COSAS member Rochona Majumdar’s 2021 book, Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Post-Colony, was announced as a contender for the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) Prize. The book is one of six on this year’s shortlist from which the winner will be selected.

Majumdar is a professor of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and Cinema and Media Studies. Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Post-Colony is her third book preceded by Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal (2009) and Writing Postcolonial History (2010).

The association website praises Majumdar’s new work calling it a “powerful and persuasive new study…[that] produces a richly nuanced account of the aesthetic, intellectual, and historiographic ambitions of the three directors [it explores], offering tour-de-force analyses of their films, including both the more familiar (Ghatak’s Cloud-Capped Star, Ray’s Apu trilogy) and the less studied (Sen’s Calcutta trilogy, Ray’s city films).”

The book can be purchased here and more information on the MSA Prize can be found here.

Congratulations to Professor Majumdar on this achievement!