Satyajit Ray
Satyajit Ray, (born May 2, 1921, Calcutta [now Kolkata], India—died April
23, 1992, Calcutta), Bengali motion-picture director, writer, and illustrator
who brought the Indian cinema to world recognition with Pather
Panchali (1955; The Song of the Road) and its two sequels, known as the Apu
Trilogy. As a director, Ray was noted for his humanism, his versatility, and his
detailed control over his films and their music. He was one of the greatest
filmmakers of the 20th century.
Ray was an only child whose father died in 1923. His grandfather was a writer
and illustrator, and his father, Sukumar Ray, was a writer and illustrator of
Bengali nonsense verse. Ray grew up in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and was
looked after by his mother. In 1940 his mother persuaded him to attend art
school at Santiniketan, Rabindranath Tagore’s rural university northwest of
Calcutta. There Ray, whose interests had been exclusively urban and Western-
oriented, was exposed to Indian and other Eastern art and gained a deeper
appreciation of both Eastern and Western culture, a harmonious combination
that is evident in his films.
Returning to Calcutta, Ray in 1943 got a job in a British-owned advertising
agency, became its art director within a few years, and also worked for a
publishing house as a commercial illustrator, becoming a leading Indian
typographer and book-jacket designer. Among the books he illustrated (1944)
was the novel Pather Panchali by Bibhuti Bhushan Banarjee, the cinematic
possibilities of which began to intrigue him. In 1949 Ray was encouraged in
his cinematic ambitions by the French director Jean Renoir, who was then
in Bengal to shoot The River. The success of Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle
Thief (1948), with its downbeat story and its economy of means—location
shooting with nonprofessional actors—
convinced Ray that he should attempt
to film Pather Panchali.
The Apu Trilogy
Pather Panchali
Ray was unable to raise money from skeptical Bengali producers, who distrusted a first-
time director with such unconventional ideas. Shooting could not begin until late 1952,
using Ray’s own money, with the rest eventually coming from a grudging West
Bengal government. The film took two-and-a-half years to complete, with the crew, most
of whom lacked any experience whatsoever in motion pictures, working on an unpaid
basis. Pather Panchali was completed in 1955 and turned out to be both a commercial
and a tremendous critical success, first in Bengal and then in the West following a major
award at the 1956 Cannes International Film Festival. This assured Ray the financial
backing he needed to make the other two films of the trilogy: Aparajito (1956; The
Unvanquished) and Apur Sansar (1959; The World of Apu).
