Book excerpt: How Aparna Sen’s cinema is localised in Bengali culture but also universal

A central influence in Aparna Sen’s life perhaps has been that of her father, the celebrated critic and filmmaker Chidananda Dasgupta, whose writings on cinema were not only seminal but also remain influential in the world of film criticism in India. One of her father’s closest friends was Satyajit Ray, with whom Dasgupta would go on to found the Calcutta Film Society in 1947. Ray himself famously forged a new path in filmmaking and radicalized Bengali cinema’s images, symbols and language.

The trio of Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen undoubtedly influenced Aparna’s choice to become not only a filmmaker but also one with a distinct cinematic language. Her years as an actor no doubt helped hone her skills in directing films, making it easier for her to understand when an actor had problems with certain movements or lines. Says Sen: ‘It also helped me in writing dialogue, by acting lines out in my head before I actually wrote anything down.

Of Ray’s cinema, Chidananda Dasgupta wrote, ‘…neither in content nor in style did Ray’s films owe anything at all to Bengali, indeed Indian, cinema traditions…’ Arguably, then, Ray ushered in another cinematic tradition that combined the modern with the traditional, the global...

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