The man who changed Indian cinema

At 6ft 4½in tall, Satyajit Ray was head and shoulders above his countrymen. His height was unheard of among Bengalis, ‘a low-lying people in a low-lying land’, as the colonial saying went. With his stature, jawline and baritone voice, he might have been a Bollywood hero. Instead, he chose to tower over the world of art-house cinema, a directorial giant among the likes of Bergman, Kurosawa and Fellini, alongside whom he is credited with inducting cinema into the temple of high culture.

His standing was secured with his first film, Pather Panchali, which premièred at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1955. India then only churned out musicals which, as Ray later put it, ‘present a synthetic, non-existent society’. He spearheaded a new school of Indian cinema that was self-consciously artistic and realist. The acclaim was rapturous. Pather Panchali and its sequels in the Apu trilogy between them won top prizes at Cannes, Berlin and Venice, and now rank among the greatest movies of all time. Restored versions will soon be screened at a BFI retrospective. But where did they come from?

To say ‘India’ does no justice to their origins. Ray was born in Calcutta – the second city of the British Empire – in 1921, and was steeped in the Bengal Renaissance spawned there by the arrival of western ideas. Its leading light – and Ray’s foremost influence – was Rabindranath Tagore, the poet who in 1912 became the first non-white Nobel laureate. But Ray was the true capstone of the renaissance. Where Tagore was a traditional oriental sage, Ray made his art out of – in his words – ‘one of the greatest inventions of the West with the most far-reaching artistic potential’.

The Bengal Renaissance was powered by renaissance men. Tagore was a composer, painter and playwright, too.