Mrinal Sen

Mrinal Sen (1923- ) motion picture director noted for his biting social commentaries. Born in Faridpur, in what is now Bangladesh, Sen grew up in a middle-class Indian family. During the 1940s he studied physics at the University of Calcutta and became interested in the theories of German political philosopher Karl Marx. At this time he began to write film reviews. In 1943 Sen joined the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), a Communist-sponsored theater group that toured the countryside. Before embarking on his career as a filmmaker in 1956, Sen made a living as a teacher, a technician in a sound studio, and a salesman of patent medicines.

Sen’s early films address social and political problems in Bengal, a region that now comprises Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal. National acclaim came with his first film in the Hindi language, the comedy Bhuvan Shome (Mr. Shome, 1969). But he is best known for three films that form the Calcutta Trilogy: Interview (1971), Calcutta, ‘71 (1972), and Padatik (The Guerrilla Fighter, 1973), all set in the turmoil of a Communist uprising in Calcutta (now Kolkata) that began in the late 1960s.

Thereafter, Sen focused on shorter features set among the Calcutta middle class, such as Ek Din Pratidin (And Quiet Rolls the Day, 1979). Many of these films center on unexpected or embarrassing events that reveal the hypocrisies and anxieties of that class. Sen also made a much-discussed, self-critical film in this period, Akaler Sandhaney (In Search of Famine, 1980), in which a film crew descends upon a village for the purpose of reconstructing a famine that devastated Bengal in 1943 and thereby exposing the hardship of the people. Instead, the film crew only makes the villagers’ misery worse. His later films include Mahaprithivi (World Within, World Without, 1992) and The Confined (1994).