Sunday, August 14 2005 10:56 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Kolkata: Indian cinema's biggest ever name Satyajit Ray will get a British salute on the 50th anniversary of his magnum opus 'Pather Panchali' (The Song of the Road) when a book release later this month puts his films in league with the best of Shakespearean plays.

On August 26, Andrew Robinson, literary editor of Times Higher Education Supplement in London would unveil his book 'Ray: A Vision in Cinema', in which he also takes a look at the film-maker's close affinity with Rabindranath Tagore.

In the tribute, Robinson draws a parallel between Ray and Shakespeare both of whom died on April 23.

"The coincidence struck me suddenly a few days after Ray's death. I remember thinking, how curious, and then, after a moment's reflection, how fitting," Robinson says in a preview to the book.

Ray's films, he says, were as subtle and deep in their probing of human relationships as Shakespeare's plays.

"As the writer and Nobel laureate V S Naipaul, a lover of both Ray and Shakespeare, once said to me of Ray's 'The Chess Players' (Shatranj Ke Khiladi). It's like a Shakespeare scene.

Only three hundred words are spoken but goodness! - terrific things happen", Robinson says.

The writer, who had a series of personal interactions with the film-maker, says he believed there was no director in cinema who could express what was going on inside a character's mind more acutely than Ray.

The exceptional range of milieu, period, genre and mood in Ray's range of work recalls that of Shakespeare. "The Time magazine wrote in a survey of world cinema in 1963: 'Will Ray redeem his prodigious promise and become the Shakespeare of the screen?"

Robinson uses rare photographs by Nemai Ghosh, whom Ray had described as 'a sort of Boswell working with a camera rather than a pen', to illustrate his book.

The pictures show Ray writing his scripts, designing his sets and costumes, acting out the roles for his actors, operating the camera, editing the film and even composing and recording the music.

Robinson feels that like Tagore, who is still largely perceived as only a poet of mysticism on the basis of his Nobel winning 'Gitanjali', Ray has tended to be typecast outside Bengal as an artist of poverty on the strength of his first film 'Pather Panchali' and its two sequels in the Apu Trilogy.

Robinson, also the author of 'Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye and co-author of several books on Tagore, talks of the pronounced belief among a section that Ray was not an 'innovative' director, that his work is fine but a bit old-fashioned and 'literary' and that his best films were those from his first decade.