The mighty influence of Ray on Indian cinema

Satyajit Ray

On August 26, 1955, ‘Pather Panchali’, a film the world refuses to forget, was released. It put Indian cinema on the world map, and launched the career of the legendary Satyajit Ray.

Ray is regarded as one of the greatest Indian filmmakers and screenwriters of his time. Apart from being an exceptional filmmaker, Ray also wrote books for children, was an accomplished illustrator. He even designed the posters and publicity material for his films. However, his relevance stretches beyond all that, to include the influence he had on several Indian film directors.

One of the unlikeliest streams to have been influenced by Ray is the parallel Hindi cinema, which emerged in the 1970s and included several talented youngsters such as Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani and Saeed Mirza. Shyam Benegal, in interviews over the years, has acknowledged Ray’s influence in helping him break away from his advertising job to pursue the creative life of a filmmaker. When Benegal’s ‘Ankur’ was released in 1974, it was considered no less than a path-breaking film, having deployed psychological realism and regional authenticity.

In Kerala, Adoor Gopalakrishnan borrowed Ray’s technique of emphasising the psychology of the characters through gestures and studying the inner life. Several of Adoor’s films are spiritually akin to some of Ray’s cinematic masterpieces.

If one watches Kannada filmmaker Girish Kasaravalli’s ‘Ghatashraddha’ (1977), one notices a peculiar resemblance to Ray’s ‘Pather Panchali’, at least in spirit, although the two cultures and languages are different. Perhaps, what brought them together was the universal truths of suffering and stoicism in the face of adversity offered by society. Both of them explored the position of women in society.

Tamil director Mani Ratnam’s style of filmmaking again bears Ray’s influence. Critics say Ray’s filmmaking deeply influenced the parallel cinema movement of Tamil Nadu as well.

In Bengali cinema, Ray’s influence is palpable in the films of Srijit Mukherjee, Anik Dutta and Kaushik Ganguly, who create magic and narrate stories in an engaging way, a talent that Ray possessed to a great degree. Srijit’s debut film ‘Autograph’ (2010) for instance, was an interesting remake of Ray’s ‘Nayak’ (1966), a paean to the Bengali superstar Uttam Kumar.

In more recent times, Ray found a representation on the OTT platform Netflix last year when four of his short stories were adapted in Hindi. The series was called ‘Ray’. Although it garnered mixed reviews, it goes on to show that India’s love affair with him endures.

Ray was far ahead of his times. His concerns were deep, his vision sharp and focused. He sought to change the status of women both socially as well as economically by portraying strong female characters such as Arati (‘Mahanagar’) and Charulata in the eponymous film (2012).

In place of dominant Hindi cinema’s jingoism, Ray’s gave a much subtler and more nuanced idea of the Indian nation, thus providing the audience with an alternate history as it were. Participating enthusiastically in Nehru’s dreams of a sovereign, socialist and democratic nation, he sought to portray that same hopefulness in several of his films beginning as early as ‘The Apu Trilogy’. Ray’s role as a national filmmaker, as Roy Armes was to define it, remains unparalleled and unchallenged.

(The writer is an author, teacher and a cinephile).