Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the complementary relationship between the charismatic auteur and the role of the anthropologist in an ever-changing world, through the realist cinema and world vision of Satyajit Ray.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the concept of authorship in relation to the role of the anthropologist in the world, as manifested in the cinema of Satyajit Ray. Ray's marginality, working in between the artistic tradition of his Brahman family and the 'Bengali Renaissance', and his European 'humanitarianism', were seen either as contradictory, or as complementary, to his 'Indianess' (Cooper 2000: 74, among others) echoing the question of universalism in anthropology (Sen 1996). His visual style fused the aesthetics of European realism with evocative symbolic realism, based on classic Indian iconography and theory, which he incorporated in a self-reflective way into his film-making as the means of observing the human condition in a rapidly changing world. This unique amalgam of expression expanded over three periods of Bengali history, from the Indian declaration of Independence and the period of industrialization and secularization of the 1950s and 1960s, to the rise of nationalism and Marxism in the 1970s, followed by the rapid transformation of India in the 1980s. The paper will discuss each period with references to a number of selected films, focusing on memory, nostalgia, and self-reflection, as well as, disenchantment, disillusion, and alienation, during a period of rapid economic, social, and political change. Ray's films offer a historical record of this transformation, not only reflecting upon the changes in the collective consciousness of the society and the time they were produced, but also on the notion of authorship in itself, challenged in his last film Agantuk (The Stranger 1991) by the caricature of the lost uncle who suspiciously claims to be an 'anthropologist'.