More than a century after his birth, Mrinal Sen remains startlingly contemporary.
Born on May 14, 1923, in Faridpur, the legendary Bengali filmmaker and screenwriter did not merely make films; he dissected societies.
Through cinema, he examined power, class, inequality, identity and the uneasy promises of modernity with a sharpness that still feels urgent today.
Even after his birth centenary in 2023, Sen’s films continue to provoke, disturb and demand reflection across generations.
What makes Sen remarkable is not simply his cinematic language, but the persistence of his questions.
The world around him has changed -- colonial rule has ended, economies have globalised, cities have transformed -- yet the anxieties he explored remain unresolved.
His cinema continues to resonate because the postcolonial condition he portrayed never fully disappeared.
It merely changed shape.
Among the recurring concerns in Sen’s body of work, the crisis of postcolonial identity stands out as one of the most enduring.
Sen belonged to a generation that witnessed the transfer of political power after colonialism, but also saw how independence did not automatically lead to psychological or cultural freedom.
Colonial institutions survived in new forms. Bureaucratic systems remained intact.
The English-speaking “bhadralok” (gentleman) middle class continued to define sophistication through imitation of Western norms, often distancing itself from local realities in the process.
In Sen’s cinematic universe, capitalism without justice, authoritarian structures, weak civic consciousness and a restless middle class combine to produce what can only be called a postcolonial hangover.
Though rooted in Calcutta, his films transcend geography.
The uncertainty, alienation and fractured identity he captured belong not only to India, but to nearly every formerly colonised society still negotiating the meaning of freedom.
Few films expose this contradiction as powerfully as Calcutta 71.
In one memorable sequence, a bourgeois man at an elite gathering proudly declares: “I can see new India is being born.”
Sen immediately cuts to the birth of a poor child on the street.
The contrast is devastating.
The promise of a “new” nation appears hollow, little more than old inequality wearing modern clothes.
Independence, in Sen’s view, risks becoming merely a transition from one hierarchy to another.
The irony echoes the words of Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks: “After having been a slave of the white man, he enslaves himself.”
A quieter but equally profound critique emerges in Bhuvan Shome.
The film’s titular bureaucrat exists inside a rigid world of authority, rules and institutional modernity, detached from ordinary life.
Yet his encounter with a young rural woman slowly unsettles this isolation.
Through simplicity, humour and proximity to the land, Sen offers an alternative vision of modernity -- one rooted not in imitation, but in human connection and local experience.
Perhaps Sen’s most direct attack on colonial mimicry arrives in Interview.
A young man desperately searches for a Western suit to attend a job interview, believing it necessary to appear respectable and employable.
In the oppressive Calcutta heat, the image becomes almost absurd: a sweating body trapped inside borrowed expectations.
By the film’s final moments, when the protagonist violently tears apart a mannequin dressed in Western clothing, the act feels symbolic -- not merely rebellion, but an attempt at decolonising identity itself.
One of Sen’s greatest strengths was his refusal to provide comfortable conclusions.
His films rarely offered moral certainty or easy solutions. Instead, they constructed situations that forced audiences to confront contradictions they would rather avoid.
In Sen’s cinema, the postcolonial crisis is never solely political or economic; it is psychological, cultural and deeply personal.
That is precisely why he remains relevant today.
In the age of globalization, the language of influence has changed, but the pressure to imitate persists.
Through education, language, media, fashion and lifestyle, postcolonial societies continue to negotiate the tension between authenticity and aspiration.
Sen understood this struggle long before it became fashionable academic discourse.
His films continue to ask a question that remains painfully unresolved in much of the modern world: can a society truly become free if its imagination is still colonised?
