Few directors have captured the pulse of a city with as much nuance and empathy as Satyajit Ray. While his earlier works, especially The Apu Trilogy, explored rural Bengal with lyrical realism, it was in the turbulent 1970s that Ray turned his gaze to urban Kolkata — a city seething with unemployment, political unrest and moral compromise. The result was the Calcutta Trilogy: Pratidwandi (The Adversary) (1970), Seemabaddha (Company Limited) (1971) and Jana Aranya (The Middleman) (1976). Together, these films form a bleak, unflinching portrait of a metropolis where dreams go to die, and where alienation becomes the defining emotion of its inhabitants.

Ray used the city of Kolkata not merely as a setting, but as a character — oppressive, indifferent, and at times, brutal. Through his disillusioned protagonists, cinematic techniques and evocative urban imagery, Ray constructed a narrative of urban alienation that remains strikingly relevant even today.

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Calcutta as a character

In the Calcutta trilogy, the city is far more than a backdrop; it is an active participant in the characters’ lives. Ray’s Kolkata is a landscape of decaying colonial mansions, overcrowded trams, shadowy alleys and impersonal office blocks. It is a city marked by its contradictions — one moment a haven for intellectual debate, the next a theatre of violence.

In Pratidwandi, the restless streets of Kolkata reflect the protagonist Siddhartha’s inner turmoil. Power cuts, political rallies and hospital queues become metaphors for a society on the brink of collapse. The city’s physical spaces — cramped tenements, dingy coffee houses and claustrophobic interview rooms — mirror the suffocating options available to the unemployed educated youth.

In Seemabaddha, Kolkata is seen through the sterile interiors of corporate offices and elite clubs. The city’s chaos is kept at bay by air-conditioned rooms and glass windows, but its moral decay seeps through nonetheless. The impersonal urban modernity contrasts sharply with the old-world values held by characters like Tutul, Shyamalendu’s sister-in-law, making the city a site of silent battles between conscience and ambition.

By the time of Jana Aranya, the city has become a place where survival demands moral compromise. Somnath, the protagonist, navigates through its crumbling mansions and soulless commercial hubs, each space reflecting his descent into ethical ambiguity.

The disillusioned protagonists

At the heart of each film is a male protagonist grappling with his place in a city that seems intent on breaking him.

Siddhartha (Pratidwandi) is an unemployed graduate caught between the revolutionary idealism of the Naxalite movement and the pragmatic survival strategies of his middle-class family. His alienation is both social and existential, as he finds himself disconnected from political ideologies, familial expectations, and personal desires.

Shyamalendu (Seemabaddha), in contrast, is a man who has seemingly conquered the city. A corporate executive on the cusp of a promotion, he embodies the upwardly mobile urbanite. Yet, his alienation is internal — a gnawing emptiness born of moral compromise and the mechanisation of human relationships. His climactic moral breakdown, witnessed by his idealistic sister-in-law, exposes the fragility of the urban success story.

Somnath (Jana Aranya), perhaps the most tragic of the three, represents the complete erosion of idealism. Forced to start a dubious business to support his family, he eventually arranges a client’s visit to a prostitute, only to discover the girl is an old friend’s sister. His story is an acute illustration of how the city turns personal relationships into transactional deals.

Together, these protagonists chart a trajectory from youthful idealism to moral ambiguity to ethical collapse — each a casualty of a city that demands survival at any cost.

Alienation through cinematic technique

Ray’s formal choices in the trilogy are instrumental in conveying the protagonists’ alienation. In Pratidwandi, he employs handheld camera movements, jump cuts, and dream sequences to mirror Siddhartha’s restless mind and fractured reality. The city’s sounds — political slogans, ambulance sirens and impatient crowds — form a relentless auditory assault, intensifying the sense of suffocation.

In Seemabaddha, Ray opts for static, meticulously composed frames to reflect Shyamalendu’s rigid, hierarchical world. The corporate spaces are shot in cold, neutral tones, with characters often framed within doorways and windows, visually trapped by the structures of power.

Jana Aranya uses gritty, documentary-style realism, with location shooting in Kolkata’s lesser-seen bylanes, dilapidated offices and marketplaces. Ray’s sparse use of background score in this film makes the silences deafening, allowing the city’s natural soundscape to heighten Somnath’s growing moral unease.

The erosion of middle-class values

Perhaps the trilogy’s most searing commentary lies in its portrayal of the Bengali middle class — once the bastion of intellectualism and progressive values, now reduced to anxious survivors in a cutthroat city. Ray exposes the hypocrisy of a society that preaches morality but thrives on nepotism, opportunism and silent complicity.

Parents who once dreamed of respectable careers for their children now urge them to ‘adjust’ to any profession. Friends become competitors, and ideals are luxuries no one can afford. The city of Kolkata, in Ray’s vision, is a crucible where personal values are tested and inevitably corroded.

Satyajit Ray’s Calcutta trilogy remains one of Indian cinema’s most honest examinations of urban alienation. Through Siddhartha, Shyamalendu and Somnath, Ray captures the anxieties of a generation caught between fading traditions and an unforgiving modernity. The city of Kolkata, both oppressive and indifferent, becomes a mirror to their inner desolation.

Decades later, as cities around the world grapple with rising unemployment, political violence and corporate exploitation, the trilogy’s relevance endures. In the cracked walls of a crumbling mansion or the sterile glow of a corporate boardroom, Ray finds the universal story of human beings estranged from themselves — a story as urgent today as it was in the restless 1970s.