For long years, the rest of India and the Western world identified Bengali cinema with either the pain and poverty of Satyajit Ray's pathbreaking Pather Panchall or with the strong political celluloid dramas of Mrinal Sen and Ritwick Ghatak. Not without reason too, given the themes that permeated films of that generation (even though it ignores the fact that most of Ray's films did not deal with poverty). But with the changing socio-political situation of West Bengal, as also in the rest of India, by the 1990s the audience had begun to move away from topics of social discontent. Their concerns now had more to do with the onslaught of a consumerist society, and to represent this angst, a new brand of avante garde Bengali filmmakers zoomed into the scene.
The turning point may have come in 1994 with Unishe April. Bengali moviegoers, fed up with the diet of 'intellectualese' in the 'art movies', and weary of the shoddy tales in the 'commercial' ones, suddenly discovered in former adman Rituparno Ghosh a director capable of representing the society they lived in. Themes of feminism, male chauvinism, modernity and consumerism, all find play in his movies. Unishe April was breaking new ground in its exploration of the love-hate relationship between a celebrity single mother and her misunderstood daughter through events on the death anniversary of the girl's father.
Ghosh did a repeat with his second offering, Dahan. Released in 1998, the film opens with a horrific molestation attempt on the beautiful wife of a junior city executive on the streets of Calcutta. While the ruffians beat up the husband senseless, the wife is rescued by another young woman, a school teacher, who is promptly made a 'hero' by the media. What looks like a tragedy averted, however, soon snowballs into a complex drama, causing upheavals in the conservative, middle and upper middle class families to which the two young women belong. As the film progresses, the masks of the progressive Bengali facade peel off, and, in what is the first depiction of marital rape in a Bengali film, the husband gives vent to his anger and frustration by raping his wife.
Rather than focusing on the perils of the jungle that is the modern city, Ghosh takes the battles of the sexes from the streets to the tranquil world of a traditional Bengali family. Dahan was a box office hit, and this despite the lack of staple ingredients of the regular potboiler. Both Unishe April and Dahan not only won national and international awards, but more importantly, the films marked the return to the theaters of the discerning audience who had stayed away from Bollywood imitations and other ludicrous excesses.