When Satyajit Ray was a little boy, his mother took him to meet Rabindranath Tagore at his abode in Santiniketan. Ray wanted Tagore to inscribe a poem in his notebook. Tagore obliged and wrote this:

Many miles I have roamed, over many a day

From this land to that, ready for the price to pay

Mountain ranges and oceans too, lay in my way

Yet two steps from my door, with wide open eyes,

I did not see the dewdrop, on a single sheaf of rice

After handing this over to the boy, he told his mother: “Let him keep this, and when he is a little older, he will understand this.” Later in life, the boy shook the film world by portraying the story of a small village in Bengal called Nishchindipur in Pather Panchali. He did focus on a “dewdrop” close to his homeland and was able to emanate an effect that inspired generations of filmmakers all over the world, from Martin Scorsese to Abbas Kiarostami, and put Indian cinema on the world map.

The reason I mention the Tagore poem is that it summarises Ray’s philosophy of life and his films. Though very local in nature, his films managed to strike a universal chord, hence were global in reach. Reflecting on the oeuvre of Ray, almost 65 years after the above incident, another Santiniketan protégée, Amartya Sen, delivering the Ray Memorial lecture in 1995 had this to say: “The great filmmaker’s eagerness to seek the larger unit (ultimately his ability to talk to the whole world) combined well with his enthusiasm for understanding the smallest of the small: the individuality of each person.”

Tagore’s influence on the Ray family was since the times of Upendrakishore Roy Chowdhury — Satyajit Ray’s grandfather — who was a writer, painter, singer and a pioneer of the Bengali printing industry. Tagore was an enthusiastic advocate of Upendrakishore’s writing, encouraging him to translate and adapt stories from abroad as well as from Indian legends, but as a frequent visitor to their house, Tagore came to regard Sukumar Ray, Satyajit Ray’s father, as one of his favourite young friends. 

Sukumar Ray was a genius himself who excelled in many fields. He graduated with double honours in physics and chemistry from the esteemed Presidency College and also started the Nonsense Club around that time. His nonsense rhymes are folklore in Bengal, reminiscent of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. He was an adept photographer, and in 1922, he became the second Indian to be made a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. Thus, the influence of both his grandfather, whom he had not seen, and his father who passed away when he was not even three, was evident in Satyajit Ray.

But I also want to emphasise the influence of women in Ray’s life at a younger age, since the portrayal of well-etched women characters — Karuna Banerjee in Aparajito, Madhabi Mukherjee in Charulata, Kapurush and Mahanagar, Sharmila Tagore in Apur Sansar, Devi and Aranyer Din Ratri, to name a few — formed a strong element in his films.

Kadambini Ganguly, who was the first woman physician of India, was one of Ray’s ancestors. It was Kadambini who delivered Ray and although he never knew her (she died when he was only two), he felt her influence through the profound effect she had on all the Ray women, including his mother, Suprabha Ray, who was a very strong and dignified lady. After the untimely death of her husband, she moved to her brother’s house at Bhowanipore with her three-year-old son. As a young widow, she travelled every day by bus during the 1930s and 40s from south to north Calcutta, where she worked as superintendent of the handicraft department at Vidyasagar Bani Bhawan. This reminds one of Madhabi Mukherjee’s character of a working woman in Ray’s Mahanagar.

Ray’s mother was excellent in knitting and stitching, and an excellent sculptor too, whose engraving of Gautam Buddha still finds a place at his Bishop Lefroy Road home (in Calcutta). It was his mother who brought him up, taught him, looked after him, cared for him, and communicated the family’s creative and literary legacy. In fact it was his mother who convinced him to spend time at Santiniketan in the proximity of Tagore at a formative stage in his life. There, he learnt art from the great Nandalal Bose.

In Ray’s Aparajito, world cinema witnessed one of the most endearing mother-son relationships ever seen on celluloid. One wonders how much of it was autobiographical, though the source material is from Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s classic.

If one delves into his earliest awareness of cinema, one must date back to his grandfather’s printing press. The printing press in Apur Sansar comes to mind reading about those stories from his childhood. In the block-making section of the printing press there was a huge imported process camera whose operator Ramdohin became his friend. One imagines little Toto in Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1988 masterpiece Cinema Paradiso in such a setting, where the projectionist Alfredo instills a deep love of films in the boy. But the story in his memoirs, which I find extremely cinematic, was a bit later in life at his uncles’ house. At noon when summer rays of the bright sun got in through a chink in the shutters of the bedroom, Ray would lie there alone for hours watching the “free bioscope” created on the wall: a large inverted image of the traffic outside.

Magic lanterns were popular toys in Bengali homes around that period. It was a box with a tube at the front containing a lens, a chimney on top and a handle on the right-hand side. The film ran on two reels with a kerosene lamp for light source. Ray himself suspected that his first inklings of a fascination with cinema started from those images. Ingmar Bergman, another giant of world cinema, also had a similar inspiration through magic lanterns in childhood and subsequently named his autobiography ‘The Magic Lantern’.

A little later in life, Ray infused himself with influences from music, painting, drama, and a host of other art forms which contributed to the artist that he was. His subsequent journey of getting addicted to films and his struggle to make Pather Panchali are quite well documented. His films gathered accolades all over the world and put Indian films firmly in the firmament of cinema history.

I find it quite intriguing that although Ray had straddled disparate subjects in his films, he never ventured out of a classical storytelling style – an orderly unfolding of events with a beginning, a middle and an end; a firm rein applied to emotion, and an avoidance of disorientation.

He never experimented with form and structure in his films, unlike Mrinal Sen or Mani Kaul in the Indian filmmaking context. The famous ghost dance in Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne was the closest foray Ray made into cinematic experimentation. Was it mainly because the films which prompted his interest in filmmaking were of the classical Hollywood tradition — the films of John Ford, Frank Capra or Billy Wilder — or that he was not brave enough to venture out of his comfort zone?

One might get an idea of his thought process from his own writings. He was an ardent admirer of the French New Wave of the 60s and singled out Godard as the thoroughgoing iconoclast. He wrote of how Godard changed basic cinema language in his films. But he was also aware that Godard’s cinema can be boiled down to a cinema of the head, not the heart, and therefore a cinema of the minority. Ray was extremely conscious of the “audience connect”.

So any experimentation with the syntax of film language would alienate the audience, and hence it was not a viable proposition for him. The stigma of esotericism always bothered him. According to him, “avant-gardism” is a luxury which we cannot yet afford in our country. That begs the question, given the strong analytical grasp which Ray had on the craft of cinema, would he have been a different type of filmmaker, experimenting with basic cinematic language at a much deeper level, if he had the luxury which French cinema afforded to the greats? These are counterfactual questions, but worth pondering.