This Mrinal Sen work became the first film to be banned in independent India in 1962 The Bengali film Neel Akasher Neeche, the second film directed by Mrinal Sen, is a marker of a time when it was considered unproblematic to cast a Bengali as a Chinese man and use make-up to pull his eyes into slits. But it is…
Tag: Mrinal Sen
Kharij: The Killing of a ‘Servant Boy’
Mrinal Sen’s clear-eyed unpeeling of the cruelty of the great Indian middle class A young, upper-middle class family, Anjan and Mamata Sen, hire a boy ‘servant’ not much older than their own son in 1980s Calcutta, administered by a Communist government, in the film Kharij. The ‘servant’ boy dies one night, possibly due to a gas leak in the kitchen,…