D Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Godard's soundtrack as part of that inheritance. More than that, he shared the classic liberal nationalist discomfort of most Indian artists of his generation in the late sixties when the 'Naxalite' Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) appropriated for itself the voice of radical change. Its student agitations and consequent state o brutality informed his Calcutta films (Pratidwandi / The Adversary, 1970; Seemabaddha / Company Limited, 1971), and led even to an uneasy contemplation that he might have to leave Calcutta and find work in Bombay. Only in the early seventies, then, did the shift away become pronounced. It came partly through his western image, as the Ray-movie motif was for the first time imported into India. Imported, it was refurbished into the latest frontier of regional nativism, making a straight ideological flip-side of the modernist programme even as Indira Gandhi's nation-in-danger rhetoric did a mirror-act on Nehru's non-aligned internationalism. Ray-movie now started getting made in Kannada, Malayalam, even in Hindi (Shyam Benegal). And Ray, as its most important pioneer, started claiming for the first time that 'I think of myself as a Bengali and my films are aimed primarily at our own audience.'10 The nativist tag remained an uneasy one, evident less from his films than from the position he was made to represent. In Bengal, for instance, the oriental image of a renaissance figure was presented through a consistent downgrading of his films as his most significant creations, with more and more programming emphasizing his commercial-art sketches, his children's short stories (the Felu and Shonkhu characters), his childhood reminiscences (Jokhon Chhoto Chhilam, 1982). Right now, the West Bengal government is apparently vying with Calcutta's biggest publishing house, Ananda Bazar Patrika, to put together his collected works, believed to be the hottest literary property in the history of Bengali publishing. And Ray went along with the line: this writer, in his only encounter with the film-maker in December 1990, accompanied an English radio journalist to his Calcutta home shortly after Shakha Proshakha was made. Asked informally about his experience of working for a French producer, he said he looked forward to an international distribution of his film. He added that in Calcutta itself, projection conditions of most big theatres prevented him from participating in the local commercial releases of his work, and barring a few private screenings in his native city, he wished now more and more to show outside Bengal, in Delhi, Bombay and particularly in Kerala with its highly film-literate audiences, all places whete he has never had a good commercial release. The tape-recorder was switched on; 1 make my films', he said, 'for a Bengali audience'. And then Ray died. Shortly before his death, and shortly after he received the lifetime-achievement Oscar, he was awarded the Bharat Ratna — India's highest honour, an exclusive preserve of politicians and so far bestowed mainly on former prime ministers. He also got the National Best Film prize for his last feature, Agantuk j The Stranger (1991). Commenting on this last bit of adulatory excess, an Economic Times Numbers 23-24