Reading Satyajit Ray

The books we grew up with

The Legend

Satyajit Ray, a Director, a Producer, a Screenwriter, a Composer, a Graphic Designer and of course a Writer, authored a large number of books, in both Bengali and English. Many of his writings still remain to be published in book form. His books have been translated worldwide  and in many regional Indian languages.

A Sandesh Cover

In1961, Satyajit Ray revived"Sandesh", a children's magazine founded by his grandfather, to which he continued to contribute illustrations, verses and stories throughout his life. The first story Ray published in Sandesh , was Banku Babur Bandhu, a sci-fi story that he wanted to film under the title of The Alien . It remained an unmade Ray film. His son Sandip Ray later took up the story for a tele-film series.

Apart from this he wrote numerous short stories, articles, and novels in Bengali. His stories are unpretentious and entertaining. The subjects included: adventure, detective stories, fantasy, science fiction and even horror. He made a significant contribution to children's literature in Bengali.

A Feluda book cover

His detective stories and novels featuring "Feluda", the private investigator, are still popular with people of all ages. The global popularity of the sleuth is also enviable, as Feluda stories have been published in full in English and in part in many other major international languages.The first Feluda story, Feludar Goendagiri , appeared in Sandesh in 1965. “The story was told in the first person by Felu's Watson --- his fourteen-year-old cousin Tapesh (Topse). The popularity of Ray's Feluda stories lies on, among other things, in their skillful mix of mystery and humour. The latter was provided by Lalmohan Ganguly , who is a writer of cheap, popular thrillers with the pen name "Jatayu". The enormous popularity of the Feluda stories is probably because they all are clean, wholesome entertainment, which is a rarity in the modern world. Many of the Feluda stories have been filmed, the first two by Ray himself and most of the others by his filmmaker son Sandip Ray. Sonar Kella appeared as the first Feluda film by Ray in 1974.

A Shonku Book Cover in Engli

Satyajit Ray modelled the character of Professor Shonku, the scientist-inventor who makes trips to far corners of the globe and gets involved in unintended adventures, on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger. Though Shonku looks bland when compared with the English professor's violent temper, his gentle manners, coupled with his rare genius for invention, have made him one of the most endearing characters of Bengali fiction. That he is no less loved by western readers is proved by the popularity of the Shonku adventures available in translation. Shonku made his debut appearance in Byomjatrir Diary , a long story Ray wrote for Sandesh magazine in 1965. He wrote a total of 38 Shonku stories --- of which the last one, Intelectron , was left unfinished. The Shonku adventures are great entertainers, but behind the adventure, one finds things more serious than mere entertainment. They find some deeper values --- like sympathy for the disadvantaged, indifference to wealth and strong opposition to what he believes to be wrong --- that are fast disappearing from the modern world.

A still from a Feluda film 

In a career that covered four decades, Ray made 36 films --- features and shorts --- . As a school goer, he read the works of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle which indicated his taste for tales of science fiction, crime detection, the fantastic and the supernatural. As an author, he wrote mostly on similar themes.

Satyajit Ray's output as a translator (whether from English to his mother tongue Bengali or the other way round) is small compared with what he produced as an original writer, but whatever he translated were beyond mere transliteratio. The books he produced as a translator are as popular as his original publications. Ray published four books of translation: Braziler Kalo Bagh (translated into Bengali from Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury), Nonsense Rhymes (translated into English from Sukumar Ray), Molla Nasiruddiner Galpo (translated into Bengali from Idris Shah), and Torai Bandha Ghorar Dim (translated into Bengali from Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Hilaire Belloc and Darmi Thompson). Much of all that Ray translated came out in Sandes.

He designed various Bengali and English  typography and type faces including the Ray Roman type-face.

One fascinating thing about Satyajit Ray's works is that, whether it is a work of literature or a film, all his works are full of information about things around us. This shows the vast fields of his interest and the vast & vivid knowledge of this multi-talented legend. His works moulded the growing up of a generation and will do so in generations to come.