Wednesday
14
October 2026
4:30 - 6:00 PM IST
Location
Room 004, School of Arts and Sciences
Central Campus
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Mrinal Sen and the “Enemy Within”
Rochona Majumdar
Professor
South Asian Languages and Civilizations, Cinema and Media Studies
University of Chicago
Speaker
Mrinal Sen (1923-2018) is remembered as one of the pioneers of the Indian New cinema, also known as the Indian New Wave, the name evoking questions of comparison with contemporary new waves elsewhere in the world such as France, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Senegal, Iran and other places. But in his later career, Sen broke away from many things we associate with new wave cinemas, including his own previous work. His commitment, he said, was to focus on the ‘enemy within.’ In this talk Majumdar explores the implications and resonances of Sen’s late career cinematic turn for his own times and ours.
Speaker
Rochona Majumdar
Rochona Majumdar is the George V. Bobrinskoy Professor in South Asian Languages and Civilizations, Cinema and Media Studies, and the College at The University of Chicago. Her books include Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures (2021), Writing Postcolonial History (2010), Marriage and Modernity (2009) and several edited volumes, most recently The Hindu/ Presidency College: Excellence and Exclusion (2026), co-edited with Sukanya Sarbadhikary and Upal Chakrabarti and a special issue on Mrinal Sen of the journal Bioscope (forthcoming) co-edited with Daniel Morgan.