An Actress in Her Time

Karuna Banerjee (1919-2001), best known for her memorable performance as Sarbajaya the mother in the first two parts of Satyajit Ray's Apu Triology - Pather Panchali and Aparajito - went on to act in a few more films, including two more by Ray, one by Mrinal Sen, and an unfinished piece by Ritwik Ghatak. In her essays and reviews collected here for the first time, she comes through as a perceptive critic of the cinema and TV of her time, a sensitive chronicler of the making of Pather Panchali, a different kind of filmmaking altogether, and a liberal thinker reacting to the major social and political events of her time. She defines her position on these issues with exemplary clarity and an uncompromising honesty. And through it all runs an actress's confident sense of times and space, wich wiith unusual insights.