Between Light and Silence: Aparna Sen on the language of cinema

Time may have turned her into a towering name in Indian cinema, but Aparna Sen remains, at heart, a seeker — restless, questioning, and deeply human. In an intimate evening of conversation at the Oxford Bookstore, the filmmaker spoke with Suman Ghosh, Kalyan Ray, and moderator Raju Raman about the craft, conscience, and contradictions that have shaped her creative world.

Sen traced her long journey — from her early years in front of the camera to the layered, reflective storytelling that has defined her work as a director. “I’ve never made films to preach,” she said, her voice steady and deliberate. “I make films because something disturbs me. I need to share that disturbance. I’m not a preacher, I’m an artist.”

That disturbance, she admitted, often becomes the seed of her stories. Ghare Baire Aaj, for instance, was born out of the unease she felt after journalist Gauri Lankesh’s death. “It was as if my idea of India was changing before my eyes,” she recalled. “I turned to Tagore’s novel because it echoed my own anxieties about the times we live in.”

Her words revealed a filmmaker whose gaze is both intimate and expansive. Speaking of 36 Chowringhee Lane, her first film as a director, Sen recalled knowing every sound and shadow of Kolkata. “Cinema isn’t just dialogue or plot,” she said. “It can be a hand lying in a shaft of light — and that alone can speak volumes.”

Kalyan Ray, her husband and creative companion, reflected on her artistic instinct — that fine balance between “the inner eye where creation begins” and the sharp awareness of the world outside.

Asked whether filmmakers must take a political stand, Sen responded with her trademark nuance. Some films, she said, come from moral urgency — like Arshinagar or Ghare Baire Aaj — but her goal has never been to deliver answers, only to ask the right questions.

Even after decades behind the camera, Sen confessed that she approaches every project “as a first-timer.” Perhaps that’s what keeps her cinema alive — a refusal to arrive, a commitment to keep searching.