Failed Masculinities : The Men in Satyajit Ray’s Films

Since he was dealing with a patriarchal society, his feminine portrayals are overlaid with a sense of what is socially desirable for a democratic independent nation, while his men are entirely products of his detached yet incisive observation.

In his career as a filmmaker, Satyajit Ray consistently created characters that he adapted from literature, often novels written after 1947. One therefore recognises in his films Indians from the post-Independence era, members of the middle-class intelligentsia conscious of their worth as subjects of the Nehruvian nation. We can see them as models for the kind of educated citizenry that newly independent India was producing, as suggested by film critics such as Pauline Kael in her review of Aranyer Din Ratri (1970) in The New Yorker. Categorising these characters and relating them to the changing milieu is what Failed Masculinities sets out to do. The rationale behind the book is the argument that Ray’s portrayal of men paints a picture of India’s trajectory, from the colonial period to contemporary times. Ray brought in a certain kind of detachment to his study of men, an approach that differed from the one he employed for his women characters.