Over 2 days, Nehru Memorial to tell you about the Satyajit Ray you don’t know

New Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library will celebrate Satyajit Ray as discoverer of modern Indian cinema later this month.
A two-day retrospective on Ray will be held on May 15 and 16 with exhibitions on Ray’s lesser known works such as calligraphy, illustrations — Ray had illustrated Nehru’s Discovery of India — doodles, etc. There will be rare photographs of the legendary director too. There will also be an “academic” panel on the movies made by Ray and his characters like detective Feluda, Professor Shonku, and the woman who anchored his movies.

“The library is venturing into the creative arts with this first retrospective. It will perhaps be the first academic panel on Ray’s works and how it captured the sociological transition of India,” said Shakti Sinha, director, NMML. Sinha said Ray was a cultural movement for the entire country and not just for Bengal—one of the reasons for choosing him to kickoff NMML’s venture into the arts.

To be thrown open by Ray discovery, Sharmila Tagore, the retrospective will have panellists like Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Amol Palekar, Suresh Jindal (the producer of Ray’s epic, Shatranj ke Khiladi), Professor Nabaneeta Dev Sen and other academics like Samik Bandhopadhyay and film historian Theodore Baskaran.

The idea, said Sinha, is to give a “new direction” in NMML’s mandate to exhibit the arts and culture against the background of modern and contemporary studies. The panellists — well-known academics, scholars of film studies, and film critics — were “carefully” chosen, added Sinha, to analytically examine the transition in the socio-political and cultural landscape of India in general, and Bengal in particular, straddling two centuries as Ray saw them.

“The library, which has one of the largest collections of books, journals, manuscripts, and documents on modern and contemporary India, has provided all the material required for research for this event,” said an NMML official. According to NMML, the panels on Ray’s family, his emergence, and the changing status of women towards the end of the 19th and beginning of 20th centuries, are distinctive in style.

Ray, who also won an Oscar for lifetime achievement, was born on May 2, 1921, in the then Calcutta to popular Bengali author Sukumar Ray and his wife Suprabha Ray. Ray was a music composer, graphic designer, calligrapher and illustrator.