A year of remembrance and resistance, where Khalid Mohamed, Monojit Lahiri, Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri, Devdutt Trivedi, Utpal Datta and Satyabrate Ghosh revisited cinema’s past to understand its moral, artistic and cultural afterlives.

If cinema is about movement—of images, ideas, emotions—then Retroscope is about the counter-movement: the deliberate pause. The Retroscope section of The Daily Eye exists not to indulge nostalgia, but to interrogate memory. Across the year, its writers returned to films, artists and moments not because they belong safely to the past, but because they continue to shape how we see, feel and argue about cinema today.

What binds these essays is a shared refusal to reduce film history to trivia, rankings or algorithm-friendly lists. Instead, they restore context, contradiction and human complexity. Collectively, they argue that cinema is not just entertainment or industry—but evidence: of social values, artistic courage, moral failures and cultural shifts.

Khalid Mohamed: Lived History, Cultural Reckoning
A substantial arc of Retroscope this year belongs to Khalid Mohamed, whose writing carries the weight of lived experience. His essays do not merely analyse cinema; they remember it from within—its rumours, its silences, its forgotten casualties.
His account of 1975 as the year of Sholay and Jai Santoshi Maa captures Indian cinema at its most contradictory and democratic. While Sholay stormed history as the definitive blockbuster, Jai Santoshi Maa—made on a shoestring—turned cinema halls into devotional spaces. Mohamed does not mock this phenomenon; he observes how cinema becomes ritual, belief and collective catharsis, particularly for women audiences who found spiritual agency on screen.

From devotion, Mohamed moves to defiance in his revisit of Bandit Queen. Thirty years on, the essay reads as a chronicle of censorship battles, ethical risks and artistic courage. By revisiting the controversies surrounding Phoolan Devi, Seema Biswas’s performance and Shekhar Kapur’s refusal to dilute violence, Mohamed reminds us how rare it is for Indian cinema to confront power honestly.

His portraits of Van Shipley and Naushad Ali extend this reckoning into music history. Shipley—India’s first electric guitarist—emerges as a forgotten pioneer undone by an industry uneasy with experimentation. Naushad, in contrast, stands as a towering moral force whose Bandra bungalow Ashiana becomes a metaphor for artistic integrity resisting cultural amnesia. Mohamed’s lingering question—why India still lacks a definitive documentary on Naushad—feels like an indictment.

Equally haunting is his resurrection of Shyam, the charismatic 1940s star who died at 31 and slipped into obscurity. Through friendships with Saadat Hasan Manto and a career cut short, Shyam’s story becomes emblematic of cinema’s brutal impermanence. Stardom, Mohamed reminds us, offers no immunity against forgetting.

This sense of injustice culminates in Mohamed’s essay on forgotten women of Hindi cinema—Indira ‘Billi’, Chitra and Naqi Jehan. Here, Retroscope becomes explicitly political, exposing how B-grade heroines were used, typecast and discarded, even as they brought vitality and desire to the screen. These women are not footnotes; they are casualties of a system that remembers selectively.

Monojit Lahiri: Memory with Affection, Not Distance
Running parallel to Mohamed’s interventions are Monojit Lahiri’s deeply personal essays, where memory is textured with warmth rather than critique alone. His tributes to Pran, Dilip Kumar, Smita Patil and Waheeda Rehman are not star profiles but meditations on presence, craft and moral courage.

Lahiri’s Pran is both screen villain and generous neighbour. His Dilip Kumar is not merely the “Tragedy King” but a man who redefined acting through restraint and psychological realism. His reflections on Smita Patil and Waheeda Rehman allow these women to speak—about choices, rivalries, doubts and survival—rather than freezing them into icons.
What Lahiri offers Retroscope is intimacy: the reminder that cinema history is also lived history, shaped by friendships, failures and human generosity.

Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri: Music, Meaning and the Architecture of Feeling
Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri’s contributions set the tone for the year by foregrounding artistic integrity over commercial triumph. His essay on composer Jaidev is not merely a tribute; it is an argument about silence and emotional truth in Hindi film music. By revisiting Hum Dono, Reshma Aur Shera, Gaman, Gharonda and Alaap, Chaudhuri reminds us that Jaidev’s genius lay in refusing spectacle—choosing inwardness over noise.

In an industry that increasingly equates scale with value, Jaidev’s career becomes a lesson in resistance. His music, shaped by classical rigour and spiritual depth, survives precisely because it did not chase trends. Chaudhuri’s writing makes a larger claim: that longevity belongs to those who trust their aesthetic conscience.

That belief extends into his essay on Waqt, marking sixty years of a film that reshaped Hindi cinema’s grammar. By analysing its ensemble structure and the now-canonical “lost-and-found” trope, Chaudhuri positions Waqt as both spectacle and blueprint—a film that taught mainstream Hindi cinema how to think structurally, emotionally and ambitiously.

Devdutt Trivedi: When Cinema Thinks Like Philosophy
Devdutt Trivedi explodes cinematic comfort zones altogether. His dense, challenging essay on filmmaker Shumona Goel expands Retroscope beyond remembrance into intellectual provocation. Drawing from Bergson, Bachelard, quantum mechanics and avant-garde cinema, Trivedi frames films like Atreyee, Family Tree and I Am Micro as philosophical acts.

This is not easy reading—and that is precisely its value. Trivedi insists that cinema need not explain itself narratively to be meaningful. Instead, it can operate as sensation, disruption and resistance—particularly against patriarchal, linear and commodified modes of seeing. His contribution reminds readers that Indian cinema’s history is not only mainstream or parallel, but also experimental, fragmented and deeply political.

Utpal Datta: Dignity as Aesthetic Choice
Utpal Datta’s revisit of Pradeep Nair’s Oridam brings Retroscope sharply back to ethics and representation. Two decades on, Datta argues that the film’s refusal to sensationalise the life of a sex worker is precisely what gives it lasting power. Anchored by Geetu Mohandas’s performance, Oridam stands as a rare example of how pain can be portrayed without voyeurism.

Datta’s writing highlights a crucial Retroscope theme: that restraint is not absence, but discipline. In a media ecosystem addicted to shock, Oridam endures because it trusted stillness, visual poetry and human dignity. The essay implicitly asks contemporary filmmakers what they are willing to give up in order to say something true.

Satyabrate Ghosh: The Humanism of Middle Cinema
Satyabrate Ghosh’s reflection on Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Jurmana situates the film within the often-overlooked space of “middle cinema”—neither spectacle nor art-house austerity. Framed through childhood memories of Chitrahaar, the essay captures how Mukherjee balanced realism, melodrama and moral inquiry.

Ghosh’s focus on Rakhee’s character is particularly telling. He stresses Mukherjee’s rare commitment to granting women moral complexity and agency—qualities increasingly scarce in contemporary mainstream cinema. Jurmana becomes less a film to be “revisited” and more a reminder of what humane filmmaking once looked like.
Retroscope as Resistance

Taken together, these essays do not flatten history into lists of classics or legends. Instead, they restore contradiction, silence and unresolved questions. They insist that cinema is not just a repository of pleasure, but a moral archive.