In his career as a filmmaker, Satyajit Ray consistently created characters that he adapted from literature, often novels written after 1947. One therefore recognises in his films Indians from the post-Independence era, members of the middle-class intelligentsia conscious of their worth as subjects of the Nehruvian nation. We can see them as models for the kind of educated citizenry that newly independent India was producing, as suggested by film critics such as Pauline Kael in her review of Aranyer Din Ratri (1970) in The New Yorker. Categorising these characters and relating them to the changing milieu is what Failed Masculinities sets out to do.