Satyajit Ray's Alien: Agantuk

Satyajit Ray's conception of an alien is almost like his idea of a Bengali male–a missing link between the childlike (that is, somewhat unformed) and the ridiculous (that is, somewhat uncouth). The validity of this observation will be at once manifest upon viewing Ray's sketch of "Bankubabu's Bandhu" ["Bankubabu's Friend"], a strange figure that is an amalgam of the stereotypical ghostly countenance and childlike character and naivete–to quote Ray himself, "a cross between a gnome and a famished refugee child ... {possessing] ... a kind of ethereal innocence" (Banerjee, 1996, 201; see also Mandal, 1999:116-29). A similar image of the "alien" seems to have influenced Ray's vision of a "non-resident Indian," the much maligned NRI, who in the 1980s exercised strong and strange emotions among Indians in general and Calcuttans in particular. The NRI became an object of envy for their wealth and of contempt for their imagined traitorous conduct, by fleeing their homeland and thereby depriving their socieity of their services. They also became an object of curiosity for their acquired foreign accents and a heightened sense of hygiene (recall the neglected tourist inquiring about the "cooking medium" in Jai Baba Felunath or the agantuk's request for a drink with "no ice"), in short, for their acquired "othernesss."