"The fruits of independence": Satyajit Ray, Indian nationhood and the spectre of empire

Challenging the longstanding consensus that Satyajit Ray's work is largely free of ideological concerns and notable only for its humanistic richness, this article shows with reference to representations of British colonialism and Indian nationhood that Ray's films and stories are marked deeply and consistently by a distinctively Bengali variety of liberalism. Drawn from an ongoing biographical project, it commences with an overview of the nationalist milieu in which Ray grew up and emphasizes the preoccupation with colonialism and nationalism that marked his earliest unfilmed scripts. It then shows with case studies of Kanchanjangha (1962), Charulata (1964), First Class Kamra (First-Class Compartment, 1981), Pratidwandi (The Adversary, 1970), Shatranj ke Khilari (The Chess Players, 1977), Agantuk (The Stranger, 1991) and Robertsoner Ruby (Robertson's Ruby, 1992) how Ray's mature work continued to combine a strongly anti-colonial viewpoint with a shifting perspective on Indian nationhood and an unequivocal commitment to cultural cosmopolitanism. Analysing how Ray articulated his ideological positions through the quintessentially liberal device of complexly staged debates that were apparently free, but in fact closed by the scenarist/director on ideologically specific notes, this article concludes that Ray's reputation as an all-forgiving, ‘everybody-has-his-reasons’ humanist is based on simplistic or even tendentious readings of his work

‘A Nation on the Move': The Indian Constitution, Life Writing and Cosmopolitanism

The Indian Constitution (IC) has been considered in terms of its intertextuality with preceding colonial documents such as the Government of India Act 1935. This essay relocates the IC in intertextual relationships with anti-colonial autobiographies and texts such as Gandhi's Hind Swaraj, showing the parallels between the way they dramatise self-rule and mix global, Indian and regional levels of identity. Both the IC and these texts are marked by processes of transnational and internal dialogue, and reflect transnational aspects of Indian print culture and the subject positions it gave rise to. Widening the discursive sites of the IC to include anti-colonial autobiographies raises questions about the IC as a species of autobiography itself, and it also gives us another perspective on the tensions within the IC, showing how the conflict between liberty and power is manifested in its linguistic cosmopolitanism and its approach to translation. Constitutions embody the aspirations of a nation's citizens, and the IC's verbal skills grade and structure these aspirations, plotting them along a spectrum of possible futures and grounding them in a variety of pasts. This concern with temporality has a parallel in some anti-colonial autobiographies where the consciousness of time is particularly acute. Finally, both the IC and Indian anti-colonial life writing can be seen as instances of South Asian literary modernity in terms of the style of their creative choices.</p