The Mozart of cinema

We are probably still too close in time to Ray's life and work to judge his true standing. Moreover, his candidacy for genius is exceptionally complex. Consider the following obstacles to full international appreciation of his artistic achievements.

In the first place, Ray's films reflect the sophisticated and subtle fusion of East and West in his upbringing. 'I never had the feeling of grappling with an alien culture when reading European literature, or looking at European painting, or listening to western music, whether classical or popular', he told me in 1982. This inevitably means that some aspects of Ray films are unfamiliar, off-putting and even incomprehensible to audiences in both India and the West (not to mention audiences in other parts of the world), as detailed throughout this book. For example, recall Ray's pivotal pun on NASA, the space agency, as nesa, the Bengali word for 'addiction', in his script for his last film, The Stranger.

Secondly, the films depict, chiefly, the culture of Bengal. Unlike in colonial times, during the lifetime of Ray's great predecessor Rabindranath Tagore, Bengal has held little economic, political or social importance for most of the world over many decades. International film-goers must surely have wondered why they should bother with films about Bengal.

Thirdly, the films' dialogue is almost exclusively spoken in Bengali, which is unintelligible to most audiences, even in India (where the national language is of course Hindi). It is no accident that The Chess Players made a special impact on Richard Attenborough, Martin Scorsese and V. S. Naipaul. Unlike any other Ray feature film, this story deals directly with the British in India and is partly told in English, courtesy of Ray's incomparable fluency in both English and Bengali.

Lastly, Ray was extraordinarily multi-talented as an artist. As emphasised by Attenborough, Ray wrote the script, designed the sets and costumes, operated the camera, edited the footage and composed the music of most of his films, as well as directed the action – as shown in Nemai Ghosh's vivid photographs and Ray's vital handwritten scripts, musical scores and drawings published in my large-format book, Satyajit Ray: A Vision of Cinema, in 2005. In addition, he was of course an extensively published illustrator and writer, for both children and adults, through both magazines and books, before and after he took up film-making. Such 'polymathy' – surely unparalleled among film directors from any culture – suffers from a natural tendency to provoke scepticism among professionals, perhaps especially in the increasingly specialised second half of the twentieth century.

Despite the above, as Ray's biographer I would hazard a guess that Pather Panchali – set in a Bengali village a century ago, The Music Room – set in zamindari Bengal, Charulata – set in Victorian Calcutta, The Chess Players – set in nawabi Lucknow, and The Stranger – set in contemporary Bengal, will continue to have worldwide appeal in the years to come, because they are works of genius. In Bengal, The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha will always be relished, too, especially for Ray's inimitable songs, sung at his Calcutta funeral in 1992.

Over seven years of researching and writing this book, wherever Ray had gone in the seven decades of his life I tried to follow him in my mind, so to say. During this journey, I encountered many highly intelligent and creative people who keenly admired Ray's films, such as Attenborough, Naipaul and Scorsese, and Lindsay Anderson, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Arthur C. Clarke and Akira Kurosawa, including several winners of the Nobel prize. Then, after publishing the biography in 1989, I wrote books and essays about a wide variety of undoubted geniuses in the arts and sciences, including biographies of Tagore and Einstein, and tried to understand the individual origins of their immortal achievements.

Ray, however, remains the only genius I came to know in person. A truly singular and multi-faceted personality, Manikda was not only a jewel of Bengal, and the Koh-i-Noor of Independent India, but also one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. Another of his admirers, Gérard Depardieu – who helped to produce Ray's penultimate film,

Branches of the Tree – compared Ray's films with Mozart's music. Mozart unquestionably inspired the intensely musical Manik from his teenage years during the 1930s up to his final year, when he made a radio broadcast for the bicentenary of Mozart's death in 1991, 'What Mozart means to me'. The ensemble performance of the characters in Charulata he said was inspired by his love of the ensemble singing in Mozart's operas. At this time in the 1960s, as we know, he compared Charles Chaplin's The Gold Rush to the 'distilled simplicity', 'purity of style' and 'impeccable craftsmanship' of Mozart's The Magic Flute, which he called 'the most enchanting, the most impudent and the most sublime of Mozart's operas'. Each of these qualities is evident in Ray's finest films. Maybe the undoubted genius of Mozart is the most appropriate comparison for Satyajit Ray a century after his birth, despite the thoroughly Bengali ethos of both himself and most of his films: the Mozart of cinema.

Excerpted with permission from Andrew Robinson's Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye; published by Bloomsbury