While the British Film Institute (BFI) is releasing a restored version of Satyajit Ray’s “Mahanagar” in the UK to mark the 50th anniversary of the film; National award winning film critic and scholar Shoma Chatterji revisits Ray’s 1963 masterpiece
Image courtesy: Arindam Saha Sardar & Soumendu Roy
M ahanagar is set in 1955. Ray’s own moving away from his joint family in 1948 was a forerunner of the major shifts in Bengali society following independence. Mahanagar was based on a short story penned by Narendranath Mitra named “Abataranika”. Narendra Mitra, who was alive then, is said to have approved of Ray’s script. The original story placed the husband at the centre. Ray shifted the emphasis to place it on the wife, Arati. This change of focus re-wrote the history of women in Indian cinema. It traced the beginnings of the working wife in a lower middle-class family of Calcutta, her...
Image courtesy: Arindam Saha Sardar & Soumendu Roy
M ahanagar is set in 1955. Ray’s own moving away from his joint family in 1948 was a forerunner of the major shifts in Bengali society following independence. Mahanagar was based on a short story penned by Narendranath Mitra named “Abataranika”. Narendra Mitra, who was alive then, is said to have approved of Ray’s script. The original story placed the husband at the centre. Ray shifted the emphasis to place it on the wife, Arati. This change of focus re-wrote the history of women in Indian cinema. It traced the beginnings of the working wife in a lower middle-class family of Calcutta, her...
- 7/20/2013
- by Shoma A. Chatterji
- DearCinema.com
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