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Carnal Knowledge: Visuality and the Modern in Charulata

Carnal Knowledge: Visuality and the Modern in Charulata another), but rather to insist upon the agrammaticality of both the experiences of being modern and their narrativization. To redirect Eagleton's words from above, if in the deep night of modernity everybody looks the same, a materialist analysis must take on board the messiness and incommensurable aspects of distinguishing, perhaps in the dark, the ruptures and syntheses produced in the encounter between a putatively universal grammar of subjectivity and its multiple, historically specific variations." In such an analysis, the sites and signs of a specifically modern consciousness are articulated in the relay between a particular cultural predicament, sedimented ideologies requiring contestation and revision, as well as systems of production and reception which are governed by a contingent (rather than global) logic of subject predication.' An example of such an articulation, and one I wish to pursue here, relates to historical representations of modern Bengali femininity and its reformulation in the cinema of Satyajit Ray. My contention is that Ray's appropriation of historical and literary images of Bengali modernity-especially with regard to "the woman question"-produces a wholesale reinscription of the past into the contemporary framework of cinema in the global system." I shall focus on the film Charulata (1964) http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Camera Obscura Duke University Press

Carnal Knowledge: Visuality and the Modern in Charulata

Ganguly, Keya
Camera Obscura , Volume 13 (1 37) – Jan 1, 1996
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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 1996 by Camera Obscura
ISSN
1529-1510
eISSN
1529-1510
DOI
10.1215/02705346-13-1_37-155
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

another), but rather to insist upon the agrammaticality of both the experiences of being modern and their narrativization. To redirect Eagleton's words from above, if in the deep night of modernity everybody looks the same, a materialist analysis must take on board the messiness and incommensurable aspects of distinguishing, perhaps in the dark, the ruptures and syntheses produced in the encounter between a putatively universal grammar of subjectivity and its multiple, historically specific variations." In such an analysis, the sites and signs of a specifically modern consciousness are articulated in the relay between a particular cultural predicament, sedimented ideologies requiring contestation and revision, as well as systems of production and reception which are governed by a contingent (rather than global) logic of subject predication.' An example of such an articulation, and one I wish to pursue here, relates to historical representations of modern Bengali femininity and its reformulation in the cinema of Satyajit Ray. My contention is that Ray's appropriation of historical and literary images of Bengali modernity-especially with regard to "the woman question"-produces a wholesale reinscription of the past into the contemporary framework of cinema in the global system." I shall focus on the film Charulata (1964)

Journal

Camera Obscura – Duke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 1996

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