In a career that spanned nearly four decades, he worked in over 125 feature films in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Hindi languages.

His passion for cinema made him enroll for a course in motion picture photography at the Institute of Film Technology, Adyar, Chennai.

He also worked for other filmmakers such as Babu Nanthankode, J. D. Thottan, Bharathan, N. Sankaran Nair and Ramu Kariat.

Ashok Kumar was born in Allahabad, North-Western Provinces, British India, to Kedarnath Aggarwal, a Hindi poet.

After obtaining a diploma in photography from the Allahabad University, he decided to join a film institute to pursue a career in filmmaking.

[2] Following that, he received several offers in Malayalam for directors such as P. N. Menon, Babu Nanthankode, J. Sasikumar, Ramu Kariat and Bharathan.

Meanwhile, Mahendran had watched some of Ashok Kumar's Malayalam films and found some of his angles and lighting techniques to be very interesting.

[5] For his second film, Uthiripookkal, Mahendran approached Ashok Kumar as Balu Mahendra was busy with his directorial, Azhiyadha Kolangal.

He became Mahendran's regular cinematographer and worked in nine of his twelve films, including Johnny (1980), Nenjathai Killathe (1980), Nandu (1981) and Metti (1982).

Contemporary cinematographers such as Ramachandra Babu, P. C. Sreeram, Ravi K. Chandran and Venu have also spoken of being inspired by his work.