The Stranger

A letter arrives at a middle-class house in Calcutta: the woman's uncle, who left home thirty-five years ago, writes that he is coming. He arrives. He says he is an ethnographer, that he has lived all over the world, that he has spent his life among tribal peoples. His hosts are fascinated and at the same time suspect he is after the inheritance. The questions turn steadily into an interrogation, and by the end civilisation itself is on the table. Satyajit Ray's last film; he died the following year. Utpal Dutt plays the stranger. It is generally read as Ray's closing statement about his own cinema and his own class.