Satyajit Ray; Film Director Depicted India’s Tragedy

Satyajit Ray, whose films of Bengali squalor introduced Indian cinema to the West much as Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashomon” had done for Japan, died Thursday in Calcutta.

Ray, whose stark portrayals of the desperately poor were appreciated around the world but not in his homeland, was 70.

The son of an Indian family prominent in the arts, Ray three weeks ago won an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement.

He died in Belle Vue hospital, the same hospital in his native Calcutta where the Academy Award was presented, the United News of India said. He had been admitted to the hospital on Jan. 29 suffering from breathing problems compounded by a longtime heart ailment.

Ray was a throwback to the early days of film when directors not only set the action but wrote the screenplays, advised cinematographers, edited the final product and--in his particular case--designed the posters that promoted their pictures.

An artist by training, he also crafted the costumes for his more than 30 films, cast the parts and scored the music.

“When the history of movies is written, he will be unquestionably amongst the giants,” British director Sir Richard Attenborough said Thursday in a statement released in London.

The hospitalized Ray accepted the honorary Oscar in a film clip made March 16 and shown at the Academy Awards ceremonies March 30. He also recently won two top Indian awards--for best film and best director--with his latest movie, “Agantuk” (“The Stranger”). As with all but one of his films, it was made in his native Bengali language.

Despite the accolades, his films never attracted a mass following in movie-mad India, where light song-and-dance comedies or violent, simplistic melodramas attract the most moviegoers.

A headline in the Feb. 16 edition of the New York Times read: “Satyajit Ray Honored, Without Profit in His Land.”

It was sadly accurate.

Ray was born into a fairly affluent, artistic aristocracy. His father and grandfather were authors and publishers. After studying art, he joined a British-based advertising firm in Calcutta in 1943 as a graphic artist.

In 1950 he was transferred to the company’s London office, where he frequented the cinema halls while despairing of the career in the fine arts he had wished for.

He had written a draft of what was to become his first film, “Pather Panchali” (“Song of the Road”). It was the first installment of his “Apu” trilogy that traced the life and times of a poor Bengal boy from childhood in the country to maturity in the city.

The film was based on a book he had illustrated while working as an artist, but he was unable to decide on an approach to the picture.

Then he saw Vittorio de Sica’s “The Bicycle Thief,” filmed entirely on location without professional actors. The neo-realist style of that classic film was to define the balance of Ray’s oeuvre.

Ray sold or pawned all his worldly goods and, with the help limited financing from friends, began filming “Pather Panchali” in 1952. However, it was repeatedly delayed by budgetary constraints. Encouraged by French director Jean Renoir, who was then shooting “The River” in India, and with the monetary aid of the Bengal government and American director John Huston (who had seen a rough cut of Ray’s first film), the story of Apu came to the screen.

The movie, which gave the West a cataclysmic introduction to the daily tragedy that is India, won the Grand Prix at the 1956 Cannes film festival and enabled Ray to leave the advertising business and become a filmmaker.

Most of his films--including two Apu sequels, “Aparajito” in 1956 and “The World of Apu” in 1959, were set in Bengal, an impecunious but culturally rich region bordering Bangladesh. But Ray maintained that they were not films about India or Indians but about people.

In 1984 he suffered two heart attacks, and he stopped making films for five years. He came back in 1989 after being fitted with a pacemaker with “An Enemy of the People,” an adaptation of the play by Norwegian Henrik Ibsen.

Clutching his Oscar in his hospital bed last month, Ray said it meant “the end of prizes. I think there is nothing more after this.”

He is survived by his wife, Bijoya, and son, Sondeep, also a film director.