The Home & The World Today

Nobel laureat Rabīndranāth Ṭhākur’s 1916 novel Gharē Bāirē tells the story of a tragic love triangle between a zamīndār (landowner), his wife through an arranged marriage, and a friend of his, a revolutionary active in the Svadēśī Movement of boycotts against foreign goods. Bengal cinema’s mainspring, Satyajit‍ Rāẏ, filmed this classic in 1984 with a slight proto-feminist touch.

Actress-turned-auteur Aparṇā Sēn rigorously adapted the story to the here and now, making the husband an online writer-editor investigating Hindu nationalism (based on the assassination of female journalist-author Gaurī Laṅkēś) and his much younger wife, a dalit, while his friend now is a student activist who turned from extreme left to extreme right. Thus the original grand bourgeois tale of emotional emancipation is transformed into an unflinching look at contemporary political miasma. Sēn, Indian’s most important female filmmaker, demonstrates once again her enormous artistic versatility as well as her unwavering moral and ethical convictions.

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