About the Book: Woman at the Window: The Material Universe of Rabindranath
Tagore Through the Eyes of Satyajit Ray
Cinematic conventions tend to be embedded in the patriarchal. The controlling
look is always male, with women subjected to the gaze-voyeuristic,
investigative, looking for titillation. Yet, Satyajit Rays cinema strove to
steer clear of this. None of Rays women protagonists-most memorably in his
adaptations of Tagores stories but true of other films too-can be reduced to a
cliché. They defy every imaginable stereotyping. Woman at the Window attempts a
completely new way of looking at Rays films in general, and his adaptations of
Tagore in particular, through an