13th and 14th June 2026 | 14.30 IST onwards | 04 hours per day (with one break of 20 min.)
Participant profile
This course is designed for cinephiles, students of film, researchers of mythology and visual culture, and artists interested in the relation between cinematic form, civilizational memory, the itihaas as a creative remembrance and mythic imagination. It will particularly resonate with viewers drawn to questions of temporality, landscape, physiognomy, ritual, ethical self-doubts and the difficult presence of the epic within modern cinema.
Course Overview
Across centuries, Rama, the epic hero of the Ramayana (a text of itihaas, not history) has appeared through various different constellations of imagination, thought and belief, like: the devotional and ethical ideal of the Bhakti traditions shaped by figures like Tulsidas (the Ramcharitmanas, 16th century); the modern literary revaluation of epic morality in Michael Madhusudan Dutta’s Meghnad Badh Kavya (1861); the politically mobilized Ram of late twentieth-century Hindutva; and the recognition of the Ramayana itself as a plural and unstable civilizational archive, articulated in A. K. Ramanujan’s Three Hundred Ramayanas … (1987). Situated at a curious distance from these trajectories stands G. Aravindan’s masterpiece Kanchana Sita (1977), one of the most significant cinematic engagements with the Ramayana anywhere in world cinema.
Often remembered through already-stabilized descriptions, like: ecological Ramayana, austere modernism, anti-spectacular myth, the film may still resist the frameworks through which it is commonly discussed. This session returns to Kanchana Sita not to summarize its meanings, but to reopen its formal and conceptual layers through close attention to its cinematic language: the meditative movement of the camera, the peculiar stillness and undulating affectivity of faces, the silence of human world and the nature, the density and suspension of time within the image, and the relation between mythic imagination and landscape.
Particular attention will be given to the extraordinary presence of the actors, primarily chosen from an indigenous group of tribal people from Andhra. Their physiognomies, gestures, not merely as ethnographic or anthropological surfaces, but as sites where local belief, mythic inheritance, and subjective interiority begin to inhabit the same cinematic field. The session will also reflect on the possibility of an Indian time-image, a sensitivity of itihaas, where the epic past is neither reconstructed nor historicized, but experienced as ethical and karmic self-doubts, expressed through duration, longing, and recurrence.
The session will place these issues in dialogue with other experiments in filming mythic time: from The Mahabharata (Peter Brook, 1989) to selected Ramayana sequence/s Bharat Ek Khoj (Shyam Benegal, 1988) to ask what remains singular, and perhaps still unthought, in Aravindan’s extraordinary cinematic vision.
FACULTY PROFILE:
An alumnus from Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI), Kolkata, DebKamal Ganguly is an independent filmmaker, researcher and teacher of cinematic arts. He has taught for 08 years (2012-2020) and designed curriculum in Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, in the departments of Film Editing, Film Direction and Screen Studies; and as a guest faculty in National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, Flame University, Pune, Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology, Bhubaneswar. Ganguly’s works have been published under special curator-ship from Lowave, Paris; his video art featured in the exhibition ‘Indian Highway’ and showcased in galleries of various cities of Europe and Asia. His films done in the capacity of editor, script-writer and sound designer have been shown in competitive sections of various international festivals and received recognition, including ‘Tiger Award for Shorts’ in Rotterdam (IFFR 2007). Ganguly has presented papers in various international and national seminars and conferences on various themes related to cinema, Deleuze studies, visual art, interfaces of art practices, translation studies, collective memory, Bengal studies, Media studies, pedagogy of cinema, film editing as a discipline, immersive sound etc including CARA-CILECT conference in Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg (2018), CILECT conference in VGIK, Moscow (2019), Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theater (2019). He is a participant of an international project for artistic research involving BRICS countries, being the coordinator for India (2018).
BASELINE CONTRIBUTION TO CONFIRM PARTICIPATION:
₹ 1300 – For Participants from India & following countries
€ 30 – For other International Participants
(We invite you to contribute over and above the baseline – voluntarily, if you wish)
CERTIFICATES:
Digital certificates of participation will be issued.
QUERIES:
For queries, if any, please write to: filminstitute@auroville.org.in
or call / message +91 9969879319 (whatsapp and telegram only)
Auroville Film Institute 