Sen @ 100: A Centennial Celebration of Mrinal Sen's Life and Work

Mrinal Sen (1923 – 2018) is one of the giants of world cinema. For the centenary of his birth, this conference brings scholars together with participants in Sen’s life and work to reflect on his radical remaking of film practice. Born in colonial India, Sen emerged as a central figure of Indian independent cinema in the 1960s and pursued a highly productive career in film until the 2000s. He is widely acknowledged as one of the founders of the New Indian Cinema (or Parallel Cinema) movement as well as a participant in the current of global Third Cinema. Sen’s work and life were inextricably entangled in the social and political turbulence and transformations of postcolonial India. His films are a unique experiment in multilayered representations of social difference and political turmoil that move far beyond a simplistic colonizer/colonized divide.

This day-long conference will include scholarly discussions of Sen’s cinema, reflections on his work and milieu by those who knew and worked with him, and two film screenings. This event has been organized in collaboration with Yale University.

Schedule:

10:30am: Coffee

11am: Introduction: Moira Fradinger (Yale University) and Sanghita Sen (University of Northumbria)

11:30am: Film Screening: Interview. Mrinal Sen. 1970

1:15pm: Lunch Break

1:45pm: Keynote Lecture: Sanghita Sen

3:30pm: Presentations and Discussion: Ben Baer (Princeton University) and Suvij Sudershan (Yale University)

5pm: Conversation with Suhasini Mulay (actor and director) and Kunal Sen (technologist and son of Mrinal and Gita Sen)

6pm: Film Screening: Suhasini Mulay, Bhopal: Beyond Genocide

7:20pm: Q&A, Closing Remarks

Participants:

Suhasini Mulay is a national award-winning actor of Indian cinema & Television and an award-winning documentary filmmaker and producer, Suhasini Mulay made her first media appearance in an advertisement for the Pears Soap as its model in 1965 when she was a High School student. This advertisement was instrumental in her debut in the main role in Mrinal Sen directed Bhuvan Shome in 1969 which is considered by the film historians as the inaugural film in the Indian Parallel Cinema movement.  She was preparing for her school leaving examination in 1968 when the film was shot. When the film was released and became a huge success, Suhasini was studying for a Diploma Program in agricultural technology at McGill University. After completing this Diploma, Suhasini switched to mass communication and signed up for the degree program at McGill majoring in Film, radio, and TV where she studied under the tutelage of the noted documentary filmmaker John Grierson. Grierson had a lasting impression on Suhasini which drove her to documentary filmmaking as a director rather than making feature films. After she came back to India, she assisted Satyajit Ray as the fourth assistant director during 1974-75 on Jana Aranya/The Middleman. She got involved with Mrigaya/The Royal Hunt, a film Mrinal Sen made in 1976 as assistant director. Over a career spanning five decades, she worked in numerous films and TV series in different Indian languages including over 60 documentaries. Her documentaries, namely An Indian Story, Bhopal: Beyond Genocide,  Chitthi, and  The Official Art Form won national awards in 1983, 1988, 1989, and 1998.

Kunal Sen is the son of Mrinal and Gita Sen. He completed graduate studies in Physics, after which he became interested in computer science which he studied at graduate level. He received a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Chicago. For the next 20 years he was involved with various aspects of digital technology, including designing electronic medical systems, writing technical books and, since 1999, heading the technology group at Encyclopedia Britannica. Since 2012 he has shifted his primary focus to making art. In 2023 he published the memoir Bondhu (Seagull Books), a personal account of his father Mrinal Sen’s life and work.

Sanghita Sen is an Assistant Professor of Film at Northumbria University, Newcastle, United Kingdom where she teaches practice-based and theoretical modules on Film and Television Programme. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University, India and a PhD in Film Studies from University of St Andrews, UK. Her first doctoral project was on mediatization of Hindutva ideology while her second doctoral project was on oppositional Indian cinema of the long 1960s in which she investigated film practices by Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, and Satyajit Ray. Her research interest includes, anticolonialism and decolonisation, Third Cinema, Indian political cinema, Bollywood & other regional popular cinema, Bengali cinema, mediatisation of Hindutva and ethno-nationalism, tricontinental film flow and international solidarity via creative practice, counter-archive and film curation/exhibition. She curates film programmes, publishes regularly and delivers invited lectures on above areas. Sanghita is also a practice-based researcher and a documentary filmmaker. She is currently working on a monograph on Indian Third Cinema and a feature length documentary on the Partition and Ritwik Ghatak. 

Moira Fradinger is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. She is the author of Binding Violence: Literary Visions of Political Origins (Stanford UP, 2010) and of Antígonas: Writing From Latin America (Oxford University Press, 2023). She has written articles on Latin American film and literature, and on the reception of classical tragedy in Latin America. She has completed the translation project Antígonas Anthology, consisting of six 20th century Latin American vernacular Antígona plays translated into English, from Haiti, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Mexico and Brazil. She has also translated poems and short stories from Spanish into English. Her current book projects are on contemporary Argentine gender debates, on Latin American Third Cinema, and on Insomnia. She has been awarded the Dahlem International Network Professorship for Gender Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, where she taught Gender Theory, and has received a Berlin Prize, spending a semester as a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany. In 2024, Professor Fradinger was awarded the American Comparative Literature Association’s prestigious René Wellek Prize for her book, Antigonas: Writing from Latin America.

Ben Baer is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where he also currently directs Princeton’s Program in South Asian Studies. He is the author of Indigenous Vanguards: Education, National Liberation, and the Limits of Modernism (Columbia University Press, 2019) and the translator from Bengali of Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s novel Hansuli Banker Upakatha (The Tale of Hansuli Turn, Columbia UP, 2011). His research encompasses literary and cultural dimensions of Communism in South Asia, Marxist theory and philosophy, postcolonial literature and theory. Professor Baer’s recent and forthcoming publications have addressed representations of the 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms in Delhi; the unexpected effects of the 1930s Meerut Communist Conspiracy Trial; and Marx’s account of “so-called primitive accumulation” in Capital.

Suvij Sudershan is a Ph.D. student in English and Film and Media Studies at Yale University. He holds an M.A. from McGill University, where his thesis focused on the depictions of small-towns in contemporary Indian novels. His current research focuses on the depictions of rural society in the modern novel, with a particular emphasis on South Asian vernacular and Global Anglophone writings. He is also interested in the international networks of Third Cinema. His work has been published in Cultural Critique and The Economic and Political Weekly.

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Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Program in South Asian Studies (OWNER), Center for Global India

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