How would Satyajit Ray have responded to the pandemic?

There may be clues in his cinema, which reveals a politically and socially conscious, and often prescient, vision of Bengal, India and humanity

The Spanish Flu ended in April 1920. Satyajit Ray, India’s most fêted filmmaker, was born a year later, on May 2, 1921. This year marks his birth centenary, as another pandemic ravages the world, its impact particularly harsh on India now more than anywhere else. A question that has arisen over the past year is how cinema will reflect this period. We have seen a few half-hearted efforts already, but the shadow of the pandemic will last far longer and we can expect cinema and its creators to rise to the challenge more substantially. In this context, it’s interesting to reflect on how Ray as a filmmaker might have responded to this scenario, 100 years later. Ray’s cinema captured a mutating India while remaining culturally rooted in Bengal. His films spoke to the dreams, aspirations, struggles, angst, challenges, and corrosiveness of the Indian plurality while telling stories that in many cases had already been told in other forms — by Tagore, Premchand, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay, Narendranath Mitra, Premchand, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Mani Shankar Mukherjee and even his grandfather, Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury. Add to this his literary work and original screenplays and we get a picture of India, starting with Ray storyboarding Pather Panchali as the country became a republic and ending with the moral destitution and weariness of Agantuk.