Ray’s cinema is known for its magnificent portrayal of the inner lives of women. But Ray the writer, whose legacy of young adult stories in Bengali is even greater than his films, has a pathological absence of women in his books. What might this chronic exclusion amount to in the minds of his fans?
Author: sohinichattopadhyay
Waheeda Rehman, the Real Outlier
The actor is the first Muslim woman to get the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, startling given the legacy of Muslim women in Hindi film
Trauma Has No Expiry Date
In the aftermath of a prominent Bengali director of plays and films being criticised for casting an actor-director accused of sexual predation, theatre practitioner Shuktara Lal reflects on the impact of trauma on stage artistes. And what genuine allyship might look like.
[Trigger warning: sexual assault, child sexual abuse]
The Dreams and Yearnings That Technology Gave Us
Tejaswini Apte-Rahm’s novel The Secret of More is set in the Bombay of the early 20th century, when the motion picture industry was being born and the seismic political changes that shaped the age of democracy and nationalism were underway
Once Upon a Library
I dream most often of my grandmother. But these days, the image of my grandfather’s study keeps visiting me
Shabaash Mithu, and the Hindi film’s inability to handle micro-humiliations
Shabaash Mithu acknowledges what I found to be the sportswoman’s main problem in India—the un-seeing of women’s sport as proper sport. The un-seeing of women as equal citizens. The result is a thousand daily indignities, such as no money to travel, no international exposure, hand-me-down uniforms of the men’s team, bureaucratic scorn. The story of women’s sport is a search…
The Courtesan, the Sportsperson and the Desires of the Nation
The courtesan, a long-time fascination of Hindi cinema, is being replaced by the sportsperson. Corporeal labour and the art of sports is the kind of performance that the politics of post-2000 India celebrates. The courtesan represents women in pre-modern India, the sportsperson represents the ideal citizen of contemporary India. In particular, the sportswoman In the book Dancing with the Nation,…
Why Does the Muslim Woman Need Saving in Hindi Film?
The Muslim man has been recast as a beast in mainstream blockbusters. But the Muslim woman we see in projects like Special Ops, War or Bajrangi Bhaijaan is either infantilised or simply erased In Special Ops, the web series by Bollywood director-producer Neeraj Pandey, there are two Muslim women characters with speaking roles among a dashboard of bloodthirsty Muslim men…
Hindi Film’s Crush on the Intelligence Services
Over the past decade and a half, the Neeraj Pandey brand of thriller has given to Bollywood what Hollywood has done for the CIA: romanticising the Intelligence Bureau. Later films like War have sexed up this formula Fifty days after the Pulwama terrorist attack, acknowledged as an intelligence failure even by the BJP-appointed governor of Jammu and Kashmir, the Hindi…
Nine Rays of Incandescence
Nine moments from Ray’s cinema that I return to again and again 1. When Arati’s (Madhabi Mukherjee’s) colleague Edith (Vicky Redmond ) teaches her to apply lipstick in the office bathroom in Mahanagar. The mirror catches the unexpected friendship between a Bhadralok school master’s daughter-in-law on her first job and the ‘smart’Anglo-Indian ‘office girl’ 2. When Shamalendu (Barun Chanda) offers…