The glamour of film-maker Satyajit Ray, the man who revolutionized Indian cinema often shrouds the character of artist Satyajit Ray. A creative genius, Ray had an exceptional hand in sketching and made priceless contributions to contemporary commercial art.
Born in a house of talents, Ray was no exception himself and took interest in western music and cinema at a very early age. At the age of eighteen after graduation, he was lured by Rabindranath Tagore and persuaded by his mother to join art classes at Kala Bhavan, Shantiniketan. Here for the first time he came to study oriental art-form under the supervision of great masters like Nandalal Bose and Benod Behari Mukherjee whose profound influence would reflect in Ray’s works throughout his life. Ray would study Chinese murals, Japanese wood-carvings; he would make trips to parts of the country to learn the intricacies of Indian art. Ray would deploy various calligraphic elements later in his illustrations and designs. In 1943 he left his studies at Shantiniketan unfinished to join the British advertising agency D.J.Keymer. |
The thirteen years that Ray spent at Keymer, saw him flourishing as a graphic artist. He made his mark in advertising through his exceptional works. He introduced orientalism and Indian calligraphy elements for the first time in advertisements, a field then dominated by western ideas. In the Jabakusum hair-oil ad, he made fun of modern women who were reluctant to wet and comb their hair; again the Chelsea cigarette ads were light hearted where some bowler or bookie would get rejuvenated with a puff and return to their games and start winning. The unique style of Ray truly Indianised the advertisements, which was something the Indian audience had never seen before. Ray's next contribution was in book jacket design where he brought in a new revolution by breaking the boundaries of the prevailing British formal style. His oriental learning at Shantiniketan would find expression through the shades of his brush and his intense passion for calligraphy would be reflected in the designs. Covers that he designed for the famous monthly children’s magazine “Sondesh”, (meaning: a Bengali sweet) are one of its kind and find a place among the finest collections of contemporary artwork. He would often need to do covers for poetries, short stories, biographies or religious texts; the graphic appeal of his designs and typography mesmerized the reader. While doing jackets for books of Signet Press, he came across the novel Pather Panchali which later he would make into the film by the same name (The Song of the Road). It was the movie that shook Indian cinema out of its slumber. Extraordinarily dexterous with the brush, Ray used to do illustrations for his own books apart from the books published at Signet Press. | |
Ray was fascinated with typography, his creations spanned both calligraphic (used only once) and architectural typography (to be re-used for titles or logos in periodicals). He is the first and the most innovative creator of Bengali typefaces. His Roman typefaces Ray Roman, Ray Bizarre and Daphnis won international competitions. The best of his creations are however out there in the open, on the innumerable film posters, book covers, billboards and even title cards. |
Just like Hitchcock or Eisentstein, Satyajit Ray used to maintain copies bound by red cloth, which he lovingly called “Kheror Khata” in which he would sketch the scenes of his movies. The sketches contain in great detail the characters, their dresses, faces, movements, positions, in fact every minute detail of a scene. As one of his heroes Mr. Soumitra Chatterjee once recollected in an interview, Satyajit Ray created the character of Feluda, an amateur detective keeping Soumitra in mind and accordingly decided the details. Later on when he would decide to make a movie on Feluda, it was imperative to recruit Soumitra as the hero and more than half of the screen play was already sketched out in Ray’s copies. Ray used to design the costumes of the characters in his movie right at the point of inception of the script. In his “Kheror Khata” the costumes designed for the courtiers and the king of the movie “Hirak Rajar Deshe” would bear exact resemblance with what was being shown in the movie… and this is the case for almost all his other works. |
Sourav Sengupta is a PGP student at IIM Ahmedabad