Satyajit Ray: A Brief Biography
Any Indian who can read knows of Satyajit Ray. His name and work are held in high esteem even twenty-five years after his death, despite several decades without a new Ray film and the unavailability of many of his films on video or DVD during his lifetime. His oeuvre continues to exert a strong influence on the collective psyche. This man broke through insurmountable barriers to make movies that are respected and honoured throughout the world.
In cinema circles, along with Japan’s Akira Kurosawa, Italy’s Federico Fellini, Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman, Mexico’s Luis Buñuel, Russia’s Andrei Tarkovsky, Germany’s R.W. Fassbinder, France’s Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, and America’s D.W. Griffith, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, Ray is regarded as one of the greatest film-makers of all time.
But sadly, due to the unavailability of his films on video until recently, most people in other parts of the world are not aware of his name or his masterpieces as compared to those of the other great directors.
I cannot take credit for the information provided in this chapter, and everything here has been gleaned from various Ray biographies and from the websites www.satyajitray.org and www.satyajitrayworld.com. Almost anything you might want to know about this great film-maker, as well as the titles of several biographies, can be found there. But a short introduction to Ray and his work here is imperative to understand who it was that I made the film Shatranj Ke Khilari with, and how lucky I was to have had this incredible opportunity.
Satyajit Ray was born on 2 May 1921 into an intellectual and affluent family in Calcutta. His grandfather Upendrakishore Ray Chaudhuri was a distinguished writer, painter and composer who founded U. Ray and Sons, one of the finest printing presses in the country, as well as a popular Bengali children’s magazine called Sandesh. His father, Sukumar Ray, also a talented writer, poet and illustrator, studied printing technology in England and joined the family business. He was a frequent contributor to Sandesh. With these influences, it isn’t hard to see how even as a child Satyajit became fascinated with block-making, printing, illustrating and writing.
Unfortunately, Ray’s grandfather had passed away six years before he was born, and his father fell ill the year he was born and died soon after. About three years after his father’s death, the family’s printing and publishing business folded up, and Satyajit and his mother had to leave their spacious house and move in with relatives, where she taught needlework to supplement the family income. Until the age of eight, his mother homeschooled him and later enrolled him in a government school, where he was an average student. While still at school, Ray became a film buff, regularly reading about Hollywood movies and film stars in magazines. Western classical music became another great interest; he would pick up old records at flea markets and listen to them at home, enraptured by the sounds emanating from the gramophone.
Ray graduated from high school when he was just short of fifteen. His mother insisted that he attend college, where he followed a science curriculum in the first two years and economics in the third (because a family friend, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, had assured him a job if he graduated in economics). But during this period, at the cost of his studies, he spent an increasing amount of time on his two passions: watching movies and listening to classical music. He shifted his focus from stars to directors, avidly studying the works of great film-makers such as Ernst Lubitsch, Frank Capra, John Ford and William Wyler.
After graduating from college in 1939, at the age of eighteen, Ray decided to give up further studies and focus on getting a job as a commercial artist, which he felt he could do even without formal training since he had a natural flair for drawing. His mother, however, felt he was too young to take up a regular job and suggested he study painting at the Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, West Bengal. The university was founded by India’s great poet-mystic Rabindranath Tagore, who had been a close friend of both his grandfather and father. The desire to learn about Indian arts, to become successful as a commercial artist and to respect his mother’s wishes and the lure of Tagore were too strong to ignore. After initial resistance, he agreed to enrol and spent two years at the university.
It is important to consider another influence besides that of cinema and music that created Ray the artist: Brahmo Samaj, a sect of Hinduism adopted by his family as far back as 1880 that had been formed as a reaction to orthodox Hindu practices such as sati and was influenced by Christianity and Islam. This cosmopolitan and rational outlook would later be reflected in many of Ray’s films, showing a progressive outlook and a strong aversion to religious fanaticism.
At Santiniketan, during trips to nearby villages for sketching exercises, the city-bred Ray had his first encounter with rural India. In this period, he also discovered the Oriental arts: Indian sculpture and miniature painting, Japanese woodcuts and Chinese landscapes. Up until then his only exposure to art had been the works of the Western masters. He, along with three friends, undertook a long tour of places of artistic interest in the country. This was when he truly began to appreciate the nuances of Indian art. It made him see how small details could make a great impact—a quality that his films would portray; a quality that his art teacher, Binode Behari Mukherjee, also demonstrated in his own work. Thirty years later, Ray would make a loving documentary on him called The Inner Eye.
During these two years he pursued his two great passions, but despite his great love of cinema, the thought of becoming a film-maker had not yet occurred to him. In August 1941, Rabindranath Tagore died—a great loss to the school and to the nation. As 1942 drew to a close, Ray realized how much he missed city life. On weekends home, he would watch as many films as possible, buy records at flea markets, look for bargains on books and visit not only his mother but also his cousin Bijoya, who lived in the same family house as his mother, and with whom he was falling more and more deeply in love. In remote Santiniketan, Ray had begun to feel out of touch with what was happening in Calcutta, in India and in the world. Mahatma Gandhi had just launched the Quit India Movement against the British Empire; World War II was at Calcutta’s doorstep; and he had missed Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, which had only played for a few days in the city. In December 1942, the Japanese bombed Calcutta for the first time and Ray left Santiniketan for good and returned home.
In April 1943, he joined the British-run advertising agency D.J. Keymer as a junior visualizer and spent the next thirteen years with the firm, where he produced many innovative advertising campaigns and created four new fonts: Ray Roman, Ray Bizarre, Daphnis and Holiday Script.
When his colleague D.K. Gupta branched out on his own with the publishing house Signet Press, he roped Ray in to illustrate books and their jackets. In 1945, Gupta published an abridged version of the novel Pather Panchali by Bibhuti Bhushan Banerjee, which Ray illustrated. Until then, he had not read much Bengali literature and, by his own admission, not even much of Tagore’s writings. But the book made a lasting impression on him, especially after Gupta, a former film magazine editor, remarked to him that it would make a good film. His long association with Signet Press provided Ray an opportunity to read Bengali literature, and some of the books he illustrated, he would later adapt for films.
The aftermath of World War II saw Calcutta flooded with American GIs and, consequently, a sudden proliferation of Hollywood films being screened—a veritable feast for Ray and his friends. In 1947, with the help of a few friends including Bansi Chandragupta and Chidananda Dasgupta, Ray co-founded Calcutta’s first film society. Battleship Potemkin was the first film they screened. Soon, Ray started writing and publishing articles on cinema in newspapers and magazines, both in English and Bengali. He developed another interest as well: writing screenplays for his own pleasure.
In 1949, the famous French film director Jean Renoir arrived in Calcutta to scout locations for The River, a film based on a book of the same name. Perhaps realizing that another opportunity of this sort would not likely come his way again, Ray walked into the hotel where Renoir was staying and sought a meeting. Soon the two were scouting for locations together in the outskirts of the city every weekend. Seeing Ray’s enthusiasm and knowledge about cinema, Renoir asked him if he was planning on becoming a film-maker. To his own surprise, Ray said yes and proceeded to give him a brief outline of Pather Panchali, which he had recently illustrated.
Meanwhile, Ray and Bijoya had married. They were united in love, and in their mutual love of cinema and music, and would stay together in harmony all their lives.
Renoir returned to shoot his film in and around Calcutta and hired several of Ray’s close friends as part of the crew. Ray was quite disappointed at not being able to participate because he had been made art director of his firm and was sent to London to work in the agency’s head office. Ray and Bijoya travelled to London by ship—a journey that took sixteen days. He had carried a notebook with him on that journey in which he made notes on how he would film Pather Panchali: to be shot on actual locations with new faces and no make-up. His friends had reacted negatively to this idea since shooting on location with amateur actors was thought to be unfeasible in an era when all around the world films were shot on sound stages with well-known actors.
During his six months abroad, Ray saw about 100 films, including Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief, which made a profound impression on him. It reconfirmed his conviction that it was possible to make realistic cinema with an almost entirely amateur cast and shoot in actual locations. Later he would write: ‘All through my stay in London, the lessons of The Bicycle Thief and neorealist cinema stayed with me.’
By the time he made the return journey home in late 1950, he had completed his treatment of Pather Panchali. With absolutely no experience in moviemaking, he collected a group of friends to work as technicians on the proposed film project. Subrata Mitra was to be the cinematographer, Anil Choudhury the production controller and Bansi Chandragupta the art director. While looking for backers, he obtained the rights to the story from the writer’s widow. She gave her verbal approval and, later, much to her credit, stuck by her word despite a better financial offer. To explain the concept of his film to potential producers, Ray developed the first of his unique script books, or kheror khata as they were called, which were later to become famous. He filled a small notebook with sketches, dialogue and the treatment. This ‘script’, along with another sketchbook illustrating the key moments of the film, were met with curiosity by producers, and though many were impressed, none agreed to finance the film. Ray spent the next two years trying to find backers.
Having met with refusal at every turn, he eventually decided that he needed to make a short segment of the film to showcase it. He borrowed money against his insurance policy and from friends and relatives, with the intention of shooting on Sundays since he was still working at the advertising agency. In October 1952, he set out to take the first shot: the scene where Apu and his sister Durga discover the train in the field of kash flowers. The following Sunday, when they returned to resume filming, they discovered, to their horror, that the entire field of flowers had been eaten up by a herd of cattle! Ray had to wait for the next season’s flowers to complete the scene and would later write: ‘One day’s work with camera and actors taught me more than all the dozen books I have read.’
Undaunted by obstacles, he went ahead with the job of casting and scouting locations for his film. The cast he gathered was a mix of professional actors and a few with no prior experience in acting. And then, finally, in 1953 he found a producer, Rana Dutta, who provided some funds, with a promise of more after seeing the results and post the release of his latest film. Ray took a month’s leave of absence without pay and began shooting a few more sequences in Boral village. As he later recalled, this period was a great learning experience for him.
The project appeared to be shaping up well when Dutta’s movie was released and turned out to be a flop, drying up all funds. Since Ray had already made arrangements for the shoot, he pawned his wife’s jewellery, with her consent, and filming continued for a few days longer. A total of about 4,000 feet of film resulted from this effort, and was turned down by all the producers he showed it to.
In September 1953, Ray’s son and only child was born. Sandip would grow up to share his father’s passion for film and assist him in many of his masterpieces. For Ray, Sandip’s birth was the only light in a dark tunnel of two years’ worth of rejections.
Finally, someone suggested approaching the Government of West Bengal and, incredibly, it agreed to fund the film. After a break of almost a year, filming resumed in the early part of 1954, but it happened in instalments since this was how government money was sanctioned, each time after endless bureaucratic protocols and paperwork. Ray later said that it was a real miracle that the two child actors did not grow up and the actress who played the old aunt did not die before the film was completed!
In the autumn of 1954, Monroe Wheeler, the director of Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, was in Calcutta setting up an exhibition, and chanced upon stills from Ray’s film. He was so impressed that he offered to hold a world premiere for the film at the museum once it was completed. Six months later, veteran director John Huston came to India to scout locations for The Man Who Would Be King. Wheeler had requested Huston to check on the progress of Ray’s film and Huston gave it rave reviews based on the twenty-minute silent rough-cut Ray could show him. The MoMA premiere was on!
To meet the museum deadline, Ray and his editor worked for ten days and nights continuously during the final stage of post-production. The first print of the film came out the night before it was to be dispatched. There was no time or money for subtitles. Weeks after the screening, a letter arrived from MoMA describing at length how well the film had been received by the audience.
A few months later, in August 1955, Pather Panchali was released in Calcutta. The film did only moderately well in the first two weeks, but by the third week word had spread and it was running to packed houses in three cinemas, then at another cinema chain for seven more weeks. It was a hit. When Jawaharlal Nehru saw the film, he was so moved that he made arrangements for it to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival as India’s official entry, where it won a special prize for Best Human Document.
Pather Panchali went on to win a dozen awards at home and at festivals abroad. It was this recognition that persuaded Ray to take the plunge. He decided to give up advertising and turn to film-making full time; and thus began a long and illustrious career. The success of his first film gave Ray full creative control over his subsequent films as writer, director, casting director, editor and composer. He went on to make a feature film every year, plus several documentaries, for the next thirty-six years.
When I met him, he already had twenty-six memorable films to his credit as well as worldwide acclaim. Looking back at that time, I am amazed that I had the nerve to approach him as a young greenhorn with just one movie to my name. But perhaps it reminded him of his own daring in approaching the great Renoir. I can only thank my stars and his kindness for the opportunity he gave me to learn, to grow, to become better, to have an understanding of film-making that I never would have had without his example and the lessons he taught me.