Satyajit Ray
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The making of Ray
Dec 5, 2021: The Times of India
When Satyajit Ray was a little boy, his mother took him to meet Rabindranath Tagore at his abode in Santiniketan. Ray wanted Tagore to inscribe a poem in his notebook.
Tagore obliged and wrote this:
Many miles I have roamed, over many a day From this land to that, ready for the price to pay Mountain ranges and oceans too, lay in my way Yet two steps from my door, with wide open eyes, I did not see the dewdrop, on a single sheaf of rice After handing this over to the boy, he told his mother: “Let him keep this, and when he is a little older, he will understand this.” Later in life, the boy shook the film world by portraying the story of a small village in Bengal called Nishchindipur in Pather Panchali. He did focus on a “dewdrop” close to his homeland and was able to emanate an effect that inspired generations of filmmakers all over the world, from Martin Scorsese to Abbas Kiarostami, and put Indian cinema on the world map.
The reason I mention the Tagore poem is that it summarises Ray’s philosophy of life and his films. Though very local in nature, his films managed to strike a universal chord, hence were global in reach. Reflecting on the oeuvre of Ray, almost 65 years after the above incident, another Santiniketan native, Amartya Sen, delivering the Ray Memorial lecture in 1995 had this to say: “The great film-maker’s eagerness to seek the larger unit (ultimately his ability to talk to the whole world) combined well with his enthusiasm for understanding the smallest of the small: the individuality of each person.
Tagore’s influence on the Ray family was since the times of Upendrakishore Roy Chowdhury — Satyajit Ray’s grandfather — who was a writer, painter, singer and a pioneer of the Bengali printing industry. Tagore was an enthusiastic advocate of Upendrakishore’s writing, encouraging him to translate and adapt stories from abroad as well as from Indian legends, but as a frequent visitor to their house, Tagore came to regard Sukumar Ray, Satyajit Ray’s father, as one of his favourite young friends. Sukumar Ray was a genius himself who excelled in many fields. He graduated with double honours in physics and chemistry from the esteemed Presidency College and also started the Nonsense Club around that time. His nonsense rhymes are folklore in Bengal, reminiscent of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. He was an adept photographer, and in 1922, he became the second Indian to be made a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. Thus, the influence of both his grandfather, whom he had not seen, and his father who passed away when he was not even three, was evident in Satyajit Ray.
But I also want to emphasise the influence of women in Ray’s life at a younger age, since the portrayal of well-etched women characters — Karuna Banerjee in Aparajito, Madhabi Mukherjee in Charulata, Kapurush and Mahanagar, Sharmila Tagore in Apur Sansar, Devi and Aranyer Din Ratri, to name a few — formed a strong element in his films.
Kadambini Ganguly, who was the first woman physician of India, was one of Ray’s ancestors. It was Kadambini who delivered Ray and although he never knew her (she died when he was only two), he felt her influence through the profound effect she had on all the Ray women, including his mother, Suprabha Ray, who was a very strong and dignified lady. After the untimely death of her husband, she moved to her brother’s house at Bhowanipore with her three-year-old son. As a young widow, she travelled every day by bus during the 1930s and 40s from south to north Calcutta, where she worked as superintendent of the handicraft department at Vidyasagar Bani Bhawan. This reminds one of Madhabi Mukherjee’s character of a working woman in Ray’s Mahanagar. Ray’s mother was excellent in knitting and stitching, and an excellent sculptor too, whose engraving of Gautam Buddha still finds a place at his Bishop Lefroy Road home (in Calcutta). It was his mother who brought him up, taught him, looked after him, cared for him, and communicated the family’s creative and literary legacy. In fact it was his mother who convinced him to spend time at Santiniketan in the proximity of Tagore at a formative stage in his life. There, he learnt art from the great Nandalal Bose.
In Ray’s Aparajito, world cinema witnessed one of the most endearing mother-son relationships ever seen on celluloid. One wonders how much of it was autobiographical, though the source material is from Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s classic.
If one delves into his earliest awareness of cinema, one must date back to his grandfather’s printing press. The printing press in Apur Sansar comes to mind reading about those stories from his childhood. In the block-making section of the printing press there was a huge imported process camera whose operator Ramdohin became his friend. One imagines little Toto in Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1988 masterpiece Cinema Paradiso in such a setting, where the projectionist Alfredo instills a deep love of films in the boy. But the story in his memoirs, which I find extremely cinematic, was a bit later in life at his uncles’ house. At noon when summer rays of the bright sun got in through a chink in the shutters of the bedroom, Ray would lie there alone for hours watching the “free bioscope” created on the wall: a large inverted image of the traffic outside. Magic lanterns were popular toys in Bengali homes around that period. It was a box with a tube at the front containing a lens, a chimney on top and a handle on the right-hand side. The film ran on two reels with a kerosene lamp for light source. Ray himself suspected that his first inklings of a fascination with cinema started from those images. Ingmar Bergman, another giant of world cinema, also had a similar inspiration through magic lanterns in childhood and subsequently named his autobiography The Magic Lantern.
A little later in life, Ray infused himself with influences from music, painting, drama, and a host of other art forms which contributed to the artist that he was. His subsequent journey of getting addicted to films and his struggle to make Pather Panchali are quite well documented. His films gathered accolades all over the world and put Indian films firmly in the firmament of cinema history.
I find it quite intriguing that although Ray had straddled disparate subjects in his films, he never ventured out of a classical storytelling style — an orderly unfolding of events with a beginning, a middle and an end; a firm rein applied to emotion, and an voidance of disorientation.
He never experimented with form and structure in his films, unlike Mrinal Sen or Mani Kaul in the Indian filmmaking context. The famous ghost dance in Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne was the closest foray Ray made into cinematic experimentation. Was it mainly because the films which prompted his interest in filmmaking were of the classical Hollywood tradition — the films of John Ford, Frank Capra or Billy Wilder — or that he was not brave enough to venture out of his comfort zone? One might get an idea of his thought process from his own writings. He was an ardent admirer of the French New Wave of the 60s and singled out Godard as the thoroughgoing iconoclast.
He wrote of how Godard changed basic cinema language in his films. But he was also aware that Godard’s cinema can be boiled down to a cinema of the head, not the heart, and therefore a cinema of the minority. Ray was extremely conscious of the “audience connect”. So any experimentation with the syntax of film language would alienate the audience, and hence it was not a viable proposition for him. The stigma of esotericism always bothered him. According to him, “avant-gardism” is a luxury which we cannot yet afford in our country. That begs the question, given the strong analytical grasp which Ray had on the craft of cinema, would he have been a different type of filmmaker, experimenting with basic cinematic language at a much deeper level, if he had the luxury which French cinema afforded to the greats? These are counterfactual questions, but worth pondering.
The writer is a national award winning filmmaker.
Filmography
As a director
1955 Pather Panchali
1956 Aparajito (1956)
1958 Jalsaghar
1958 Paras-Pathar
1959 Apur Sansar (1959)
1960 Devi
1961 Rabindranath Tagore (Documentary)
1961 Teen Kanya
1962 Abhijaan
1962 Kanchenjungha
1963 Mahanagar
1964 Charulata
1965 Mahapurush
1965 Kapurush (The Coward)
1965 Two (TV Short)
1966 Nayak
1967 Chiriyakhana
1969 Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne
1970 Aranyer Din Ratri
1970 Pratidwandi
1971 Sikkim (Documentary)
1972 Seemabaddha
1972 The Inner Eye (Documentary short)
1973 Ashani Sanket
1974 Sonar Kella
1976 Bala (Documentary short)
1976 Jana Aranya
1977 Shatranj Ke Khilari
1979 Joi Baba Felunath
1980 Heerak Rajar Deshe (The Kingdom of Diamonds)
1981 Pikoo’s Day (TV Short)
1981 Sadgati (TV Movie)
1984 Ghare-Baire
1987 Sukumar Ray (Short documentary)
1989 Ganashatru
1990 Shakha Proshakha
1991 Agantuk (The Stranger)
As a writer
1950 Chinnamul
1955 Pather Panchali (screenplay)
1956 Aparajito (1956) (screenplay)
1958 Jalsaghar (script)
1958 Paras-Pathar (dialogue) / (screenplay)
1959 Apur Sansar (1959) (screenplay)
1960 Devi (screenplay)
1961 Rabindranath Tagore (Documentary)
1961 Teen Kanya (screenplay)
1962 Abhijaan (screenplay)
1962 Kanchenjungha (story and screenplay)
1963 Mahanagar (scenario) / (screenplay)
1964 Charulata (scenario) / (screenplay)
1965 Mahapurush (screenplay)
1965 Kapurush (The Coward) (screenplay)
1966 Nayak (screenplay) / (story)
1967 Chiriyakhana (screenplay)
1969 Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (screenplay)
1970 Aranyer Din Ratri (screenplay)
1970 Baksa Badal (screenplay)
1970 Pratidwandi (screenplay)
1971 Sikkim (Documentary)
1972 Seemabaddha (screenplay)
1972 The Inner Eye (Documentary short)
1973 Ashani Sanket (screenplay)
1974 Sonar Kella (screenplay) / (story)
1976 Jana Aranya (screenplay)
1977 Shatranj Ke Khilari (dialogue) / (screenplay)
1979 Joi Baba Felunath (novel) / (screenplay)
1980 Heerak Rajar Deshe (The Kingdom of Diamonds) (screenplay) / (story)
1981 Pikoo’s Day (short film)
1981 Sadgati (TV Movie) (dialogue) / (screenplay)
1983 Phatik Chand (novel) / (screenplay)
1984 Ghare-Baire (screenplay)
1986 Kissa Kathmandu Kaa (TV Mini-Series) (novel)
1989 Ganashatru (screenplay)
1990 Shakha Proshakha (screenplay) / (story)
1991 Goopy Bagha Phire Elo (story)
1991 Agantuk (The Stranger) (screenplay) / (story)
1994 Uttoran (screenplay) / (story)
1995 Target
1996 Baksha Rahasya (story)
2000 Dr. Munshir Diary (telefilm, based on his story)
2003 Bombaiyer Bombete (novel)
2007 Kailashey Kelenkari (novel)
2008 Tintorettor Jishu (novel)
2010 Gorosthane Sabdhan (novel)
2011 Royal Bengal Rahasya (novel)
2011 Some Maana (Short)
2012 Jekhane Bhooter Bhoy (story)
2013 Feluda (novel)
As a producer
1956 Aparajito (1956)
1958 Jalsaghar
1959 Apur Sansar (1959)
1960 Devi
1961 Teen Kanya
1962 Kanchenjungha
1991 Agantuk (The Stranger)
As a music composer
1958 Paras-Pathar
1961 Teen Kanya
1962 Abhijaan
1962 Kanchenjungha
1963 Mahanagar
1964 Charulata
1965 Mahapurush
1965 Shakespeare-Wallah
1965 Kapurush (The Coward)
1966 Nayak
1967 Chiriyakhana
1969 Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne
1970 Aranyer Din Ratri
1970 Baksa Badal
1970 Pratidwandi
1971 Sikkim (Documentary)
1972 Seemabaddha
1972 The Inner Eye (Documentary short)
1973 Ashani Sanket
1974 Sonar Kella
1976 Jana Aranya
1977 Shatranj Ke Khilari
1979 Joi Baba Felunath
1980 Heerak Rajar Deshe (The Kingdom of Diamonds)
1981 Sadgati (TV Movie)
1983 Phatik Chand
1984 Ghare-Baire
1989 Ganashatru
1990 Shakha Proshakha
1991 Goopy Bagha Phire Elo
1991 Agantuk (The Stranger)
1996 Baksha Rahasya
1999 Ray
2000 Dr. Munshir Diary (TV Movie)
2008 Tintorettor Jishu (theme music)
2010 Gorosthane Sabdhan (from the archives)
2011 Royal Bengal Rahasya (from the archives)
Madhabi Mukherjee
The actress’ regrets
Priyanka Dasgupta , May 1, 2021: The Times of India
“Manik-da was an extraordinary human being — learned, well-behaved and refined”. That’s how fondly 79-year-old Madhabi Mukherjee describes Satyajit Ray — the director of three of her remarkable films — on the eve of his birth centenary. As the empowered Arati of ‘Mahanagar’ (1963), the lonely Charu of ‘Charulata’ (1964) and the evolved Karuna of ‘Kapurush’ (1965), Mukherjee’s nuanced performances join the dots to form a narrative about a woman’s emancipation.
Describing Ray as a director, Mukherjee said, “There are some professors who teach in a way that one needs to go back home, re-read and then understand. Then there are others who explain everything lucidly in class. Manik-da belongs to the second category.” Her casting in ‘Mahanagar’ was partly accidental since she had agreed to meet Ray only after the crew had offered her the taxi fare!
Few know that the famous swing scene of ‘Charulata’ was shot at Shibpur’s Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology. Even fewer are aware why Tagore’s ‘Nashtanirh’, from which it was adapted, was not retained as the title. “During title registration, it was found that Sunanda Devi had a film with the same name,” she revealed. That 1951 film had Uttam Kumar in the cast. “After contemplating names like ‘Amal’ and ‘Bhupati’, ‘Charulata’ was chosen,” she said. Ray had gone to Cannes with ‘Charulata’. “Everyone was sure that I would win. The norm was that the award would be given to the one who was present in person. Back then, I couldn’t afford the airfare,” she recalled.
Yet, Mukherjee never collaborated with Ray after ‘Kapurush’. Some believe she was a victim of politics. Despite their 21-year age difference, others claim that an alleged relationship between them had led to trouble in Ray’s domestic life. Few refer to an interview where Mukherjee had allegedly admitted that there was “yearning from both sides”.
In her memoir, she had mentioned how not a word was said when Ray had directed Soumitra Chatterjee in 14 films while people within the unit and outside started talking when she did her second with him (‘Charulata’). “I don’t like dirty politics and decided to move away. I had refused ‘Nayak’ and ‘Ashani Sanket’. Manik-da had also asked journalist Sebabrata Gupta to convince me to do ‘Ghare Baire’. I’ve been unyielding and can’t accept if my self-respect is hurt. I never gave Manik-da my reason for refusal. I didn’t even confront the person who did politics.”
Didn’t she feel sad watching those roles played by others? “I was not greedy. I had one kind of trauma. Manik-da had another. He must have understood that someone was doing politics,” she said. She, however, honoured Ray’s invitations to all his film premieres.“I’ve done injustice to Manik-da. He had wanted me to rise above the situation. But I failed him.” She refused to name the trouble-maker.
Memorabilia
2020: Sandip finds a trove
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From: Priyanka Dasgupta, Ray ‘classics’ tumble out of Kolkata loft in his son’s lockdown clean-up, April 26, 2020: The Times of India
Feluda might be proud of what filmmaker Sandip Ray did during the lockdown – snoop around the attic of his Bishop Lefroy Road house in south Kolkata to discover a treasure trove of Satyajit Ray memorabilia tucked away without anyone seemingly knowing about its existence.
The priceless find includes negatives of 100 hitherto unseen photos clicked by Satyajit Ray, over 1,000 unseen negatives of working stills from the sets of the master’s early movies, and letters and telegrams from stalwarts of cinema such as Frank Capra, Arthur C Clarke, Akira Kurosawa and Richard Attenborough.
According to Sandip, who has carried the Ray legacy forward with a series of whodunits revolving around his father’s fictional sleuth Feluda, the long overdue clean-up had thrown up the perfect collection for Ray fans to feast their eyes on during his birth centenary on May 2 next year.
“We used to clear a bit of the loft once in a while, but there was never this kind of uninterrupted time to check if there was anything important lying there,” Sandip said. Till 1959, the Ray family’s address had been south Kolkata’s 31, Lake Avenue. They then shifted to 3, Lake Temple Road, before finally moving to their 1/1 Bishop Lefroy Road address in the heart of the city.
While shifting homes, a lot of stuff kept piling up, but throwing these away was never an option because the family didn’t want to risk disposing of something precious. But it wasn’t until now that Sandip realised what an invaluable treasure the loft held.
This treasure is a ray of hope for us: Son
Some of the negatives in the collection have never seen the light of day. “I don’t remember seeing them printed. Among them are working stills from Pather Panchali,” Sandip said. When shooting for Pather Panchali began at Boral in South 24-Parganas in 1952, acclaimed photographer Nimai Ghosh hadn’t yet joined Ray’s unit. Art director Bansi Chandragupta, who had done the production design of the Ray classic, used to shoot stills on the sets.
Chances are these negatives, once printed, will add a fresh perspective on the making of the classic. Asked to give a rough estimate of the retrieved negatives, Sandip said the count was huge. “During those days, one exposure meant 36 photos. We have managed to retrieve at least 25 such wallets,” he said.
Besides stills from the sets, there are negatives and transparencies/slides that are the Oscar-winning legend’s own work. The letters from iconic filmmakers to Ray are episodes in themselves. “Arthur C Clark had written to Baba about the stories he was writing and the kind of research he was doing. I had read some of these letters. ” Sandip said. The Rays believe there are more hidden gems waiting to be discovered since only 50% of the loft has been cleared. “This is a terrible and uncertain time. Chancing upon this treasure trove has been a ray of hope for us,” he said.
The writer
Some famous works
July 4, 2021: The Times of India
Satyajit Ray’s films are known, watched and discussed all over the world, but Ray was not just a filmmaker. He used to compose music for his own films, he was an illustrator, a calligrapher, and, as many of us have now come to know ever since the webseries ‘Ray’ hit our computer and cellphone screens, he was an eminent name in the world of literature too. In his lifetime, Ray wrote many novels, novellas, short stories, plays and essays. Four of these short stories have been adapted for ‘Ray’ but there’s a wealth of other short stories, most of which are available in English translation.
Ray’s stories can be divided into several genres. The first and most prominent one is horror. There is hardly a subgenre of horror that the writer hasn’t written in. In ‘Ratan Babu and that Man’, for instance, a quiet middle-aged loner goes to a sleepy little suburban town in search of a few weeks of solitude only to meet a man who seems to have an uncanny number of things in common with him. Before we realise that Ray is slowly diving into the world of doppelgangers, his skilful writing, vivid descriptions of sunsets, dusks and railway overbridges, and the breath-taking thrills of psychological horror have already gripped us, making it an unforgettable story. In ‘Bhuto’, an aspiring ventriloquist wishes to learn from the master of the art, but when the master refuses, the young man swears revenge by not only learning the art himself, but by shaping his dummy in the resemblance of the master who shunned him so ruthlessly. But, as he soon realises, his troubles have just begun. In ‘Fritz’, a man returns to the circuit house in a town in Rajasthan which he had visited as a child, and is suddenly reminded of a Swiss doll which he had buried in a corner of the lawn after a dog had torn it apart. That night, the doll named Fritz comes back to life, eager to play with his long-lost friend. In what is perhaps Ray’s most famous horror story titled Khagam, a young man kills the pet cobra of a reclusive hermit, and the hermit curses him. That night, in a forest rest house, the man slowly begins to turn into a cobra himself, until the hermit is found in the morning feeding milk to his favourite pet. Ray’s story reads just like a screenplay, and he manages to evoke such stunningly horrifying imagery that even today, anyone who reads it will check under their bed before going to sleep.
…TO THRILLS
The second genre that Ray wrote in was that of psychological thriller, although some readers may argue that these stories were, in essence, horror stories. Purists would beg to differ though, but whichever genre they might have been in, the stories themselves were unmistakably thrilling. In ‘A Strange Night for Mr Shasmal’, a young man on the run takes shelter in a rest house, only to find that all the living things that he has killed in his life — birds, snakes, insects, cats and dogs — have turned up in his room to pay him a visit. Very soon though, the story takes an unexpected turn, with the advent of the final unexpected visitor. Psychological thriller/ horror at its best. In ‘Mr Eccentric’, an aged retired man lives in a house in Darjeeling and has the rather strange habit of collecting seemingly inconsequential things he finds lying on the road — a button, a pair of gloves, a walking stick — until a dark truth is revealed about the items he collects.
Note how Ray didn’t stop short of dealing with subjects which we normally wouldn’t associate with children’s literature. But Ray never thought of children as any different from adults, claiming instead that their minds are much more fertile, and hence, much more capable of accepting fresh ideas.
SHAPESHIFTERS TO SHAPING KIDS
This brings us to the third genre of stories that Ray wrote. In these stories, Ray gave children priceless life lessons, preparing them for the world of adulthood and the myriad joys and sorrows that came with it. In a story titled ‘Class Friend’, Ray wrote about a successful and affluent man who is paid a visit by an old friend from school. When the needy friend seeks financial help, the protagonist refuses, but a strange turn of events makes him change his mind. In ‘Apodartho’ (The Idiot which hasn’t been translated yet), a young boy tells the story of a dim-witted but harmless uncle who everyone chides, but who, many years later, by dint of the fact that he was now the eldest surviving member of the family, managed to earn everyone’s love and respect. In ‘The Millionaire’, an affluent industrialist who had consciously detached himself from all his friends and well-wishers learns a lesson when he happens to meet his younger self. These are all stories that help shape young minds, that teach them the difference between right and wrong, and the shades in between.
And there are dozens and dozens of more such stories. All of them so visual, so screenplay-like that they are all waiting to be adapted for the screen. In the hands of the right filmmakers, they can turn out to be magnificent films that will once again remind the world of the remarkable oeuvre of the genius called Satyajit Ray.
See also
Pather Panchali 1955
Satyajit Ray
