Satyajit Ray, Ray's films, and Ray-Movie It was ironic, to say the least, that the Emergency held Ray-movie as the model to emulate when it imposed stringent censorship norms on independent film-makers. The Film Finance Corporation for instance was instructed by a parliamentary com--^ mission to only fund films that demonstrated '1. Human interest in the story; 2. Indianness in theme and approach; 3. Characters with whom the audience can identify; 4. Dramatic content/18 And the notorious 'Film-20' series commissioned similar art-house shorts to illustrate each point in Mrs Gandhi's 20-point programme. Ray, in indirect response, quit making films set in the contemporary for the next fourteen years, withdrawing into children's stories (at least one of which, Hirak Rajer Deshe / The Kingdom of Diamonds, 1980, made veiled allusions to the Emergency) and period movies including his trusty Tagore (Chare Baire / The Home and the World, 1984). When he returned to the contemporary (Ganashatru, Shakha Proshakha, Agantuk) it was, in the sympathetic words of Amaresh Misra, as 'an armchair liberal functioning as a simple humanist who now viewed social reality in terms of a naive individ-ual-versus-society conflict and placed his hopes and disillusionments either in some grassroots cultural activity or the travails of innocent children, sensitive but mentally retarded figures and maverick outsiders.'19 For, whatever Ray would have had to say about it, this India — defining liberalization as an induction into a global market on terms set by American trade representatives — was not entering the place in the world that he had sought for in those heraldic fifties when he made Father Panchali. A version of this article titled 'Beyond Orientalism' was published in Sight and Sound, Homage to Satyajit Ray, 1992. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. New Delhi, 1980. 2. Filmworld, Bombay, January 1980. 3. Arturo Lanodto, quoted in Marie Seton, Portrait of a Director, London, 1971. 4. Pauline Kad, J Lost It at the Movies, New York, 1965. 5. Newsweek review of Ashani Sanket / Distant Thunder, 1973, quoted in Satyajit Ray, edited by Chidananda Das Gupta, New Delhi, 1981. 6. Art Film Publications, Los Angeles, on Apur Sansar. 7. Frances Flaherty, quoted in Marie Seton, op. cit. 8. Andrew Robinson, The Inner Eye, London, 1989. 9. Roy Armes, Third World Film-Making and the West, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1987. 10. Quoted in Satyajit Ray, edited by Chidananda Das Gupta, op. cit. 11. Satyajit Ray, 'Calm Without, Fire Within', Indian Film Culture, Calcutta, September 1964. 12. M.S.S. Pandian, The Image Trap, New Delhi, 1992. 13. 'The Road Revisited', Journal of Arts and Ideas, No. 4. 14. In Satyajit Ray, edited by Chidananda Das Gupta, op. cit. 15. 'On Seemabaddha', in ibid. 16. See, for example, Robinson's chapter on the films in The Inner Eye, op. cit. 17. 'An Indian New Wave?', 1971. 18. Committee on Public Undertakings 1975-76, Report on the Film Finance Corporation, New Delhi, 1976. 19. 'Satyajit Ray's Films: Precarious Social-Individual Balance', Economic and Political Weekly, Bombay, May 1992. Journal of Arts 6' Ideas