against Ritwik Ghatak as cultural icons. When we remember Ray, Ghatak and Mrinal Sen, we remember …

‘Ray’s vision is universal’: Girish Kasaravalli on Satyajit Ray

Vision of a land: Bibhutibhusan Bandopadhyay's Bengal in Satyajit Ray's cinema

In the middle of a great political unrest, in 1972, Satyajit Ray decided to return to Bibhutibhusan Bandopadhyay, whose novels he had adapted into the Apu Trilogy. He expressed his deep admiration for Bibhutibhusan on more than one occasion, for the “encyclopedia of life in rural Bengal” he created, and for the amazingly authentic speech he used for his characters. …