The Bengali auteur's influence is ever-present: Satyajit Ray is cited as a source of inspiration by living artists as diverse as Barry Jenkins, Martin Scorsese, Ava DuVernay, Shyam Benegal, Claire Denis, Teju Cole, J M Coetzee, Durga Chew-Bose and so on. Referring to contemporary Southasian filmmakers, actor and filmmaker Aparna Sen says, "We have inherited [Ray] as Ray had inherited Tagore." He may be the most internationally recognised and celebrated name in Indian cinema – and unfortunately, the only name with which certain audiences and critics are familiar.
At times, it is hard to banish the uncharitable suspicion that Ray is included in certain textbooks, lists, syllabi, and other common artefacts of film culture and criticism in a tokenistic manner, as shorthand for Southasian film history at large.
In an essay for Criterion, entitled 'The Apu Trilogy: Behind the Universal', Girish Shambu reminds us that prior to a fascination with Bollywood, Western film viewers and critics associated Indian cinema synonymously with the films of Satyajit Ray. How did it happen, asks Shambu, that one filmmaker could "stand in for the cinematic output of the one of the most populous and diverse countries on the planet"?
Early writings on Satyajit Ray – from what appear to be the first mentions of him in popular English-language print in 1957 to the commercial releases of his first two Apu films in the US and Britain in 1958 – delineate how and when the Bengali auteur, from being an upstart, becomes the filmic icon we recognise today. Contrary to narratives of Ray's immediate and welcomed induction into the canon of world cinema – as recounted by certain scholars and admirers – we can trace the reception of Ray in Western film criticism as a surprisingly ambivalent encounter. These writings are sites of recurrent tropes, cultural biases, and other problematic discourses by which non-Western cinemas enter into the institutions and canons of a Western film audience.