WONDER AND THE CHILDHOOD IMAGINARIES OF SATYAJIT RAY

Satyajit Ray and the Sense of Wonder Conference, University of California, Santa Barbara,

October 2023.

A consideration of Satyajit Ray’s work through the analytic of wonder is bound to entangle the figure of the child. Ray’s cinematic children are commonly celebrated as privileged conduits to wonder, enabling audiences to experience wonder “through their eyes.” To regard wonder thus—as an encounter at the edge of knowledge and experience—closely aligns it with the realm of childhood. Yet this instantiation of wonder naturalizes developmental logics of childhood that, in turn, authorize other narratives of “growing up,” such as trajectory of nationhood and modernity. As such, wonder’s political purchase is easily coopted. In this paper, I identify and explore these pitfalls of wonder in the reception of Ray’s work and propose alternative interpretive pathways that highlight wonder cultivated through play with temporality and memory in his work. I argue that to take Ray’s presumed privileged relationship to the world of childhood as an element of his legacy requires disambiguating those interpretive tendencies that read childhood conservatively from those that invite more adventurous imaginations of the child.