Introduction

Summary

In his very revealing 1963 “Calm Without, Fire Within” (from his collection of writing on films entitled Our Films, Their Films), Ray refers to his formative years at Rabindranath Tagore's university in Santinikitan. In order to learn the rudiments of Chinese calligraphy, Ray writes:

We rubbed our sticks of Chinese ink on porcelain palettes, dipped our bamboostemmed Japanese brushes in it and held them poised perpendicularly over mounted sheets of Nepalese-parchment. “Now draw a tree,” our Professor Bose would say. (Bose was a famous Bengali painter who made pilgrimages to China and Japan). “Draw a tree, but not in the western fashion. Not from the top downwards. A tree grows up, not down. The strokes must be from the base upwards. …”

The aim of this study is to situate and evaluate the cinema of Satyajit Ray from an Indian aesthetic as well as an Indian social and historical perspective. His rich and varied filmic oeuvre arises, I intend to show, from within the Indian tradition itself. He drew his cinematic tree along the very same lines as designated by his teacher, Professor Bose, in the above citation. Now, this does not mean that Ray deliberately shunned or avoided any influences derived from his profound knowledge of Western art forms. A closer look at his vast array of films confirms, in his own words, the parallel

existence of an art form, western in origin, but transplanted and taking roots in a new soil. The tools are the same, but the methods and attitudes in the best and most characteristic work are distinct and indigenous.