In the last decade or so, Bengali cinema experienced a sudden revival, demanding an analysis of recent texts as well as the reason for their success. Analysis of contemporary trends in Bengali cinema will show that contemporary Bengali films are successful because they deliberately evoke nostalgia by retelling told stories, and recapturing the atmosphere and stylistic peculiarities of old Bengali cinema through the postmodern strategies of intertextuality, repetition, parody, and pastiche. I argue that postmodern nostalgia, as it is employed in contemporary Bengali films, is not just a mood, or feeling, or affect, but a trope that is carefully employed to elicit particular responses from the Bengali audience. I argue that it is through the trope of postmodern nostalgia that Bengali cinema engages with the past and challenges our understanding of time, place and reality, thereby making possible new critical investigations of history and memory.

This is a work in progress presented by Dhrubaa Mukherjee. Dhrubaa is a second year doctoral student in the Department of English at Texas A&M University whose research emphasis is on Contemporary South Asian Literature and Culture, Indian Cinema, and Postcolonial, Transnational, and Feminist Discourses. Dhrubaa is particularly interested in the recent trends in contemporary Bengali cinema.