Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye carries echoes of Satyajit Ray’s 1971 Feluda thriller Sonar Kella A book cover (left) and film poster for Sonar Kella Though I rarely read beyond Bengali novels in recent years, I was drawn to Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye because it seemed to reverse the central premise of Satyajit Ray’s Sonar Kella. A beloved film for many Bengalis of…
Tag: Satyajit Ray
Ritwik Ghatak at 100: The Many Re-incarnations of Ritwik in Bollywood
From Subhash Ghai to “Bidhu” Vinod Chopra to Sanjay Leela Bhansali, the unlikely ‘filmi’ students of the Film and Television Institute of India where Ghatak taught for all of two years, keep his legacy alive in unmissable ways. There is also Payal Kapadia, as non-Bollywood as it can get, who mentions his influence on her work The film lovers’ conventional…
100 Years of Mrinal Sen
From using real footage to voice-overs by Amitabh Bachchan, the legendary middle name in the Ray-Sen-Ghatak trinity set many trends
Seeing the World in A Grain of Bengal
Three years after independence from 200 years of British rule, a debutant film-maker who came of age in colonial India started making a film in Bengali about a village in Bengal. Satyajit Ray worked almost entirely in Bengali, building a bridge “between his beloved Bengal and the rest of the world”
How Satyajit Ray and 80-year-old Kolkata firm Signet Press changed publishing in India
The Calcutta publisher that published the first edition of Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India in 1946, is known for outstanding cover art and illustration, clean layouts, stylish typefaces
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
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…
Indian cinema legend Soumitra Chatterjee’s death spotlights end of art film era
Chatterjee worked closely with late Oscar-winning director Satyajit Ray, one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Worked his entire life in the Bengali film industry, eschewing the more lucrative Bollywood Noted Hollywood director Martin Scorsese once said the four most influential auteurs of the 20th century were India’s Satyajit Ray, Japan’s Akira Kurosawa, Italy’s Frederico Fellini and…