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| Biography - Satyajit Ray |
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(1921-1992) |
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Satyajit Ray was born on May 2, 1921 in Calcutta to Sukumar and Suprabha Ray. He graduated from the Ballygunge Government School and studied Economics at Presidency College. He then attended Kala Bhavan, the Art School at Tagore's University at Santiniketan during 1940-1942. Without completing the five-year course, he returned to Calcutta in 1943, to join the British-owned advertising agency D. J. Keymer as a visualizer. Within a few years, he rose to be its art director.
In 1948, he married Bijoya Das, a former actress/singer who also happened to be his cousin. Their only offspring, Sandip, was born in 1953. In 1983, Satyajit Ray suffered a massive heart attack. He died on April 23, 1992 in Calcutta after having some 36 films and documentaries and numerous books and articles to his credit.
Satyajit Ray's biographers and film scholars writing on his complex and prodigious oeuvre have tried to pigeonhole him in one way or another. He has been called a Bengali Bergman, a Calcutta Chekhov or a sort of reincarnated Renoir.
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Little Satyajit
in mother's lap |
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One critic, Michael Sragow, describes Ray as the most sublime filmmaker to emerge since Renoir and De Sica. In the West, most scholars assumed Ray, artistic and somewhat offbeat, must have emerged from India's large and prolific motion picture tradition. In India, Ray was initially dismissed as a peddler of poverty, someone who made low budget features with foreign markets, international film festivals and awards in mind. The more discriminating marvels at Ray's genius calling him the last Titan of the Bengal Renaissance. On the other hand, to the post-colonialists Ray is a modernist whose work is not really Indian; Bollywood is quintessentially Indian.
A proper Ray biography must address the issue of Ray's legacy. In this brief essay, we shall attempt to do this in several sections.
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| Emergence of Ray |
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Ray directing a death scene in
‘ Pather Panchali' |
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In 1955, with the release of his first feature film, Pather Panchali , Satyajit Ray emerged as an internationally acclaimed filmmaker. His reputation further surged with the completion of the Apu Trilogy (1959), considered by some critics to be the greatest cinematic suite ever made. By the time of his death in 1992, Ray had made twenty-nine features and seven documentaries and shorts. Working with simple tools, he fashioned tales, both visual and literary, that were straightforward in their presentation yet richly complex in their capacity to suggest multiple meanings and interpretations. He wrote his own screenplays, handled the camera, and did his own editing work as well. After 1962, he began scoring the music for all his films. Trained as a graphic artist, he sketched out each scene before shooting and designed the posters that publicized his new releases.
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| Family and Early Life |
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| Satyajit before his school going days |
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Satyajit Ray was born into a distinguished family of artists, writers, musicians, scientists, and physicians. His grandfather, Upendra Kishore, was an innovator, a writer of children's storybooks (popular to this day), an illustrator, printer, and musician. Ray's father, Sukumar, trained as a printing technologist in England, was Bengal's most beloved nonsense rhyme writer, illustrator, and cartoonist. He died when Satyajit was only two and a half years old.
Ray's mother, Suprabha, was a singer. After his father's death, they lived with Suprabha's brother's family and with Ray's paternal uncles. The extended family had many talented uncles, aunts, and cousins, including artists and musicians. One of the uncles was a cameraman, who later became a director of films. As a youngster, Ray developed two significant interests. The first was music, especially Western Classical music. He learned to read music, collected albums, and started to attend concerts. The second was movies. He saw silent films as well as “talkies,” and began to compile scrapbooks with clippings from newspapers and magazines on Hollywood stars. As a young man, Ray developed an avid interest in the craft of cinema. He read books on filmmaking and theoretical works on cinema, and wrote screenplays for his own amusement.
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| Santiniketan |
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Upon graduating from Presidency College, Kolkata, majoring in economics, he joined the art school Kala Bhavan, founded by Rabindranath Tagore, at Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan, at Tagore's personal encouragement. Tagore had been close to both Upendra Kishore and Sukumar Ray. At Santiniketan, Ray learned to draw from the great master teachers, Nandalal Bose and Binode Behari Mukherjee. Bose and Mukherjee were pioneers of what became known as the Bengal School, innovating and inventing an art form that emphasized an Asian style, combining Chinese and Japanese calligraphy with traditional Indian elements. Ray later developed this style in his illustrations and graphic designs.
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| Satyajit, a student of Art, at Tagore's university |
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| Film Apprenticeship and D.J. Keymer |
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While in Santiniketan, Ray was exposed to film theory and read books on cinema. He discovered that his two passions, music and film, strongly converged. After returning to Kolkata, he began the habit of going to the theatre with a notebook. He was not just watching, he was studying as well. His apprenticeship in filmmaking thus began.
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Ray joined the British advertising agency D. J. Keymer in Kolkata in 1943 as a junior designer. The job helped him bloom into a graphic artist, typographer, book-jacket designer, and illustrator. He went to London in 1950 on a commission from the company. While there, he saw many films, including Vittorio De Sica's Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief, 1948) and Jean Renoir's La Règle du jeu (Rules of the Game, 1939), which made abiding impressions on him.
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| Pather Panchali |
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| Shots drawn in water colour before the shooting of ‘Pather Panchali' |
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While returning from London by sea, Ray illustrated a children’s edition of Pather Panchali, a semi-autobiographical novel by noted Bengali author Bibhuti Bhushan Banerjee. The sketches became storyboard elements when he elected to make a film from the novel. He managed somehow to make the film, using mostly amateur actors, shooting outdoors in natural light, financing it by pawning his rare music albums and his wife’s jewellery, and calling on his mother’s connections in government circles in Kolkata. This became typical of his mode of independent filmmaking- an endless search for the elusive producer who would agree to his nonnegotiable artistic terms.
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The release of Pather Panchali in 1955 brought Satyajit Ray instant international as well as national recognition. It was first screened without subtitles at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955 to critical acclaim. It was shown the following year at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Best Human Document award. The die was cast: Ray resigned from his post at D. J. Keymer, and he became a full-time filmmaker, directing one or more films every year until 1983, when he suffered a massive heart attack. He remained an acute heart patient, which drastically reduced his ability to make films, though he continued to produce provocative work.
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| Beginning of Fiction Writing |
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| The frontispiece painted in water colour by Ray himself for his first prose fiction in Bengali : The Diary of Space Traveller |
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Ray earned very modest amounts from directing his small-budget films, not sufficient to support his small family. He started writing and illustrating stories for Sandesh, the children's magazine that his grandfather had founded, and which Ray revived in 1961. In 1968 the editor of Desh, a popular Bengali literary magazine, persuaded Ray to write a novella for its annual edition. Ray, the writer of mysteries, adventure stories, and science fiction, all appropriately illustrated by him, thus made his debut on Bengal's literary scene. This was the beginning of his prolific literary output of some seventy novellas, stories, and translations, each of which became a best-seller in Bengali.
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| Ray Honours |
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Oscar for
Lifetime achievement |
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During his life and filmmaking career, Ray received many honors. In addition to the Honorary Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement, which he received in 1992 in his hospital room, a few weeks before he passed away, he was presented with the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honor. Oxford University conferred on him an honorary doctorate; the University of California, Berkeley, awarded him the Berkeley Medal. President Francois Mitterrand of France went to Kolkata (Calcutta) to personally award him the Légion d'Honneur.
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| Summing Up |
We have attempted to locate the multiple sources of the influences that informed Ray's oeuvre. However, what in the final analysis emerged in Ray's art is his own agency and the originality of his creation. Looking at his designs, graphics, and posters one finds a grand artist assured in the practice of his media and using it deftly to realize the idea and intent. His music has a playful melodic geometry, reduced to the barest essentials, with a focus usually on one or two timbres. The flute presents a series of arpeggiated phrases
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Ray, nearing 70, on location of his last film
‘The Stranger' |
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forming a musical signature of his own. One can say the same thing about his films: they show a radical simplicity concealing layer upon layer of ingenuity and complex composition. These defy all labels- the only one that seems apt and appropriate is Ray's own signature in all his work.
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