Summary
A prodigal son, swaddled in tweed and hubris, sails back to the Ganges-soaked courtyards of his forebears, his mind still crackling with the voltaic after-shocks of London salons. Expecting rose-petal processions, he instead collides with the lacquered orthodoxy of uncles who read marriage contracts like stock ledgers and aunts who treat desire as a communicable sin. In the hush of oil-lamp evenings he proselytizes free-love axioms learned beneath foggy streetlamps, only to watch every syllable ricochet off the zamindar’s marble busts. His heart, calibrated for sonnets, is forcibly synced to the arrhythmic drum of dowry negotiations. When he pursues a neighbor’s doe-eyed daughter—her laughter still ring-fenced by purdah—her dowry-minded father brandishes the ancestral will like a sabre. The film’s pulse quickens into a carnival of mime, tabla slaps, and iris-shot ridicule: the Anglophile dandy, once peacock-proud, is reduced to a stammering supplicant clutching wilted roses in the monsoon. Yet every humiliation is double-exposed with the wry smile of the satirist behind the camera, who loves the fool too much to merely flay him. By the time the rejected hero boards the same steamer that brought him home, the riverbank does not cheer; it merely folds him into its humid indifference, leaving behind a civilization caught between the corset of tradition and the corsair of modernity.
Synopsis
This famous satire contrasts conservative Bengali culture with that of the colonial elite. It is the story of a young Indian who returns to his native land after a long absence. He is so mightily impressed with his foreign training that, at his parental home, he startles everybody with his quixotic notions of love and matrimony.
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