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Although revered as one of the world’s great filmmakers, the Indian director Satyajit Ray is described either in narrowly nationalistic terms or as an artist whose critique of modernity is largely derived from European ideas. Rarely is he seen as an influential modernist in his own right whose contributions to world cinema remain unsurpassed. In this benchmark study, Keya Ganguly situates Ray’s work within the internationalist spirit of the twentieth century, arguing that his film experiments revive the category of political or “committed” art. She suggests that in their depictions of Indian life, Ray’s films intimate the sense of a radical future and document the capacity of the image to conceptualize a different world glimpsed in the remnants of a disappearing past.

Examining the filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s engagements with religious questions with reference to his films Devi (The Goddess), Mahapurush (The Holy Man), Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder), Sadgati (Deliverance) and Ganashatru (A Public Enemy), this essay assesses the influence of Ray’s Brahmo inheritance, his personal atheism/agnosticism and his cultural fascination with Hinduism in his representations of women’s status and caste discrimination. It concludes that although Ray’s approach to Hinduism was far from one-dimensional or sectarian, its negative social consequences were emphasized more in his work than any positive role it might play in society and culture.

[...]the greater story that Ray's many films project- of the transition of Bengali culture from the colonial to the postcolonial era- is about calibrating a historical compass that is simultaneously attuned to the upheavals and disturbances of India's anticolonial past with present- day postcolonial aspirations to modernize the nation.13 Ray Recasting Tagore: The Aura of the Original, the Power of Adaptation Here I consider Satyajit Ray's historical perspective in light of his visual refashioning of \"The Postmaster,\" a short literary text by that most beloved of Bengali poets, Rabindranath Tagore.14 That Ray should mingle his vision of Bengali modernity with Tagore's is hardly surprising in light of Ray's training at Visva- Bharati University, the school of arts in Shantiniketan started by Tagore.15 Moreover, both men shared an intimacy with the cultural affections of Kolkata, the city in which they grew up, lived, and worked. 16 Indeed, it is not uncommon for critics to appraise this auteur's vision largely in terms of his indebtedness to Tagore. First published in 1891, seventy years before Ray's adaptation of it, \"The Postmaster\" represents Tagore's innovations with the short story form in Bengali, while also reflecting the social climate of its time, which is radically different from the postcolonial period in which Ray revisits this tale.36 Any analysis of the film's relationship to the story would thus be incomplete without considering the intellectual and po liti cal circumstance of colonial Bengal in whose social milieu both Tagore and this work are so immersed. While acknowledging the evolution between various phases of Ray's work, Cooper all too easily reduces Ray's motivations to a few ancient prescriptions for aesthetic ideals given in Sanskrit. Besides fixing Ray's work as largely atavistic, this has the effect of not being able to account for those films by Ray that most per sis tent ly challenge simplified categories of genre, theme, and so forth. [...]Cooper has to admit early on that his analysis leaves out the most fantastical and genre- flexing of Rays works, namely his magically real children's films. 14.

Bengali film director Satyajit Ray, who received an Academy Award for lifetime achievement, is profiled. Besides directing his movies, Ray writes his own scripts, edits the negative and composes the music--control virtually unknown in cinema.

In the colonial era, the average Indian's prospects for participation in national politics or global trade were, of course, very limited and much liberal thought during this period was directed toward the reform of Indian society and took on strongly individualistic and moralistic overtones. An eminent Marxist historian from Calcutta, for instance, wrote that while history moved through class conflict, Ray's characters remained isolated, free-floating individuals. 12 This kind of statement shows how little of Ray's ideological position has been understood even by sophisticated and politically astute viewers from his own culture.

[...]a reading of the film seems tendentious and ignores its far more universal themes, which have endured through time and across even larger geographic as well as cultural barriers. film in the context of a national cinema is an appropriate mode of critical discourse and certainly historically accurate-Iranian cinema, at the time, was not part of the global cinema then taking shape, a cinema with an established canon that was, it should be said, defined primarily by Western critics and audiences (a modernity borne by the West is defined by the West, take it or leave it, and what is more modern than cinema?) The Cow transcends such lower-level categorizations and more appropriately belongs not just to a national film history but also to international film history. [...]exasperated beyond his limits, Islam begins to beat Hassan uncontrollably, like the animal of burden he is claiming to be, yelling at him to get up the hill.