Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures : Film and History in the Postcolony

Rochona Majumdar examines key works of Indian art cinema to demonstrate how film emerged as a mode of doing history and that, in so doing, it anticipated some of the most influential insights of postcolonial thought. She analyzes the films of Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak as well as a host of film society publications. Co-Winner, 2023 Chidananda Dasgupta Award for the Best Writing on Cinema, Chidananda Dasgupta Memorial Trust Shortlisted, 2022 MSA Book Prize, Modernist Studies Association Longlisted, 2022 Moving Image Book Award, Kraszna-Krausz Foundation The project of Indian art cinema began in the years following independence in 1947, at once evoking the global reach of the term "art film" and speaking to the aspirations of the new nation-state. In this pioneering book, Rochona Majumdar examines key works of Indian art cinema to demonstrate how film emerged as a mode of doing history and that, in so doing, it anticipated some of the most influential insights of postcolonial thought. Majumdar details how filmmakers as well as a host of film societies and publications sought to foster a new cinematic culture for the new nation, fueled by enthusiasm for a future of progress and development. Good films would help make good citizens: art cinema would not only earn global prestige but also shape discerning individuals capable of exercising aesthetic and political judgment. During the 1960s, however, Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak—the leading figures of Indian art cinema—became disillusioned with the belief that film was integral to national development. Instead, Majumdar contends, their works captured the unresolvable contradictions of the postcolonial present, which pointed toward possible, yet unrealized futures. Analyzing the films of Ray, Sen, and Ghatak, and working through previously unexplored archives of film society publications, Majumdar offers a radical reinterpretation of Indian film history. Art Cinema and India's Forgotten Futures offers sweeping new insights into film's relationship with the postcolonial condition and its role in decolonial imaginations of the future. "In the years following Indian independence in 1947, art cinema was seen as central to the development and future of the new nation. Filmmakers like Satyajit Ray came to the fore as did a host of film societies and publications aimed at promoting a new kind of film culture that would offer a distinct alternative to the popular movies coming out of Bombay. Indian art film would not only bring the new nation international prestige but would create responsible and discerning individuals capable of exercising and combining aesthetic and political judgments. Good films, it was believed, could produce good citizens. However, as Rochona Majumdar argues, the liberal faith of progress championed by Indian elites in the 1950s and early 1960s would soon unravel as the promises of postcolonial development, justice, and prosperity receded, giving rise to civil unrest and political violence. Rather than promoting a progressive view of history, the three leading Indian filmmakers of the period - Mrinal Sen, Ritwik Ghatak, and Satyajit Ray -- communicated a sense of a postcolonial present characterized by multiple contradictory possibilities. Ray, Sen, and Ghatak's disillusionment from their prior commitment to filmmaking as integral to the development of India anticipated a new way of conceiving ideas of postcolonial history and time that anticipated later works by historians and theorists. Ultimately, these three filmmakers stand out for acknowledging that the postcolonial consensus was in disarray, and with it art cinema's previous certainty about its pedagogic, political, and historic purpose"-- Provided by publisher