The visionary Satyajit Ray (1921-1992) is India’s most famous director. His visual
style fused the aesthetics of European realism with evocative symbolic realism,
which he based on classic Indian iconography, the aesthetic and narrative
principles of rasa, the energies of shakti and shakta, the principles of dharma,
and the practice of darsha dena/ darsha lena. He incorporated these aesthetic
elements in a self-reflective manner as a means of observing and recording the
human condition in a rapidly changing world. This unique amalgam of selfexpression expanded over four decades that cover three periods of Bengali
history, offering a fictional ethnography of a nation in transition from agricultural,
feudal societies to a capitalist economy. His films show the emotional impact
of the social, economic, and political changes, on the personal lives of his
characters. They expand from the Indian declaration of Independence (1947)
and the period of industrialization and secularization of the 1950s and 1960s, to
the rise of nationalism and Marxism in the 1970s, followed by the rapid
transformation of India in the 1980s. Through the Eyes of his characters, Ray’s
films reflected upon the changes in the conscious collective of the society and
the time they were produced, while offering a historical record of this
transformation of his imagined India, the ‘India’ that I got to know while watching
his films; an ‘India’ that I can relate to. The paper highlights an affinity between
Ray’s method of filmmaking with ethnography and Kantian anthropology. For
this, it returns to the notion of the charismatic auteur as a narrator of his time,
working within the liminal space in-between fiction and reality, subjectivity and
objectivity, culture and history respectively, in order to reflect upon the
complementary ontological relationship between the charismatic auteur and
the role of the amateur anthropologist in an ever-changing world.