Hyderabad: Christopher Nolan’s love letter to Satyajit Ray has arrived at a rather interesting time. Back home, social media users were recently dragging Ray into comparisons with Aditya Dhar. Meanwhile, one of Hollywood’s finest filmmakers has once again reminded everyone why Ray’s cinema remains in a league of its own.
During a visit to the Criterion Closet in New York, Nolan picked up a box set of Ray’s celebrated Apu Trilogy and named him among the greatest Indian filmmakers in cinema history. The Oscar-winning director revealed that he had watched Pather Panchali, the first film in the trilogy, and said the masterpiece “completely blew” his mind.
Nolan is yet to watch Aparajito and Apur Sansar, the remaining two chapters tracing Apu’s journey from childhood in rural Bengal to adulthood. That is precisely why The Odyssey filmmaker decided to take the complete trilogy home.
The praise carries added weight amid the strange online discourse surrounding Ray in India. Following the success of Aditya Dhar’s Dhurandhar films, some social media users began placing Dhar alongside, and occasionally even above, Ray. The comparison invited sharp reactions from cinephiles, who argued that putting a contemporary blockbuster filmmaker against an auteur with Ray’s global legacy was premature, to say the least.
Ray has also remained an uncomfortable figure for sections of the Right because his cinema never hesitated to question blind faith and social orthodoxy. His 1960 film Devi explored how religious dogmatism could destroy a young woman after her father-in-law became convinced that she was an incarnation of a goddess.
Ray himself had clarified that Devi wasn’t an attack on religion but on its extreme and dogmatic form. He also recalled being accused in newspapers of making films “against Hinduism,” criticism he dismissed while defending his right to tell the stories he believed in.
The irony is difficult to miss. While some people in India continue to reduce Ray’s legacy to ideological fights and social media comparisons, Christopher Nolan is walking out of the Criterion Closet with The Apu Trilogy under his arm.
Nearly seven decades after Pather Panchali first reached audiences, Satyajit Ray doesn’t need an online certificate of greatness. The world’s greatest filmmakers are still discovering his work, taking it home and admitting that it blew their minds.
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