Satyajit Ray (Bengali: [ʃot̪ːod͡ʒit̪ rae̯] ; 2 May 1921 – 23 April 1992) was an Indian film director, screenwriter, author, lyricist, magazine editor, illustrator, calligrapher, and composer. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential film directors in the history of cinema. He is celebrated for works including The Apu Trilogy (1955–1959), The Music Room (1958), The Big City (1963), Charulata (1964), and the Goopy–Bagha trilogy (1969–1992).
Ray was born in Calcutta to author Sukumar Ray and Suprabha Ray. Starting his career as a commercial artist, Ray was drawn into independent film-making after meeting French filmmaker Jean Renoir (who was in India to make his film The River) and viewing Vittorio De Sica's Italian neorealist film Bicycle Thieves (1948) during a visit to London. He started work on his first film after he returned from London.
Ray directed 36 films, including feature films, documentaries, and shorts. Ray's first film, Pather Panchali (1955), won eleven international prizes, including the inaugural Best Human Document award at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival. This film, along with Aparajito (1956) and Apur Sansar (The World of Apu) (1959), form The Apu Trilogy. Ray did the scripting, casting, scoring, and editing for the movie and designed his own credit titles and publicity material. He also authored several short stories and novels, primarily for young children and teenagers. Popular characters created by Ray include Feluda the sleuth, Professor Shonku the scientist, Tarini Khuro the storyteller, and Lalmohan Ganguly the novelist.
Ray received many major awards in his career, including a record thirty-seven Indian National Film Awards which includes Dadasaheb Phalke Award, a Golden Lion, a Golden Bear, two Silver Bears, many additional awards at international film festivals and ceremonies; till date remaining the only Indian to receive two out of Big Three film festivals top prizes. He received an Academy Honorary Award in 1992. In 1978, he was awarded an honorary degree by Oxford University. The Government of India honoured him with the Bharat Ratna, its highest civilian award, in 1992. On the occasion of the birth centenary of Ray, the International Film Festival of India, in recognition of the auteur's legacy, rechristened in 2021 its annual Lifetime Achievement Award to the "Satyajit Ray Lifetime Achievement Award". In 2024, Forbes ranked Ray as the 8th greatest film director (worldwide) of all time in its list of "The 30 Greatest Film Directors of All Time."
Background, early life and career
Satyajit Ray's ancestry can be traced back to at least ten generations. His family had acquired the name "Ray". Although they were Bengali Kayasthas, the Rays were "Vaishnavas" (worshippers of Vishnu), as opposed to the majority of Bengali Kayasthas, who were "Shaktos" (worshippers of the Shakti or Shiva).
The earliest-recorded ancestor of the Ray family was Ramsunder Deo (Deb), born in the middle of the sixteenth century. He was a native of Chakdah village in the Nadia district of present-day West Bengal, India, and migrated to Sherpur in East Bengal. He became son-in-law of the ruler of Jashodal (in the present day Kishoreganj District of Bangladesh) and was granted a jagir (a feudal land grant). His descendants migrated to the village Masua in Katiadi Upazila of Kishoreganj in the first half of the eighteenth century. Satyajit Ray's grandfather Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury was born in Masua village, Kishorganj, in 1863. Upendrakishore's elder brother Saradaranjan Ray was one of the pioneers of Indian cricket and was called the W.G. Grace of India.
Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury was a writer, illustrator, philosopher, publisher, amateur astronomer, and leader of the Brahmo Samaj, a religious and social movement in 19th-century Bengal. He set up a printing press named U. Ray and Sons.
Satyajit's father and Upendrakishore's son, Sukumar Ray, who was also born in Kishorganj, was an illustrator, critic, and a pioneering Bengali writer of nonsense rhyme (Abol Tabol) and children's literature. Social worker and children's book author Shukhalata Rao was his aunt.
Satyajit Ray was born to Sukumar Ray and Suprabha Ray (née Das Gupta) in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Sukumar Ray died when Satyajit was two years old. Ray grew up in the house of his grandfather, Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury, and of his printing press. He was attracted by the machines and process of printing from an early age and took particular interest in the production process of Sandesh, a children's magazine started by Upendrakishore.
Ray studied at Ballygunge Government High School in Calcutta, and completed his BA in economics at Presidency College, Calcutta (then affiliated with the University of Calcutta). During his school days, he saw a number of Hollywood productions in cinema. The works of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Ernst Lubitsch and movies such as The Thief of Baghdad (1924) and Uncle Tom's Cabin (1927) made lasting impression on his mind. He developed a keen interest in Western classical music.
In 1940, his mother insisted that he study at Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, founded by writer Rabindranath Tagore. Ray was reluctant to go, due to his fondness for Calcutta and low regard for the intellectual life at Santiniketan. His mother's persuasiveness and his respect for Tagore, however, finally convinced him to get admitted there for higher studies in Fine Art. In Santiniketan, Ray came to appreciate Oriental art. He later admitted that he learned much from the Indian painters Nandalal Bose and Benode Behari Mukherjee. He later produced a documentary, The Inner Eye, about Mukherjee. His visits to the cave temples of Ajanta, Ellora, and Elephanta stimulated his admiration for Indian art. Three books that he read at the university influenced him to become a serious student of film-making: Paul Rotha's The Film Till Now and two books on theory by Rudolf Arnheim and Raymond Spottiswoode. Ray dropped out of the art course in 1942, as he could not feel inspired to become a painter.
In 1943, Ray started working at D.J. Keymer, a British advertising agency, as a junior visualiser. Here he was trained in Indian commercial art under artist Annada Munshi, the then-Art Director of D.J. Keymer. Although he liked visual design (graphic design) and he was mostly treated well, there was tension between the British and Indian employees of the firm. The British were better paid, and Ray felt that "the clients were generally stupid". In 1943, Ray started a second job for the Signet Press, a new publishing house started by D.K. Gupta. Gupta asked Ray to create book cover designs for the company and gave him complete artistic freedom. Ray established himself as a commercial illustrator, becoming a leading Indian typographer and book-jacket designer.
Ray designed covers for many books, including Jibanananda Das's Banalata Sen and Rupasi Bangla, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's Chander Pahar, Jim Corbett's Maneaters of Kumaon, and Jawaharlal Nehru's Discovery of India. He worked on a children's version of Pather Panchali, a classic Bengali novel by Bandyopadhyay, renamed Aam Antir Bhepu (The Mango-Seed Whistle). Ray designed the cover and illustrated the book and was deeply influenced by the work. He used it as the subject of his first film and featured his illustrations as shots in it.
Ray befriended the American soldiers stationed in Calcutta during World War II, who kept him informed about the latest American films showing in the city. He came to know an RAF employee, Norman Clare, who shared Ray's passion for films, chess, and Western classical music. Ray was a regular in the addas (freestyle casual conversations) at Coffee House, where several intellectuals frequented. He formed lasting associations with some of his compatriots there, such as Bansi Chandragupta (celebrated art director), Kamal Kumar Majumdar (polymath and author of stylish prose), Radha Prasad Gupta, and Chidananda Das Gupta (film critic). Along with Chidananda Dasgupta and others, Ray founded the Calcutta Film Society in 1947. They screened many foreign films, many of which Ray watched and seriously studied, including several American and Russian films. The use of Indian music and dancing in the 1948 Indian film Kalpana (transl. Imagination), directed by the celebrated dancer Uday Shankar, had an impact on Ray. In 1949, Ray married Bijoya Das, his first cousin and long-time sweetheart. The couple had a son, Sandip Ray, who also became a film director. In the same year, French director Jean Renoir came to Calcutta to shoot his film The River. Ray helped him to find locations in the countryside. Ray told Renoir about his idea of filming Pather Panchali, which had long been on his mind, and Renoir encouraged him in the project.