In 1955, with the release of his first feature film, Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray emerged as an internationally acclaimed filmmaker. His reputation surged further with the completion of the Apu Trilogy (1959), considered by some critics to be the greatest cinematic trilogy 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 composing the music for all his films. Trained as a graphic artist, he sketched each scene before shooting, and designed the posters that publicized his new releases.
 
Ray worked under two severe constraints: all his films, made for relatively small Bengali-speaking audiences in India, had to be modestly budgeted, and he had to rely on stories and themes that he found filmable in modern Bengali fiction. These included some of his own - he is Bengal’s best-selling adventure and science-fiction writer to this day. During his life and filmmaking career, Ray received many honours. In addition to the Honorary Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement, which was conferred on him in 1992 in his hospital room, a few weeks before he passed away, he was presented with the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian honour. 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 L gion of d’Honneur.

Satyajit Ray was born on May 2, 1921 in Kolkata to Sukumar and Suprabha Ray. This was a distinguished family of artists, writers, musicians, scientists, and physicians. His grandfather, Upendra Kishore, was in 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 began attending 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.
 
Upon graduating from Presidency College, Kolkata, with a major in economics, he joined - with Tagore’s personal encouragement - Kala Bhavan, the art school founded by Rabindranath Tagore at Vishva Bharat University in Shantiniketan. Tagore had been close to both Upendra Kishore and Sukumar Ray. At Shantiniketan, Ray learned to draw from the great masters, Nandalal Bose and Binode Behari Mukherjee. Bose and Mukherjee were pioneers of what came to be known as the Bengal School, innovating and inventing an art form that emphasised an Asian style, combining Chinese and Japanese calligraphy with traditional Indian elements. Ray later developed this style in his illustrations and graphic designs.
 
While in Shantiniketan, Ray was exposed to film theory and read books on cinema. He discovered that his two passion - music and film - actually converged. After returning to Kolkata, he fell into 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.

Ray joined the British advertising agency JD 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. During his stay there he saw many films, including Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1948) and Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), which made abiding impressions on him.

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 non-negotiable artistic terms.

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 DJ Keymer, and 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.

Ray earned very modest amounts from directing his small-budget films, not enough 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 bestseller in Bengali.

One can identify three major compositional periods in Ray’s life. The first period (1955-1964) was remarkable for its robust optimism, celebration of the human spirit, and creative satisfaction. Ray was not only directing and scripting, but also composing the music and taking charge of the cinematography. During this period, he directed, arguably, his greatest films. This period coincided with India’s early years of independence and Nehru’s experiments with secular democracy based on humanism, internationalism, and modernism.

The second period (1965-1977) saw India come under a dark spell. There was the war with China (1962) during Nehru’s last years, and a war with Pakistan (1965). Growing urban unemployment and an agricultural crisis brought about by a command economy created near-famine conditions in parts of the country. The war in Vietnam and the Cultural Revolution in China had radicalised Kolkata’s youth, its artists, writers and intellectuals. Revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence gripped the city. Kolkata, once known as a friendly and safe city, became a dangerous place to live in. The Bangladesh war (1971) caused an influx of millions of refugees fleeing the Pakistani army, filling Kolkata and its outskirts. Four years later, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, battling a massive opposition to her government, imposed National Emergency on the country. India came under draconian control, but there were few signs of serious protests.

Ray was uneasy. The films he made during this period clearly projected a troubled vision of India. The Calcutta Trilogy - The adversary, Company Limited, and The Middleman - created powerful portraits of alienation, waywardness, and moral collapse. Days and Nights in the Forest and Distant Thunder, made during the Bangladesh War on the subject of the Bengal famine of 1943, showed rape and violence in a straightforward manner. The Chess Players, made during the Emergency, used the metaphor of a chess game to show how the King of Oudh, more a poet and composer than a ruler, submitted to the British takeover of his kingdom in 1856 as his people fled their villages. The two short films, Pikoo and Deliverance, raised the issues of adultery and untouchability. Even his so-called escapist films - the Goopy and Bagha musicals and the detective film Golden Fortress - carried messages against war, criminality and greed. In midlife, at the height of his creative powers, Ray seemed to have adopted a dark worldview. Socially, he became increasingly isolated.

In the third and last phase (1977-1992), Ray’s worldview came full circle. In the 1980s he became even more isolated and distant. In the films he made during these years, he related his messages in definitive terms: unlike his early work, his films became didactic and frank. Gone were the carefully crafted shades of greys; Home and the World (1984), based on a Tagore novel, is a diatribe against nationalism, the mix of religion and politics, and political opportunism and dishonesty. Although the theme is the swadeshi movement of 1905, Home and the World addressed issues of critical concern in the 1980s. Stricken by two heart attacks, Ray was not able to make films with his characteristic rigor. He made modest family dramas, shot indoors under the watchful eyes of his doctors. He made three films, all based on his own stories, in 1988, 1989, and 1990. The first, Enemy of the People, an adaptation of the lbsen play to Bengali in 1988, addressed questions of capitalist corruption and manipulation of religion, people, politics, and environment. Branches of a Tree (1989) also addressed issues of capitalism as it impacts family alues and ethics. The protagonist, a heart patient like Ray, is obsessed with honesty, mediated by mood swings of music and madness. The third film, The Stranger (1990), literally carries Ray’s own voice in three places, where he sings. The protagonist is clearly Ray himself. His global concerns are articulated locally. Who is an artist? Who is civilized and who is primitive? The protagonist is against narrowness of all sorts against boundaries and borders. "Don’t be a frog in the well", he tells his grandnephew as the film comes to an end.

Ray was a product of the Anglo-Bengali encounter of the 19th Century. His cultural, intellectual, and ideological roots can be traced to what is known as the ‘Bengali Renaissance’. As a powerfully creative artist, his craft was influenced as much by the West as by the Bengal School. One can argue that, in the final analysis, he was more than a product of the ‘Calcutta modern’ - a synthesis of the East and the West. His creativity, he once remarked, remained grounded both in what is uniquely Bengali and in what is universal.

Ray’s mother had taken him to visit Rabindranath Tagore when he was five years old. Young Ray extended his autograph book to Tagore. Tagore wrote in it in verse:
For a long time, over many miles, I’ve been to many countries.
I’ve spent a lot of money.
I’ve seen the highest peaks;
I’ve seen the greatest oceans.
But I still have yet to open my eyes, glace over at the field next to my house, and see a dewdrop on a blade of grass.

Tagore then told Ray, "When you grow up, you’ll understand what I’ve written for you here". Years later, while filming Pather Panchali, Ray realised that all his theoretical knowledge and study of film proved inadequate to the challenge he faced. He wrote, "One day’s work with camera and actors taught me more than all the dozen books I read on filmmaking. I found out for myself how to catch the hushed stillness of dusk in a Bengali village, when the wind drops and turns the ponds into sheets of glass, and the smoke from the ovens settles in wispy trails over the landscape, and plaintive blows on conch shells from homes far and near are joined by the chorus of crickets which rise as the light falls, until all one sees are stars in the sky, and the fireflies that blink and swirl in the thickets."

Satyajit Ray died on April 23, 1992. A million mourners marched in the funeral procession, the greatest outpouring of public grief in Kolkata since Tagore’s death fifty years earlier.
(The writer teaches history and directs the Satyajit Ray Film and Study Collection at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA]