Nostalgia for the Light: Afterlives of Left Radicalism in Mrinal Sen’s Films

This essay argues that Mrinal Sen’s cinema functions as an affective archive of the twentieth-century Bengali left and offers a rich site for thinking about political mimesis and film, the cinematic production of solidarity and the relationship between nostalgia and critique. Emphasising Sen’s formative encounter with the radicalism and internationalism of the 1940s left cultural movement spearheaded by the Indian People’s Theatre Association, it approaches his films through the prisms of affect and cinematic theatricality, in contrast to accounts that emphasise their cerebral, acerbic or analytical qualities. Through historically grounded close readings of Chorus , Padatik , Akaler Sandhaney and Mahaprithibi , it shows how Sen’s theatrical use of gesture, song, sound, mise en scène, temporal layering and intertextual resonances activates the affective force of leftist pasts, unsettles easy oppositions between nostalgia and critique, and creates a sense of embodied lingering with a vanished world of left radicalism. In exploring this embodied lingering as a force of political mimesis that can move viewers to an affective engagement with the past and its unrealised possibilities, the essay makes a case for considering political cinema not merely as a vehicle of argument but also as a generator of sensuous connections and emotional intensities.