Ray’s diverse and prolific artistry attests to a filmmaker who believed in the power of personal expression and all the forms it could take. His multidisciplinary skills carried over to his films, many of which he not only directed but wrote, produced, cast, and scored. In addition to directing thirty-six films over his career, documentaries and shorts among them, Ray also had ample experience in illustration, advertising, fiction writing, composing, and calligraphy. Ray’s films are deeply humane, openhearted illustrations of ordinary people negotiating the vagaries of life. By the time the subsequent entries in the “Apu Trilogy” came along – Aparajito in 1956 and The World of Apu in 1959 – Ray and the national cinema he helped rejuvenate had become formidable. When it screened in competition at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival, it won the inaugural Best Human Document award and secured a spot for Indian cinema on the international stage. Pather Panchali was integral in establishing a new wave of realist cinema in post-colonial India that countered the formulaic excesses of Bollywood. Owing much to the Italian neorealists whom Ray studied during his time in Europe in 1950, the film uses a cast of largely nonprofessional actors and unfolds with an unvarnished, quasi-documentary realism that focuses attention on social milieu rather than narrative dramatic incident. Based on a classic bildungsroman novel, it chronicles the experiences of a boy and his family living in a poor Bengali village. Ray’s debut feature, Pather Panchali (1955), is exemplary of the director’s sensibility. And like the neorealist lineage of filmmaking they inherit, they sensitively address the socioeconomically disadvantaged. They are measured and complex, treating their characters as three-dimensional social agents who are irreducible to any symbolic function.

They are concerned with the tensions and rifts between cultural tradition and modernity, fading attitudes and emergent ones, and collective and individual morality. Yet it seems to me that Satyajit Ray is one of a handful of the preeminent 20 th-century auteurs, along with Ozu and De Sica, who truly warrants the label. Used to describe filmmakers with compassionate worldviews who demonstrate an empathic attunement to human characters, it has the tendency to become a catch-all descriptor for any film that privileges quotidian human experience over explosions. The word “humanist” gets thrown around a lot in cinema discourse. The Cinema Auteur of India Rewards Discovery

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