Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses Agnidev Chatterjee’s Charulata 2011 - a recent Bengali film that explores cyber romance - as an example of a glocalized South Asian narrative, arguing that it shows the impact of global modes of communication (emails) on individuals and their personal relationships.

Paper long abstract:

A lonely wife in Kolkata and a bachelor in London have a virtual affair, but are forced to re-think their relationship when they discover he is her brother-in-law. Charulata 2011 is an ingenious post-millennial adaptation of Tagore's novella, Nashtanirh (The Broken Nest), already immortalized by Satyajit Ray in his classic, Charulata (1964). This intertextuality, especially with Ray, lends an added dimension to the film, allowing Chatterjee to contrast two modernities in Bengal - the colonial and glocal - over the course of a century.

Both these women gain temporary respite from their suffocating marriage through an affair, but their circumstances are vastly different. While Tagore/Ray's heroine (like Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary and Lady Chatterley in the Continent) could only bond with a man she knew, technology expands Charulata's choice in 2011. She romances the strange and the unknown - an unseen tall dark stranger with a gift for words. While the 19th century Bengali heroine had to reign in her erotic impulse, her 21st century counterpart submits to it, though with an overwhelming sense of guilt. But there are similarities too - both are childless homemakers; have a literary sensibility; and though a 100 years apart, in both their cases, the lover eventually departs, and duty ultimately wins over passion, bringing back the duly chastened wife to the wronged husband.

The paper proposes to read Charulata 2011 as a dramatization of a glocalized South Asian narrative, where the protagonist negotiates an uneasy juxtaposition of a globalized outlook on the world with the entrapment of age-old social obligations in her self.