Satyajit Ray

Satyajit Ray (1921-1992), celebrated Bengali director and one of India's best-known film-makers. Born into one of Calcutta's most illustrious families, Ray was the grandson of Upendra Kishore Ray-Choudhury, the publisher, musician, and author of children's literature. Ray-Choudhury created the famous duo of Goopy and Bagha, which Ray later filmed as Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1968; The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha). Ray's father, the satirist Sukumar Ray, died when Ray was two years old. Ray studied in Shantiniketan, at the rural university established by Rabindranath Tagore, under the nationalist painter Nandlal Bose. He went into advertising, and formed the Calcutta Film Society in 1947. Ray remained an avid cinema enthusiast, encountering several Italian Neo-Realist films while in England in the early 1950s, and meeting Jean Renoir while the latter was shooting The River (1951) in Bengal.

Ray's debut Pather Panchali (1955; Song of the Little Road) was made under strained financial conditions and was only completed when the West Bengali government came through with a last-minute grant. It became an internationally renowned film, winning several awards, including the Best Human Document prize at Cannes. Ray later made two sequels, chronicling the growth of the films' child protagonist, Apu: Aparajito (1956; The Unvanquished) and Apur Sansar (1959; The World of Apu). Collectively known as the Apu trilogy, these remain his best-known films. His later output often adapted the works of Tagore: Charulata (1964), Teen Kanya (1961; Three Daughters), and Ghare Baire (1984; The Home and the World). Among his most popular films are his children's stories, featuring Goopy and Bagha, and the detective Feluda (1974; Sonar Kella/The Golden Fortress, for example). Ray also made several stories based on original screenplays, often using the narrative device of a small number of characters being brought together and interacting for a defined period before they part from one another, changed forever: this is seen in films such as Kanchenjungha (1962) and Nayak (1966; The Hero). Like his contemporaries Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Gahtak, Ray also responded to the turbulent political movements of Calcutta in the late 1960s, generated by the Naxalite uprising, with his Calcutta trilogy: Pratidwandi (1970; The Adversary), Seemabaddha (1971; Company Limited), and Jana Aranya (1975; The Middleman).

Ray is also extremely well known in his native Bengal as a writer of short stories, published in Desh, and other periodicals, and in his own children's journal Sandesh. A collection was published in English as Stories (1987).