13 Satyajit Ray Books: Feluda, Shonku and the Film Writing

Pradosh Mitter, known to everybody as Feluda, is a private investigator in Calcutta who solves cases with observation, a good memory and a habit of testing his teenage cousin Topshe, who narrates. A few cases in, they pick up Lalmohan Ganguly, a writer of terrible thrillers under the name Jatayu, who supplies the comedy and the car. The cases run through Darjeeling, Lucknow, Rajasthan and Varanasi, and Ray sends the three of them travelling so often that the book doubles as an atlas of the country in the 1960s and 1970s.

Ray put this collection together himself, and split it down the middle. The first half is about Indian cinema, including how Pather Panchali got shot, what was wrong with the studio films he grew up on, and what a director owes the place he is filming. The second half is him as a fan: Chaplin, Kurosawa, Hollywood, the neorealists who changed what he thought a film could be. He wrote it in English, so nothing arrives through a translator, and the tone is a working director thinking out loud rather than a critic performing.

Professor Trilokeshwar Shonku keeps a diary, and the diary is the story. He lives in Giridih with a cat named Newton, invents things like a pill that cures everything except the common cold, and then finds himself somewhere a Giridih pensioner has no business being, outer space included, dealing with the consequences. The entries are short, the science is cheerful nonsense, and Ray plays it completely straight, which is what makes it funny. For a child who is not yet a confident reader, this is the friendliest thing he wrote: you can finish an adventure in fifteen minutes.

This is the collection people are most surprised by, because the man who made humane family films also wrote proper unsettling short stories. There are hauntings, objects that should not move, and a run of tales told by Uncle Tarini, an old boy whose stories always start comfortably and never end that way. The book also carries a Feluda story that turned up among Ray's papers after his death. His horror works by understatement: an ordinary Bengali household, one detail slightly off, and then the floor goes.

The second volume carries the rest of the run, and the difference is noticeable. The cases get longer, the villains get nastier, and Feluda spends more time on questions of greed and family property than on stolen objects. Jatayu is fully part of the team by now, so the comic rhythm is settled, and the travelling continues, Kathmandu included. The later stories also run shorter on average, so the volume ends up mixing full novels with cases that are over in forty pages.

Ray wrote this near the end of his life, in English, about the making of Pather Panchali, Aparajito and Apur Sansar. It is a production story before it is anything else: an advertising man with no filmmaking training, a crew of amateurs, weekend shoots that stopped whenever the money ran out, a field of flowers eaten by cattle so the famous train scene had to wait a year. He is matter of fact about all of it, including the parts where he had no idea what he was doing, and that plainness is what makes it moving.

Published for his centenary and edited by his son Sandip Ray, this one takes the family seriously: the title points at three generations of Rays, so alongside Satyajit's fiction you get work connected to his father Sukumar, the nonsense poet, and his grandfather Upendrakishore, who wrote the fairy tales the family printing press produced. There are previously unpublished pieces, autobiographical writing, and Ray's own drawings through the book, which matter because he was a designer and illustrator first. It is a heavy, handsome object rather than a book you carry on a train.

Ray first wrote this for a children's magazine, and it shows in the best way: short chapters, no lecturing, a boy's eye for what is funny about adults. He grew up in a family that ran a printing press and produced children's magazines, so the memoir is full of type, blocks, ink and visiting oddballs, along with early cinema, cricket and school. The Penguin edition adds his account of making Pather Panchali, which sits oddly next to the childhood pieces but is worth having.

These are the pieces Ray wrote in Bengali for Bengali readers, which means he assumes more and explains less. He goes into film language, the problem of turning a novel into a script, what music does and does not do in a film, the difference between what a scene needs and what an audience wants. There is a long section on his own films where he is his own toughest critic. If Our Films, Their Films is Ray talking to the world, this is Ray talking to people who already argue about cinema at home.

In the 1960s Ray wrote a script called The Alien about a spacecraft landing in a Bengal village and a child who befriends what comes out of it. Hollywood got involved, names were attached, the project collapsed, and the script circulated for years afterwards, which led to a long argument about what later films owed it. This book collects the screenplay, the story it grew from, Ray's own account of the affair, and his other writing on science fiction, so you can read the film that never existed and judge the row for yourself.

This is the fourth and closing volume of the Shonku stories, and it finishes the job of getting every one of them into English. The late entries are odder than the early ones, with more of Ray's interest in memory, machines that behave badly, and the limits of a scientist who keeps meddling anyway. Shonku himself is unchanged: still writing everything down in his diary, still travelling further than a Giridih pensioner reasonably should, still surviving by a mixture of luck and his own inventions.

Sandip Ray put this together from writing on cinema that had stayed uncollected: an appreciation of silent films, notes on the trouble with adapting books, thoughts on contemporaries from Godard to the Bengali star Uttam Kumar, and reports from film festivals where Ray sat on juries and watched himself be judged. It is a leftovers book in the literal sense, which means it is uneven, and it also means there are three or four pieces here you will not find anywhere else.

This is the sampler: a thick selection pulled from across his short fiction, mixing the eerie, the funny and the plain strange, and sold in numbered volumes so the one you find may be the first or the second. As an object it does the job well, and if somebody owns no Ray at all it is a reasonable single purchase that covers a lot of ground. As a thirteenth book on a shelf that already holds Indigo and 3 Rays, it is mostly stories you have met before.