The Films of Adoor Gopalakrishnan: A Cinema of Emancipation

This first study of Adoor Gopalakrishnans feature films offers a compelling analysis of the socio-historical contexts of his work. Suranjan Ganguly examines how Keralas abrupt displacement from a princely feudal state into twentieth-century modernity has shaped Gopalakrishnans complex narratives about identity, selfhood and otherness, in which innocence is often at stake, and characters struggle with their consciences. Ganguly places the films within their larger frameworks of guilt and redemption in which the hope of emancipation moral, spiritual and creative is real and tangible.