www.thecontour.org © The Contour Volume 5, Issue 3 & 4 ISSN: 2349-6398 Website: www.thecontour.org E-mail:
[email protected] Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TCJournal2014 Twitter: twitter.com/thecontour2014 January & April, 2019 Editor-in-Chief Dr. Susanta Kumar Bardhan Cover Designing & Formatting Suman Saha Publisher Dr. Susanta Kumar Bardhan, Suri, Birbhum, 731101, West Bengal, India 2 VOLUME 5 || ISSUE 3 & 4 For Push Notification: The Contour powered by Telegram January & April, 2019 To download the Lite version for the Android Click Here. www.thecontour.org Absence of the Real from the Reel: Politics of Exclusion and Cinematic Aloofness for the Dalit Cause in Popular Bengali Films of Recent Decades Probhat Chandra Hazra Junior Research Fellow Dept. of English, Visva-Bharati Abstract The construction of a homogeneous national identity through the filmic narratives has been one of the most persistent tropes of the Indian cinematic culture for a long time now. The popular Hindi cinema in particular has made a conscious attempt to appeal the elite bourgeois imagination and thus prepared a field for creating certain stereotypes. The portrayal of the English educated, masculine-romantic hero as true ‘Indian’ national, often failed to grasp the essence of a pluralistically constructed nation like India. Now, my paper would look into the curious case of 21st Century Bengali cinema which has a visible inclination towards the attributes and vogues of poplar Hindi film. This Kolkata-centric regional film industry with a huge number of annual releases of mindless commercials and a parallel art-house movie-making, addresses chiefly the complexities of romantic love and urban crisis to gratify the taste of its upper caste/class spectators.