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Satyajit Ray was born in 1921 to a family distinguished for
its cultural attainments. Both his father and his grandfather
were celebrated writers of stories for children; his father’s
nonsense rhymes are to this day household favourities among
educated Bengalis. Ray trained as a painted in Tagore’s
university in Santiniketan; subsequently becoming an art director
for a leading advertising agency in Calcutta. But his passion
was for Western classical music and the cinema. In the early
1950s he decided to leave his job to make a film based on
the classic Bengali novel ‘Pather Panchali’ (“Song
of the Road”). He worked with amateur actors and technicians,
using the most unsophisticated equipment. To finance the film
he sold his books and records, and pawned his wife’s
jewellery. His depiction of a boy growing up in the harsh
deprivation of a Bengal village became a landmark in film
history and was hailed as a masterpiece at the Cannes Film
Festival of 1955. As Penelope Houston, a leading film critic,
commented: Ray’s Bengal became cinema’s India.
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Ray produced a film practically every year
around a range of themes: sequels to Pather Panchali, superstitions,
shamanism, the diminishing aristocracy, untouchability and
a variety of problems affecting middle-class life in Calcutta.
His films were thematically openended and marked by delicate
understatement. His involvement with Calcutta was total, and
in return he received in abundance the love and admiration
of Calcutta’s literati. Ray himself, despite offers,
refused to work outside Calcutta. He was as much the creation
of the city’s milieu as he created the milieu from the
mid-1950s onwards.
The corpus of Ray’s creativity did not end with filmmaking.
He wrote the scripts for his films and composed the music.
A prolific writer of stories (some of which have now been
translated into English) and novels in Bengali, he created
the character Prodosh Mitter (nicknamed Phelu), a young detective
who became a great favourite among Bengali children- not to
mention many adults!. He was yet still a songwriter, and the
songs he wrote for his children’s film, ‘The Adventures
of Goopy and Bagha’ were an enormous success. He was
also a designer of books and created a typeface known as Ray
Roman.
Ray died in 1992 soon after receiving, in absentia, an Oscar
for lifetime Achievement. His funeral procession drew a crowd,
which was remarkable even by Calcutta’s standards. For
the duration of his working life, Ray was Calcutta’s
triumphant progeny. |
