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Ray directed 36 films, including feature films, documentaries and shorts. He was also a fiction writer, publisher, illustrator, calligrapher, music composer, graphic designer and film critic. He authored several short stories and novels, primarily for young children and teenagers. Feluda, the sleuth, and Professor Shonku, the scientist in his science fiction stories, are popular fictional characters created by him. In 1978, he was awarded an honorary degree by Oxford University.

Ray’s first film, Pather Panchali (1955), won eleven international prizes, including the inaugural Best Human Document award at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival. This film, along with Aparajito and Apur Sansar (The World of Apu) (1959), form The Apu Trilogy. Ray did the scripting, casting, scoring, and editing, and designed his own credit titles and publicity material. Ray received many major awards in his career, including 32 Indian National Film Awards, a Golden Lion, a Golden Bear, 2 Silver Bears, many additional awards at international film festivals and ceremonies, and an Academy Honorary Award in 1992. The Government of India honoured him with the Bharat Ratna, its highest civilian award, in 1992. Ray had received many noticeable awards and gained a prestigious position over his life time.

Early life and education

Ray as a child

Satyajit Ray was born to Sukumar and Suprabha Ray in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Sukumar died when Satyajit was barely three, and the family survived on Suprabha Ray’s meager income.^[7] Ray studied at Ballygunge Government High School in Calcutta, and completed his BA in economics at Presidency College, Calcutta (then affiliated with the University of Calcutta), though his interest was always in the fine arts.^[7]

In 1940, his mother insisted that he study at Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, founded by Rabindranath Tagore. Ray was reluctant to go, due to his fondness for Calcutta and the low regard for the intellectual life at Santiniketan.^[8] His mother’s persuasiveness and his respect for Tagore finally convinced him to try. In Santiniketan, Ray came to appreciate Oriental art. He later admitted that he learned much from the famous painters Nandalal Bose and Benode Behari Mukherjee.^[9] He later produced a documentary, The Inner Eye, about Mukherjee. His visits to Ajanta, Ellora and Elephanta stimulated his admiration for Indian art.^[10]

Sukumar Ray and Suprabha Ray, parents of Satyajit Ray (1914)

In 1943, Ray started working at D.J. Keymer, a British advertising agency, as a junior visualiser, earning 80 rupees a month. Although he liked visual design (graphic design) and he was mostly treated well, there was tension between the British and Indian employees of the firm. The British were better paid, and Ray felt that “the clients were generally stupid.”^[11] Later, Ray worked for the Signet Press, a new publisher started by D. K. Gupta. Gupta asked Ray to create book cover designs for the company and gave him complete artistic freedom. Ray designed covers for many books, including Jibanananda Das‘s Banalata Sen, and Rupasi Bangla, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay‘s Chander Pahar, Jim Corbett‘s Maneaters of Kumaon, and Jawaharlal Nehru‘s Discovery of India. He worked on a children’s version of Pather Panchali, a classic Bengali novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, renamed as Aam Antir Bhepu (The mango-seed whistle). Designing the cover and illustrating the book, Ray was deeply influenced by the work. He used it as the subject of his first film, and featured his illustrations as shots in his ground-breaking film.^[12]

The facade of Satyajit Ray’s house in Kolkata (Calcutta)

Along with Chidananda Dasgupta and others, Ray founded the Calcutta Film Society in 1947. They screened many foreign films, many of which Ray watched and seriously studied. He befriended the American soldiers stationed in Calcutta during World War II, who kept him informed about the latest American films showing in the city. He came to know a RAF employee, Norman Clare, who shared Ray’s passion for films, chess and western classical music.^[13]

In 1949, Ray married Bijoya Das, his first cousin and long-time sweetheart.^[14] The couple had a son, Sandip Ray, a film director.^[15] In the same year, French director Jean Renoir came to Calcutta to shoot his film The River. Ray helped him to find locations in the countryside. Ray told Renoir about his idea of filming Pather Panchali, which had long been on his mind, and Renoir encouraged him in the project.^[16] In 1950, D.J. Keymer sent Ray to London to work at the headquarters. During his six months in London, Ray watched 99 films. Among these was the neorealist film Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) (1948) by Vittorio De Sica, which had a profound impact on him. Ray later said that he walked out of the theatre determined to become a filmmaker.

Career

The Apu years (1950–59)

See also: The Apu Trilogy and Satyajit Ray filmography

22-year-old Ray at Santiniketan

After being “deeply moved” by Pather Panchali,^[18] the 1928 classic Bildungsroman of Bengali literature, Ray decided to adapt it for his first film. Pather Panchali is a semi-autobiographical novel describing the maturation of Apu, a small boy in a Bengal village.^[19]

Ray gathered an inexperienced crew, although both his cameraman Subrata Mitra and art director Bansi Chandragupta went on to achieve great acclaim. The cast consisted of mostly amateur actors. After unsuccessful attempts to persuade many producers to finance the project, Ray started shooting in late 1952 with his personal savings and hoped to raise more money once he had some footage shot, but did not succeed on his terms.^[20] As a result, Ray shot Pather Panchali over two and a half years, an unusually long period, based on when he or his production manager Anil Chowdhury could raise additional funds.^[20] He refused funding from sources who wanted to change the script or supervision over production. He also ignored advice from the Indian government to incorporate a happy ending, but he did receive funding that allowed him to complete the film.^[21] Ray showed an early film passage to the American director John Huston, who was in India scouting locations for The Man Who Would Be King. Impressed with what he saw, Huston notified Monroe Wheeler at the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) that a major talent was on the horizon.^[22]

With a loan from the West Bengal government, Ray finally completed the film; it was released in 1955 to critical acclaim. It earned numerous awards and had long theatrical runs in India and abroad. The Times of India wrote “It is absurd to compare it with any other Indian cinema […] Pather Panchali is pure cinema.”^[23] In the United Kingdom, Lindsay Anderson wrote a positive review of the film.^[23] However, the film also gained negative reactions; François Truffaut was reported to have said, “I don’t want to see a movie of peasants eating with their hands.”^[24] Bosley Crowther, then the most influential critic of The New York Times, criticised the film’s loose structure and conceded that it “takes patience to be enjoyed”.^[25] Edward Harrison, an American distributor was worried that Crowther’s review would dissuade audiences, but the film enjoyed an eight months theatrical run in the United States.^[26] A film still of Apu having his hair brushed by his sister Durga and mother Sarbojaya was featured in The Family of Man, a MoMA exhibition that was seen by 9 million visitors.^[27] Of the thirteen exhibition images depicting India, it was the only one taken by an Indian photographer. Curator Edward Steichen credited it to Ray, but it was likely taken by the film’s cinematographer, Subrata Mitra.^[28]

Ray’s international career started in earnest after the success of his next film, the second in The Apu Trilogy, Aparajito (1956) (The Unvanquished).^[29] This film depicts the eternal struggle between the ambitions of a young man, Apu, and the mother who loves him.^[29] Upon release, Aparajito won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, bringing Ray considerable acclaim.^[30] In a retrospective review, Edward Guthmann of San Francisco Chronicle praised Ray for his ability to capture emotions, and blend music with storytelling to create a “flawless” picture.^[31] Critics such as Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak rank it higher than Ray’s first film.^[29] Ray directed and released two other films in 1958: the comic Parash Pathar (The Philosopher’s Stone), and Jalsaghar (The Music Room), a film about the decadence of the Zamindars, considered one of his most important works.^[32] Timeout magazine gave Jalsaghar a positive review, describing it as “slow, rapt and hypnotic”.^[33]

While making Aparajito, Ray had not planned a trilogy, but after he was asked about the idea in Venice, it appealed to him.^[34] He finished the last of the trilogy, Apur Sansar (The World of Apu) in 1959. Ray introduced two of his favourite actors, Soumitra Chatterjee and Sharmila Tagore, in this film. It opens with Apu living in a Calcutta house in near-poverty; he becomes involved in an unusual marriage with Aparna. The scenes of their life together form “one of the cinema’s classic affirmative depictions of married life.”^[35] Critics Robin Wood and Aparna Sen thought it was a major achievement to mark the end of the trilogy. After Apur Sansar was harshly criticised by a Bengali critic, Ray wrote an article defending it. He rarely responded to critics during his filmmaking career, but also later defended his film Charulata, his personal favourite.^[36] Critic Roger Ebert summarised the trilogy as “It is about a time, place and culture far removed from our own, and yet it connects directly and deeply with our human feelings. It is like a prayer, affirming that this is what the cinema can be, no matter how far in our cynicism we may stray.”^[37]

Despite Ray’s success, it had little influence on his personal life in the years to come. He continued to live with his wife and children in a rented house, with his mother, uncle and other members of his extended family.^[38]

From Devi to Charulata (1959–64)

Ray with Ravi Shankar recording for Pather Panchali

During this period, Ray made films about the British Raj period, a documentary on Tagore, a comic film (Mahapurush) and his first film from an original screenplay (‘Kanchenjungha’). He also made a series of films that, taken together, are considered by critics among the most deeply felt portrayals of Indian women on screen.

Ray followed Apur Sansar with 1960’s Devi (The Goddess), a film in which he examined the superstitions in Hindu society. Sharmila Tagore starred as Doyamoyee, a young wife who is deified by her father-in-law. Ray was worried that the Central Board of Film Certification might block his film, or at least make him re-cut it, but Devi was spared. Upon international distribution, the critic from Chicago Reader described the film as “full of sensuality and ironic undertones”.^[40] In 1961, on the insistence of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Ray was commissioned to make Rabindranath Tagore, based on the poet of the same name, on the occasion of his birth centennial, a tribute to the person who likely most influenced Ray. Due to limited footage of Tagore, Ray was challenged of making the film mainly with static material. He said that it took as much work as three feature films.^[41]

In the same year, together with Subhas Mukhopadhyay and others, Ray was able to revive Sandesh, the children’s magazine which his grandfather had founded.^[6] Ray had been saving money for some years to make this possible. A duality in the name (Sandesh means both “news” in Bengali and also a sweet popular dessert) set the tone of the magazine (both educational and entertaining). Ray began to make illustrations for it, as well as to write stories and essays for children. Writing eventually became a steady source of income.^[42]

In 1962, Ray directed Kanchenjungha, Based on his first original screenplay, it was also his first colour film. It tells the story of an upper-class family spending an afternoon in Darjeeling, a picturesque hill town in West Bengal. They try to arrange the engagement of their youngest daughter to a highly paid engineer educated in London. Ray had first conceived shooting the film in a large mansion, but later decided to film it in the famous town. He used many shades of light and mist to reflect the tension in the drama. Ray noted that while his script allowed shooting to be possible under any lighting conditions, a commercial film crew in Darjeeling failed to shoot a single scene, as they only wanted to do so in sunshine.^[43] The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther gave the film a mixed review; he praised Ray’s “soft and relaxed” filmmaking but thought the characters were clichés.^[44] Also in the 1960s, Ray visited Japan and took pleasure in meeting filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, whom he highly regarded.^[45]

In 1964, Ray directed Charulata (The Lonely Wife); one of Ray’s favourite films, it was regarded by many critics as his most accomplished.^[46] Based on Tagore’s short story, Nastanirh (Broken Nest), the film tells of a lonely wife, Charu, in 19th-century Bengal, and her growing feelings for her brother-in-law Amal. In retrospective reviews, The Guardian called it “extraordinarily vivid and fresh”,^[47] while The Sydney Morning Herald praised Madhabi Mukherjee’s casting, the film’s visual style and camera movements.^[48] Ray said the film contained the fewest flaws among his work, and it was his only work which, given a chance, he would make exactly the same way.^[49] At the 15th Berlin International Film Festival, Charulata earned him a Silver Bear for Best Director.Other films in this period include Mahanagar (The Big City), Teen Kanya (Three Daughters), Abhijan (The Expedition), Kapurush (The Coward) and Mahapurush (Holy Man). For the first one of these, Mahanagar drew praise from British critics; Philip French opined that it was one of Ray’s best.