Calcutta Through Different Lenses: Revisiting India in Jean Renoir’s The River and Satyajit Ray’s The Apu Trilogy

The Orientalist discourse has fostered a version of the East that, for ages, have seamlessly permeated into the various attempts of the West to portray the ‘Orient’. One such attempt is Jean Renoir’s “authentic” portrayal of India for a by-and-large Hollywood audience, The River (1951) shot entirely in Calcutta. Inspired by Renoir, Satyajit Ray presented his version of Calcutta through The Apu Trilogy (1955-’59) which was in stark contrast to Renoir’s portrayal of the city. This paper seeks to explore how Renoir and Ray portray two different Indias – one smeared with a colonial perspective while the other breaks out of the West-imposed binaries to offer something more tangible – and how these marked differences are reflected through their respective filmmaking processes.