India's most highly acclaimed film director, Satyajit Ray (1921-92), was a Calcuttan through and through but won more plaudits abroad than he did in his homeland. Fascinated by film-making from an early age, Ray studied painting at Rabindranath Tagore's university at Shantiniketan where he came into contact with pastoral life, an experience which was to influence much of his work. Later, with the help of his friend, Bansi Chandra Gupta, a painter who shared many of his interests in films, Ray launched the Calcutta Film Society in 1947.

 

While working for a British advertising agency as an illustrator and designer, Ray stumbled upon the Bengali novel by Bibhuti Bhusan Bannerji called Pather Panchali ( Song of the Little Road - the story of a brahmin family in rural Bengal), and fell in love with the book. A couple of years later Ray befriended the celebrated French film director Jean Renoir, who was in Calcutta looking for locations and actors to film Rumer Godden's book The River . Renoir provided an essential impetus by encouraging Ray to go ahead with the making of a film of Pather Panchali . Ray started shooting in October 1952 in the village of Gopalnagar, Bannerji's birthplace; after numerous hurdles, mostly financial, the film was finally completed in 1955.

Pather Panchali 's premier in New York was a great success, "a triumph of imaginative photography" in the words of one critic, but the Calcutta preview met with a cool reception, leaving Ray despondent. However, the film soon went on to high acclaim and an award at the Cannes Film Festival, establishing Ray as an international director of repute. After Pather Panchali came Aparajito (1956) and Apur Sansar (1959), which completed the "Apu Trilogy", still considered Ray's finest work. He went on to make 36 films, the last one being Agantuk ( The Stranger ) in 1991. Ray also wrote fourteen novels, five screenplays, and numerous books of movie criticism and made several documentaries including one on Rabindranath Tagore. A number of musical recordings have been released of Ray's film soundtracks, including the music to the Apu Trilogy by Ravi Shankar and the film score to Jalsaghar ( The Music Room ) by Vilayat Khan, another of India's great classical musicians. Satyajit Ray was honoured with an Oscar for his lifetime achievement in the film industry and in India was awarded the prestigious Bharat Ratna.