“Desire is for Men who are Men”: The Politics of Masculinity in Satyajit Ray’s The Home and the World

The first epigraph, from Mrinalini Sinha’s Colonial Masculinity, addresses the formation of the colonial category of the “effeminate babu.” Sinha argues that both the economic and the political decline experienced by elite Bengali men in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as they evolved from collaborators of colonial ideology to critics, helped forge this category. As products of the “Anglicist” approach to rule prevalent in the mid-nineteenth century, this class of western-educated Indians was intended to mediate between the rulers and their subjects.