Between 1961 and 1987, Satyajit Ray directed five documentaries and six short films. In 1961, Ray observed the birth centenary of Rabindranath Tagore by making a documentary on the poet for the Films Division of the Government of India, and an omnibus feature film called Teen Kanya, which brought together three short films adapted from well-known Tagore short stories— Monihara, …
Satyajit Ray needs no introduction as a film-maker and a writer. The glorious abandoning of sense in Sukumar Ray’s Abol Tabol, the posthumous collection of his nonsense poems generally believed to have been inspired by Edward Lear, has delighted and enthralled generations of Bengali children. “Each word spoken in a play is like a fruit in a tree,” says a …
Sandip Ray announcedhis arrival as a film-maker with the release of Phatik Chand in 1983. Excerpts: When you were growing up, Satyajit Ray was publishing one classic story for children after another in ‘Sandesh’. A fairy tale for children You were 13 when Satyajit Ray made ‘Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne’ in 1969, at a time when there were not many …
Satyajit Ray was of the world, as were Chaplin and Bunuel and Renoir and Mizoguchi and Eisenstein and De Sica and Kurosawa and Godard and Pasolini, not to speak of other twentieth century masters, but he was of the breed who belonged to a particular developed culture and carried out the transfer of technology into a freshly evolved form. Children’s …
Plato, it turns out, was a bit of a Ramgorurer chhana or a “son of Rangaroo” for whom laughter is taboo. In its foreword, Satyajit’s son Sandip remembers, “Baba started translating Sukumar’s nonsense rhymes quite unexpectedly, while waiting at an airport lounge due to a long flight delay.” There have since been other translations. The Nonsense World of Sukumar Ray, …
