The film lover’s conventional view is ‘what if’. What if Ritwik Ghatak’s Nagarik , completed in 1952 but unreleased till his death, was released before Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali in 1955? Would the posthumous outsize legacy that arrived in the decades since he has gone be his in his lifetime?

But this is a ‘what is’ statement, not a ‘what if’ piece. What is uncontestably true is that Ghatak’s legacy in mainstream Hindi film is more palpable, and arguably more celebrated, than the legacy of Ray and Mrinal Sen, his contemporaries in the so-called holy trinity. Ray gets more lip service from mainstream Hindi filmmakers, and Sen gets more nods in the work — for instance, in the use of the narrative voiceover, in popular Hindi film’s love for self-referencing as we see in Yash Raj a

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