Kheror Khata

Ray’s kheror khata is an opportunity for us to consider the concept of the auteur once again and in the most expansive sense. We know that Ray wrote and drew his films before he embarked on making them. He used these big red books to do so that were called kheror khata, the name derived from the word kharua that means red. They bring to mind the Soviet artist Sergei Eisenstein’s richly illustrated notebooks on which there have been a series of multimedia exhibitions since 2016 and a recent volume edited by Ian Christie and Julia Vassilieva entitled The Eisenstein Universe (2021).