Mrinal Sen obituary. Acclaimed Bengali film-maker who became one of Indian cinema’s most probing recorders of the country’s social fabric

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Bhuvan Shome, 1969, directed by Mrinal Sen, is a shrewd comedy about a bureaucrat widower who falls for a village girl. Photograph: Mrinal Sen Productions/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock
▼ For most people, Indian films mean Bollywood – rigidly formulaic Hindi-language musicals – but for others they mean exquisite art movies, mainly produced in Kolkata in the Bengali language. The latter industry, which came to be known as parallel cinema, is exemplified by the work of the near contemporaries Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen.
Sen, who has died aged 95, benefited from the newly independent Bengali cinema after Ray, with his 1955 film Pather Panchali, proved it was possible to work outside the commercial system. Yet Sen, unlike Ray, did not restrict himself to Bengali, but made films in Oriya (Odia) and Telugu, as well as in Hindi.
A Marxist, Sen became one of Indian cinema’s most probing recorders of the country’s social fabric, in opposition to Ray’s European humanism. However, although his films attack the poverty and exploitation in Indian society, they are never worthy or simply didactic because of his often experimental style. Though few of Sen’s films gained wide distribution in the west, they won prizes at several festivals, including special jury prizes for In Search of Famine (1981) at Berlin and The Case Is Closed (1982) at Cannes.
He was born into a Hindu family in Faridpur, East Bengal (now Bangladesh), the son of Dinesh and Saraju Sen, and studied physics in Kolkata, before becoming a freelance journalist. From 1943 to 1947, he was involved with the Indian People’s Theatre Association, sponsored by the Communist  party of India. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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dushazmi

She lived till 95, great inspiration for our gen.