Ray is a great director, and ipso facto cannot be typical of anything, perhaps not even reliably himself (it is the prerogative of all great artists constantly to take us by surprise). But it seems reasonable to assume that he must have come from something and fit into some sort of context. And so of course he does. Not particularly a cinematic context: eighteen years after the appearance of Pather Panchali, the first of the Apu trilogy, he is still a solitary figure, a unique talent in Indian cinema, and the Indian cinema apart from him has hardly moved on from the kind of nonsense he gently satirizes in the filmgoing sequence of Apur Sansar, all trashy, theatrical, sentimental, and fantasticated. But a literary and artistic context is very much there…. (pp. 165-66)

Ray's first films, the Apu trilogy, at once place him in a certain tradition by...