Amoeba Music

The Big City (Mahanagar), set in mid-1950s Calcutta and directed by the great Satyajit Ray, follows the personal triumphs and frustrations of Arati (Madhabi Mukherjee), who decides, despite the initial protests of her bank-clerk husband, to take a job to help support their family. With remarkable sensitivity and attention to the details of everyday working-class life, Ray gradually builds a powerful human drama that is at once a hopeful morality tale and a commentary on the identity of the contemporary Indian woman.

Special Features:

• New 2K digital film restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• New interview with actor Madhabi Mukherjee
• Satyajit Ray and the Modern Woman, a new interview program featuring Ray historian Suranjan Ganguly
• The Coward (1965), a feature film directed by Ray that also addresses modern female identity and stars Mukherjee and Soumitra Chatterjee
• New English subtitle translation
• A booklet featuring an essay by scholar Chandak Sengoopta and an interview with Ray from the 1980s by his biographer Andrew Robinson