From Teen Kanya to Arshinagar: feminist politics, Bengali high culture and the stardom of Aparna Sen AQ1 Kaustav Bakshi a and Rohit K. Dasgupta b a Department of English, Jadavpur University, West Bengal, India; b Institute for Media and Creative Industries, 5 Loughborough University, London, UK ABSTRACT This paper makes an attempt to understand the stardom of the Bengali film-maker and actor Aparna Sen, who has been associated with the industry for 55 years. We argue that Sen’s star persona is based on a 10 polysemic structure, to borrow Richard Dyer’s term, which comes from the multiple roles she has played in her career. Achieving a local stardom through her work as an actor in Bengali popular cinema, she went on to acquire international fame through the films she made. Besides, as the editor of an immensely popular Bengali women’s magazine, Sen became 15 a cultural commentator through her columns and also played an active part, through the magazine, in entering into dialogue with her readers on diverse issues such as communalism and sexuality rights. As a socially conscientious critic who has participated in several humanitarian and political causes, Sen emerged as a figure of trust and reliance for her fans 20 and even her staunchest critics. The paper analyses the construction of her stardom, based on a series of interviews that both authors con- ducted with Aparna Sen over a period of time, interviews with a cross section of her fans, alongside an analysis of her media presence and finally the films she made and acted in. KEYWORDS Aparna Sen; female stardom; humanism; Bengali high culture; feminist Bengali films Introduction 25 Aparna Sen is one of the most well-known auteur-actors in Bengali cinema, who has over the years emerged as a formidable star presence within the sociocultural milieu of not just West Bengal but also India. Sen started her career as an actor with Satyajit Ray’s Teen Kanya in 1961 but then became a film-maker of international repute, though a little late in her career. 1 Though most of the earlier films she acted in, being products of the mainstream Tollygunje-based Bengali 30 film industry, did not have any mentionable access to the global film market, they, nonetheless, fetched her a local stardom and iconic status, which has still not waned. Studies on Indian auteurs have proliferated in recent years; 2 however, there have been few studies which have looked closely at the star text of the film-maker. Directors are rarely analysed as stars but more often as auteurs understood largely through the meanings of their oeuvre. A 35 small number of directors in India do possess the visibility of stardom through the ‘propensity for mythology’ 3 and most of these directors such as Guru Dutt and Raj Kapoor are actors turned directors. Aparna Sen is not only one of a very small group of female actors turned directors (others include Sai Paranjpye, Hema Malini, Pooja Bhatt, Nandita Das and Revathy 4 ) but also the most well known. Sen is recognized not only for her direction and acting but also as a cultural and 40 sociopolitical commentator. CONTACT Kaustav Bakshi kaustav_259@yahoo.com AQ2 © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE, 2017 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2017.1304084 C/e: BI C/e QA: SM