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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Lounge Loves | Satyajit Ray
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Lounge Loves | Satyajit Ray

A glimpse into master film-maker Satyajit Ray's literary genius

The Magic Moonlight Flower And Other Enchanting Stories: Translated by Arunava Sinha, Red Turtle, 102 pages, Rs 295Premium
The Magic Moonlight Flower And Other Enchanting Stories: Translated by Arunava Sinha, Red Turtle, 102 pages, Rs 295

The wonder of words

Satyajit Ray’s reputation as one of the greatest film-makers in the history of world cinema tends to overshadow his other, no less formidable, literary and artistic talent.

Born into a family of geniuses, Ray grew up in an ambience where reading, writing, painting, design and publishing were woven seamlessly into the daily rhythms of life. Both his grandfather and father, Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury and Sukumar Ray, respectively, were pioneers among writers for children in Bengal. The former wrote the story of Goopy Gyne and Bagha Byne, which was later immortalized on film by his grandson, while the latter was Bengal’s finest nonsense verse writer, the founder of the immensely popular children’s periodical Sandesh, and a visionary printer, who studied and imported advanced technologies to India at a time when indigenous publishing was in its incipient stages.

Ray, who co-edited Sandesh for many years, was a prolific writer and illustrator for children and young-adult readers. Feluda, the sleuth he created, is one of the most compelling fictional entities in the collective Bengali imagination—inseparable from the young Soumitra Chatterjee, who brought the character to life in Ray’s cinematic adaptation of the stories. Apart from detective fiction, Ray also experimented with genres like science fiction, fantasy, horror and fairy tale. A combination of all these myriad interests is reflected in the four stories that comprise this delightful collection, translated into English by Arunava Sinha, with some of Ray’s original illustrations reproduced in it.

The volume opens with the tale of Sujan Harbola, the Boy Who Spoke to Birds. By braiding fantasy with reality, Ray draws attention to a rare and near-extinct gift—the art of imitating bird and animal calls—that most urban, English-reading children are unlikely to have heard of. Sujan, a simple boy with no head for numbers or bookish learning, is not only vindicated by his singular power of mimicry but also ends up with a princess at the end of the story. In Gangaram’s Lucky Stone, a morality tale of sorts, the virtues of honesty and the ability to keep one’s faith in the goodness of humanity are celebrated. The Ogre And the Princess is, once again, a tale of redemption, where the underdog wins the day through sheer diligence. In the final story, a boy has to overcome a tyrannical king, rescue a prince, and kill a snake in order to get to the moonlight flower whose magical power can save his father from “miseria", a fatal disease that robs the soul of its will to live.

Ray’s characters, a combination of royalty and commoners, as well as their magical adventures are the stuff of folk tales one encounters across cultures, but also have memorable antecedents in Bengali literature, in Thakurmar Jhuli(Grandma’s Bagful of Stories) by Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar, for instance.

The singular charm of Ray’s prose, however, lies not only in his ability to revive the folksy energy of his predecessors but also in his gift of grounding his stories in familiar social and cultural circumstances, so that even the most fantastical fates do not seem improbable or out of the reach of lesser mortals. The prospect of defeating demons and finding happiness is not just appealing to young readers but can also inspire optimism in older and more cynical ones.

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Published: 29 Mar 2014, 12:03 AM IST
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