Mrinal Sen’s Ruins: Uncanny Encounters and Inscrutable Women in Khandhar and Antareen

This article focuses on two of Mrinal Sen’s later films, Khandhar (1983) and Antareen (1993), to argue that a ‘ruin aesthetic’ coalesces in his oeuvre in response to the political transformations of his time. While most scholars read Sen’s family dramas as a retreat from the radical politics of the 1960s and 1970s, I suggest, instead, that, going beyond discourses of disappointment and despair often associated with the collapse of the global Left, Sen’s late films reorient us to a new articulation of political via his figuration of ruins. Sen imbues the debris of monumental physical structures with a different conceptualisation of history and the past. In the spatiotemporal configuration of the ruin, history is palpable only as fragments, but these shards potentiate a different future. The figure of the woman – aligned with the ruin – is a key vector through which old certitudes are abandoned and new possibilities imagined in the films in question.