Satyajit Ray
1921 – 1992 · India
Known for: Film director whose Apu Trilogy carried the life of rural Bengal to the world
“A film maker who found the whole world in a Bengali village.”
Biography
Satyajit Ray was born in Calcutta on 2 May 1921 into a family that had made its name in print. His grandfather Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury founded the press U. Ray and Sons and the children's magazine Sandesh; his father Sukumar Ray wrote the nonsense verse of Abol Tabol and died when Satyajit was two. He grew up among the machines of the family press and read economics at Presidency College, his attention already on Hollywood comedy and Western classical music. In 1940 his mother persuaded him, against his own inclination, to study fine art at Visva-Bharati in Santiniketan, the university Rabindranath Tagore had founded, where the painters Nandalal Bose and Benode Behari Mukherjee taught him to look at Indian art. He left in 1942 without becoming a painter and went into advertising, designing book jackets for Signet Press until he was the best known typographer in the city.
Two encounters settled his direction: helping Jean Renoir scout Bengal locations for The River, and seeing Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves in London. He began Pather Panchali on his return, shooting at weekends with an untried crew, actors who had never performed and money that kept running out, finishing it in 1955. The film took eleven international prizes, among them the first Best Human Document award at Cannes in 1956, and grew with Aparajito and Apur Sansar into The Apu Trilogy, the childhood, schooling and manhood of a village boy. Ray wrote, cast, scored and edited what followed and drew his own titles: The Music Room in 1958, The Big City in 1963, Charulata in 1964, and the Goopy and Bagha films that Bengali children learned by heart. Between films he invented the detective Feluda and Professor Shonku for young readers, and edited Sandesh, the magazine his grandfather had begun.
The honours accumulated: a record thirty seven Indian National Film Awards, a Golden Lion at Venice, a Golden Bear and two Silver Bears at Berlin, an honorary degree from Oxford in 1978. A heart attack in 1983 slowed him, and the films of his last decade were made under medical restriction, largely indoors. In his final months he received an Academy Honorary Award from a hospital bed in Calcutta and the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honour. Ray died on 23 April 1992 at the age of 70. India renamed the lifetime achievement award of its international film festival after him in 2021, and his thirty six films remain the measure by which Indian cinema takes itself.