Tensions in Rural Bengal: Landlords, Planters and Colonial Rule

Abstract

From the weave of Ray’s variegated body of work, Ganguly isolates persistent threads of critique, noting that they coalesce around his treatment of those subjective and perceptual modes that were the most vulnerable and sensitive witnesses of Indian modernity’s productive violence: femininity and aurality. Ganguly’s discussion of the allegorical content of the female protagonists of Ray’s films (from Bimala in Ghare Bhaire to Charulata’s namesake, Devi’s Doya, and Mahanagar’s Arati) steers clear of the enervated trajectory routinely traced by critics of Indian cinema, who instrumentalize Indian women and film music as tropes for staging the antinomies of tradition and modernity. Instead, she shows how the materiality of Ray’s audiovisual choices manifests film’s own structuring role in the predicament of feminine desire on the cusp of modernity, suspended between the embodied temporalities of patriarchy and capitalism, the stultification of aristocratic leisure and the alienation of modern labour. Some of the most beautiful points in the book are those that explore Ray’s quotidian and yet dialectically charged confrontations between the forms (classical music), subjects (middleclass women, the theatrical elite) and technologies (the lorgnette, the gramophone) that have been reified by and subsumed within a visual regime of which mainstream cinema is both a protagonist and a product. It is by illuminating the unexpected, counterintuitive and ultimately open-ended alliances forged by modernity’s uneven supersessions, Ganguly argues, that Ray’s practice functions as an Adornian immanent critique of social conditions, as well as a vehicle for redeeming physical reality, in Kracauer’s sense. By recuperating overlooked aspects of Ray’s cinematic practice as sites of dialectical inquiry rather than traces of authorial intention or signature style, Ganguly invests the exhausted form of the single-author study with a new political significance. In both form and execution, her book demonstrates a rare commitment to precisely the kinds of utopian thinking that avant-gardism has sought to recuperate. Ganguly’s readings are in fact rich in potential in ways that she does not adequately exploit: although she shies away from engaging with contemporary trends in film theory, her commitment to thinking dialectically about film’s indexicality has much to contribute to the current surge of interest in documentary and reality based genres. This resurgence of realism at the moment of film’s own displacement by technologies of digital manipulation bears all the hallmarks of the moment of cinematic emergence to which Ganguly’s retrospective study is devoted, and begs the very critique she brings to bear on realism, one that is urgently relevant for combating the ongoing resurrection of referentiality as an epistemology of the Third World. Ganguly’s is a book for our times, for she illustrates how postcoloniality can name a location through which to rejuvenate reflexive inquiry at a time when reflexivity seems to have lost its potency as a mode of critique.