Physics World. Hello. And welcome to the Physics
World Stories podcast. I'm Andrew Lester. In this
episode, we're gonna be exploring the life and
work of Satyajit Ray. In the Physics World
magazine this month and on physics world dot
com, you'll find a feature by Andrew Robinson
delving into the life and work of the
famed Bengali film director
who blended art and science. Ray was born
in Calcutta in 1921,
and as we'll hear was not just a
film director, but also an established author, essayist,
magazine editor,
illustrator,
calligrapher,
and music composer.
Between 1955
and 1991,
he directed almost 30 features as well as
short films and documentaries.
He won an Oscar and other leading prizes
at international film festivals. But don't take my
word for it. Last year, on the centenary
of Ray's birth, the American film director Martin
Scorsese
said that his films are truly treasures
of cinema,
and everyone
with an interest in film needs to see
them. Andrew Robinson joins us for this episode
of the podcast,
and we'll hear about the influence that Satyajit
Ray has had on physicists who've loved his
work since they were children. One such physicist
is Momita Dasgupta,
who'll join us later in the podcast.
And we'll hear about how one film, the
alien, that wasn't quite made
has caused a little bit of controversy surrounding
Steven Spielberg.
That's all to come.
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Here's Andrew Robinson.
He he was a very serious,
success as a as a science fiction
writer in Bengali.
I mean, there's a there's a character called
professor Shonku who is
based on,
Conan Doyle, I think, and other writers in
the past,
and he's
been quite a success in in Bengali.
And then there's a detective
that's created by Ray who,
called Feluda, who is
also he made films about him, and the
detective is a scientist as well in in
in his
rational attitude to his
to finding criminals and dealing with them.
And I think those are rather famous
books even
in, the rest of India, not just in
Bengal where Ray comes from because they've all
been translated into English.
And a lot of young people know Ray
because of his
children's writing, so to speak, his detective
writing, which is also enjoyed by adults too.
Tell me about him as a person. Were
you knowing him more than most, I guess?
Yeah. He was he was a very private
man,
despite being a film director.
Some people thought he was a loner.
I mean, he did have a family,
but
he, from an early age, was a single
child.
No brothers and sisters because his father died
when he was very young,
and so there weren't any more in the
family. And he grew up
very
much, as an only child reading
and drawing
a lot,
and becoming a really fine illustrator.
And I got to know him, of course,
much later in life when he was, you
know, very well known and had
become a,
a very successful director, not only in India,
but also abroad.
So it was a rather different
experience from meeting him when he was younger,
but I could see the young person still
in the way he would sit for many,
many, many hours alone working
at home.
And he said I always feel more creative
when I'm in my chair in Calcutta.
So although he traveled the world, he really
liked to be sitting in his chair in
Calcutta. But then he would go to the
studio,
and he would work
with a whole group of people,
in a very social way,
including actors like Richard Attenborough.
He could work with a group,
but he also spent a lot of time
alone.
And I was fascinated by that
contrast
because most film directors are sociable creatures. They
have to be. Even if they don't want
to be, they have to be to succeed.
Ray managed to be both.
He said I I seem
a bit aristocratic when I'm at home alone,
but I'm a complete
democrat when I'm working in the studio.
You know, everybody works together.
And the other thing that I would like
to say about him is he was a
polymath.
As a director, only Charles Chaplin
did as much as Ray did in terms
of producing a film. I mean, Ray did
everything from writing the script
to designing the sets to directing it, of
course, and casting the actors, but he also
composed the music.
Chaplin did that.
Very, very few other directors have done that
successfully.
He was behind the camera too through all
his later films,
so there are a lot of pictures of
him hard at work behind the camera.
And then he was a really successful writer
of fiction
and a magazine editor and a very talented
illustrator who'd worked in for a British advertising
company in Calcutta.
And he he he had many other strings
to his bow.
And I think for that reason, he was
immensely,
intriguing if you were coming from abroad.
How does somebody
grow up like this in in a
very crowded city,
very alone, but also very involved,
and very polymathic
and somehow succeeding and surviving?
He had very little money.
He came from a family with a bit
of money, but his father died
and,
he really grew up poor. There's no question.
He had to have a job before he
could get a work as a filmmaker,
and that was his work as an advertising
man.
Okay.
So maybe polymathary, if that's a word, is,
is through necessity. I think it came naturally,
but I think it helped him. I mean,
there's no question that the ability to to
draw,
people, landscapes,
cartoons,
and his father is the most famous nonsense
verse writer in Bengal. He's like Edward Lear
or Lewis Carroll
in Bengal.
Shukumarai
is just a household name.
People still know his verses by heart.
And so,
Ray inherited
some of those abilities, but he also
created them as well by
by by working hard.
I got interested in him,
I think, when I was a student really.
I was studying chemistry,
and
I've been to India
just in a gap between school and university
to do a bit of teaching and, you
know, I was pretty interested in India and
and then
he suddenly
appeared
in London
in 1977,
when I was sort of just entering my
twenties. And he he came to the premiere
of his
rather fine
historical drama, The Chess Players, with Richard Attenborough,
playing a British general
and some wonderful Indian actors like Syed Jaffray
and Shabana Azmi.
And there he was standing on the stage
at the premiere in
London's National Film Theatre launching this film, and
it hadn't really been finished. So
the subtitles didn't exist. So Syed Jaffray had
to do an earphone commentary,
and,
he did it wonderfully well. His English was
as good as he's all do. He was
in the film, of course, but he was
doing the commentary for all of this packed
house.
And Ray apparently had a pair of headphones,
but he he was listening for the commentary.
But then one of the usherettes said to
him, could could I borrow them? And he
was very decent. And he said, yes, you
have them, and I'll just watch the film.
Brilliant.
So I got I got rather taken with
him after seeing him on stage,
with with his actor,
and I got in touch with him eventually
and said,
I had a job in a publishing house.
And I said, would you like to,
write your autobiography?
Which is a bit cheeky of me really
because I I didn't really have the right
to ask this, but he he he was
quite friendly and he replied saying, I am
so busy, but if I ever do write
it, may I send the manuscript to you?
So we got on to friendly
written communication,
and then I met him in person,
in London in 1982, and and I interviewed
him for a film magazine.
And it went very well,
and we spoke for more than 3 hours.
And,
I think that was the beginning of our
our relationship, our friendship, really. And after that,
I used to go and see him in
India,
watch him shooting his
one of his famous films in the 1980s
and I published the book I think in
1989
after a lot of work.
So I've got a science background. My father
was a physicist at Oxford,
in electronics,
and,
I have to say he was not at
all interested
in in Ray.
He was very interested in
India.
He had some Indian physicist friends, but not
really in the cinema. He was not just
not interested.
So I know a lot of physicists probably
don't know who Ray is,
frankly speaking, but some do. And
it's fair to say that some quite well
known people in Physics have been interested in
him like,
Arthur c Clark who was trained in that
field before he took up science fiction,
And Arthur c Clark loved Ray's films,
and then there's a few others that, I've
mentioned,
in my piece of Physics World,
including an Indian,
theoretical physicist who's pretty well known in quantum
physics, Deepanka Home.
He's been he's a Bengali from Calcutta, and
he's been following Ray all his life,
because he's he loves his science fiction. He
used to write science fiction as well,
and he he loves all of his films.
And there are many even in science who
who have seen some of the the really
famous films.
And Arthur Clarke said the first film was
one of the most heartbreakingly
beautiful films ever made,
Pato Panchali, and that was the one that
made Ray famous in the world that's that
launched him in 1955.
His momita, Das Gupta. I'm an assistant professor,
10 year track at
Augsburg University. It's a small liberal art college,
which is located in Minneapolis,
in Minnesota,
United States.
My training as a physicist started as an
experimental physicist.
My PhD was at the intersection of fluid
mechanics and solid dynamics. I tried to understand
the physics behind how microorganisms
swim. Before we go on to talk about
Raya, I just wonder if you could help
me because I've heard his name pronounced a
number of different ways. How is it actually
pronounced? The Bengali pronunciation would be Shokdujeet Rai,
but, of course,
Satyajit
Rai is how, like, you know, folks go
by.
And I think he also went by, like,
you know, because as you know, he was
very
famous among non Indian
people and population. But Shokta Jeet Rai is
the Bengali population. Satyajit Ray is what everyone
calls him by. Is it fair to say
that you're a bit of a fan? Oh,
yes. Totally. I am the fangirl,
like, forever Satyajit Ray fan.
As some people like to call infamously, they
call themselves
racist,
the r a y
c I s t. I wouldn't go to
that extent, but,
because I have some problem with the word.
But,
yeah.
I'm close.
Why are you such a fan? I was
introduced to Satyajit,
Ray's works. Like, mostly his short stories
and detective novels,
which were targeted towards young adults.
And,
I think,
I was introduced when I was pretty young,
like, you know.
And that
opened doors to, I think, everything that I
am and, you know, how I think and
how I function.
It had a very strong impact
on me as a young adult. So, for
example,
one of my favorite works is his detective
novel called Feluda.
So this is this detective character, like, Sherlock
Holmes,
character.
And I think at some point, it it
was inspired by,
Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, but very different kind
of a character.
And this guy was this investigative
journalist
who would go and investigate cases.
And Ray had this really beautiful way of
intertwining
his stories
with other things that
interested him and was very capable of interesting
young adults, like travel
and then some interesting aspects in travel
and,
science and very evidence based,
investigations.
And all of those to young minds, I
think those are simple enough for them to
grasp,
yet imaginative enough for them to kinda get
there, run their parts and their imaginations. And
his descriptions were very vivid.
And he was a great illustrator, so some
of his work, he would actually draw sketches.
Not all, like, you know, after a couple
of pages. So you could actually see the
characters, like, you know,
as if in front of you when you
were reading them. So he had that capacity.
So I think all of that together sort
of attracted me
reading more of Ray's work
and the language, very lucid,
very,
geared and targeted towards young adults. Nothing
of the liter to an extent, like, you
know, sometimes my mom who was, like, you
know, into literature,
she would say, oh, why are you reading?
Like, you know, his work doesn't have literary
values.
But what it had was mostly imagination.
And I think for young adults, that was
more appealing rather than the literary value. And
then I started reading more work. I started
watching more films. His films, I would say,
watching them at different times of my life,
they have had different interpretations
because,
again, as everyone know, the great filmmaker he
was, he had very subtle hints about a
lot of things like class struggles, a cast
struggles,
and about human beings, how he portrayed women,
and how he portrayed, like, the society as
a whole, the interplay between different
roles and different,
aspects of the society.
Yeah. So, you know, as I grew up,
like, and I started and watched more and
more of his movies, I think I understood
or at a every time I understand things
at different
and different aspects of things that he tried
to portray in a very subtle manner. But
as a young adult, it was mostly his
books that attracted, and he had made a
couple of movies for young adults also. So
there are a couple of Teluda movies.
That's the detective character that I was talking
about. And then there was also,
this
other character called professor Shonku. So professor Shonku
was this mad scientist,
character that he introduced who would travel different
parts of the world and then, you know,
through his scientific discoveries,
would try to solve some,
he was not
he was not, like, kind of an investigator
like Feluda was, but he, through his inventions,
would try to do something good for the
world, and he was a nonviolent person even
though he worked with a lot of machines
and, stuff. And, you know, he and
very crude. He would work from a laboratory
based in his basement, like, in the house.
And then he's building these things and there
are chemical reactions, and then he's building this
like, his first story was, like, he built
this snuff gun
and, you know, somebody who would sniff the,
like, thing from the gun, they would sneeze
for, like, 56 times. So it's very imaginative.
Like, imagination
wrapped around with the,
like, you know, the science. So that was
another character that, I read and,
yeah. And he had a several a bunch
of short stories also,
which were also very popular among the. You
mentioned the science there. Would you credit him
with your interest in science? Was it did
they inspire you in some way to become
a scientist?
Yes. Yes. I think it did.
I think it did.
So,
you know, in his writing, it I mean,
I don't know about the science part. Okay?
But the investigative
nature,
which is very key to being a scientist,
I think that was somewhere honed by
Satyajit Ray's reading a lot of Satyajit Ray
because you would find a clue about something
that interests you, and then you would go
and find something else that aligns with that
interest. And I think even now, I was
talking to my husband, like, you know, a
couple of days earlier. And it's like, even
now, I think I follow that. Like, what
I really want to do, it's like I
collect clues from something and then I go
and be like, oh, okay. What can I
find about this? Where can I go and
look for this resource that is going to
help me, you know, figure more things about
this? And so it's it's all about like,
I think for me, more than the science,
which is something that, you know, one could
pick up from books and, like, enough education
and the training in academia. It is that
investigative
nature,
which which I think is something I imbibe
from reading a lot of Ray as a
kid. There is also this other part
about, you know, being original, like, you know,
finding something original even if it is like
you
you read information,
different people before you have collected, but you
have the power to create your story and
narrative,
like, you know, by seeing the information, but
you because you are bringing in yourself also
in your experience
also into the,
entire, like, you know, story. So I think
that that requires some imagination.
And being exposed and to Ray and Ray's
readings, I felt that is also there was,
like, this other takeaway,
that that kind of, I think, has shaped
me
and my nature,
growing up and,
you know,
whatever I do today. I'm thinking about when
I speak to,
scientists across
well, across the world, really, but certainly, the
the English speaking world. When you you ask
scientists of a certain age what first got
them interested in science, that quite a lot
of them will say Star Trek. Is Rey
a similar kind of
influence in in in India?
No. I would not say so. So first
of all, India is vast, and,
Rey
was very particular about though he has a
couple of works that he had,
done in non Bengali, but he was, like,
mostly this Bengali guy who was obsessed about
Bengal, and most of his work was about
Bengal and done in Bengal. Even the story
alien, which never really got made, was also
very based on Bengal
because he always maintained that
that's the language he is most comfortable in
communicating
and expressing himself also.
So I would say I lucked out. Like,
you know, I was born in Bengal and,
like, you know, that that kind of,
like, I could read his books which were
written in Bengali. But as I was growing
up, a lot of it was also translated
into other languages.
But,
when I met other folks
around India,
I did not think they were as much
impacted
as I was, or maybe I am that
other biased Bengali who just thinks everything about
Bengali is great.
But I would take that opinion with a
pinch of salt.
But,
yeah, I would say, like, most Bengali kids
have
yeah. They have been impacted
more
because his medium, his movies, and his writings,
most of them were in Bengali.
And
it is not just him. So
Satyajit Ray's father, Shupama Ray or Shupama Ray,
was
also
this, like, you know, he used to write
these poetries
about
unfortunately, he died very young, so there aren't
a lot of, like, you know, like,
he doesn't have that body of work that
a lot of other people have throughout their
lifetime. I think he died when he was
32 or 36, very young.
But he was this genius minded guy, and
he used to write
these
poems,
like, bizarre poems about these imaginative
animals
about,
like, you know, and them doing things. And
if you read them carefully, sometimes they sometimes
it would you would think that they don't
make any sense. It's just to,
like, you know,
pick a child's brain and their imagination.
But it was actually also a lot about
society and different,
like, you know, how society functions.
And, I think Satyajit Ray was also very
inspired
by,
you know, that
writing. And in Bengal at that time,
there were other writers who were kind of,
you know, writing and following that path. And
there were these body of works, which,
you know, as kids
growing up, let's say, from the late 19
fifties through even till now, had access to
in Bengali.
So I would say, Bengal disproportionately
got, like, the more dose of that
than rest of the country.
And
I don't know. But a lot of people
in Bengal take up science and fundamental
science, not just,
like, you know, become engineer. Because in the
rest of the country, it's more about, you
know, with the boom and IT booms, people
tend to become more engineers. But Bengal is
a place like, there has been a constant
influx of,
fundamental
scientists, and I won't be surprised if, you
know, Ray Ray's father, Shukumar Ray, there was,
there were other writers, sci fi writers too,
if they would have helped,
you know, forming some of the interest from
the young. I can see how his the
imagination side of the the science fiction side
of things is inspired by his father's poetry
and that side of things. But where do
you know have a sense of where the
science interest came from? So Ray lost his
father when he was 2 or 3 years
old.
And I think he spent a lot of
time in his life to discover his father
through his work,
and his father was a trained scientist.
His father was,
he did his,
bachelor's in physics and chemistry from this, very
prestigious presidency college in Calcutta.
And
his grand Satyajit Ray's grandfather
or Shupama Ray's father, his name was Upendra
Kishore,
Raichaudhuri.
He was also,
like, he used to write kids' novels.
And they were, at that time,
bringing these,
block prints and other kinds of printing. They
had a big printing press
to publish their stories and their illustrations. They
would be doing that. And Shupama Ray
was also a great illustrator,
and he eventually went to London, I think.
Yeah. He went to London.
And over there, he,
again, did,
these courses on photography and lithography
and,
because he was interested in illustrations.
And he
he has
journal articles, and he was into publishing
his work and his understanding of that. And,
so
Satyajit Ray's father was very much
like, he was a scientist by training, and
he kind of honed his skills towards things
he was interested in. And then he went
back to Calcutta
to, you know, run the press, and they
had these magazines which they were, you know,
publishing on a daily basis. But, unfortunately,
he,
you know, he contracted this,
very rare disease, and he was ailing for
a couple of years before he died. But
Satyajit Ray
did not spend a lot of time with
his father
in childhood.
So
a large part of his life was, you
know, a lot of people say and I
have read also, was discovering his father through
his works.
And,
I have read their bookshelves, has a lot
of books about,
HG Wells and, like, you know,
Arthur Conan Doyle. We know him for Sherlock
Holmes, but he has also written his fair
bit of sci fi stuff. And,
so he did read a lot of those
things while, you know, in his formative years.
And he liked to call himself the science
fiction
enthusiast,
like, you know, so he would read a
lot about them. And once he started writing,
professor Shombu, this character I was talking about,
like, the mad scientist,
from 19 sixties,
he actually,
you know, systematically
read more about science and scientific discoveries
and scientific,
like, you know, the discourse. And so that,
you know, the facts and things that he
was producing
was not something bizarre and, like, you know,
he wanted to be correct about that. So,
you know, and then he kind of totally
took to that, and there was a sci
fi club called Ashorjo or Fantasy Fantastic, I
think, was the name of the sci fi
club, which was created in Bengal.
And they actually
started, like, screening a lot of sci fi
movies
which were available around that time. And Satyajit
Ray would go above and beyond his busy
schedule
to actually, like, you know, get the prints
of these movies and screen them. And he
was very good friends with Arthur Clark. So,
you know, and, he would, like you know?
And, also, I think he was in corresponding
with Bradshaw. Like, you know, so they would
be just,
sort of exchanging
letters
about sign fictions and this lot of discussion
would go on. And a lot of his
stories and things that he would publish later,
like, you know, through his different sci fi,
the the characters
would be based on some of these knowledges.
Like, I was talking about Feluda. He was,
like, this
character who would be doing some investigative journalism,
but then he would be talking about a
character, let's say, who got killed by,
some poison.
And then he would put the fact that,
oh, this poison could only be administered if
someone has a certain health condition, and this
would be a bad combination for that person.
So, you know, there there is science in
that. Like, you you cannot just come up
with that. So he used to do those
research and, like, do those works. It's not
just about science at fiction level,
like with all the cosmic
like, the cosmological,
sort of things, but also basic things. Like,
there was a lot of attention to detail
and the science behind them. My science fiction
interest covers some of those sixties
films that we saw. 1st Met in the
Moon, Destination
Moon, that kind of moon focus that came
along and space focus that came along with
the, the moon landings and the space race.
And
Ray's film
script for the alien produced in 1967
in in the height of that. Is that,
was he inspired, do you think, by the
space race? And it was that a similar
thing in Indian cinema and in Indian science
fiction at the time?
That's actually,
kind of unheard what Ray sort
of delved into because Indian cinema at that
point was not,
dealing even today,
Indian cinema don't delve into those kind of
topic. But Ray, the visionary he was, his
first movie,
he kind of just
you know, he was so original. He he
just
and anything and everything he did was nothing
similar to what was going on around him.
So,
yeah, I would say it was not a
reflection was of what was going around,
but the journey could be understood because
in 1961
so they had these magazines called Sandesh,
which, used to be published during his father's
time. It was a very popular magazine, but
then it kind of, like, you know, the
interest and everything fizzled out.
And in 1961,
his friend who was the editor of that
magazine asked him, and they wanted to bring
out the magazine again because there was, again,
a lot of literary interest.
And they asked Satyajit Ray to write. He
was not a writer. So we have to
think, this person, he started his career as
an illustrator. He used to work in,
like, you know, an advertising agency. From there,
he became a filmmaker.
And
he like, you know, in 1955,
Pockit Panchali released. And then after that, he
was doing really well. And there were, like,
3, 4 other very good movies that came
out. The entire Pockit Panchali, it's a part
of trilogy of 3 movies. Those movies came
out around that. And around 1961,
they wanted because there was a lot of
interest around him, they wanted to kind of,
you know, revive this magazine.
And his friend asked him to write,
like, you know and because this was mostly
geared towards
young adults and, young people, they asked him
to write. And he wrote for the first
time. And he introduced this character, like, you
know, professor Shonku,
and he started writing about it.
And I think that had and he has
also said in different places that it started,
like, at as this funny, mad scientist in
the beginning. But after that, things got very
serious, and that was a direct,
like, you know, it had direct correlation with
Ray's interest into science,
like reading about science, like reading journals.
And I have read, like, you know, he
had subscription to science and, like, you know,
other scientific magazines
where he would be reading up upon them
to help him write, but he was actually
building up on his intuition about and he
all also had the AGLs and, like, you
know, his other backgrounds about, like, you know,
his part of his father's works were also,
like, you know, had that sci fi
relationship. So then he started,
like, you know, writing this more. And there's
this interview of Ray in,
the eighties, which I heard it's in Bengali,
actually, where he talks about this, and he
said that Shonku became more serious
because of his interest.
Now that was the timeline around 90 that
started around 1961.
So by 1967,
if he was writing this, like, you know,
The Alien, which was, again,
based on the first writing that he wrote
in Sandesh,
like, The Bunku Babu Diary, that was something
he wrote for Sandesh,
And that was the screenplay that he later
adapted for,
you know, the alien. And there was also
this another one called Bongjhatri
Diary that was Shonku's first,
novel. And I think there are parts of
that also which are adapted into this. So
I think you can if you follow the
chronology, you can see that, you know, he
was kind of following his
interest and he became very passionate about it.
And this writing was, like, a product of
that,
that thing. You were speaking to somebody or
somebody was listening now who'd never heard
of of Ray's work and and and you
said, right, you've got to start with this
one. Where do they start? I would say
there is no chronology. Just pick up the
one, you know, that you like and,
you know, your interest would be picked to
an extent that you would become the investigator
to find out which one you want to
read.
But, basically, it totally depends on interests. Like,
I would say,
if you are into,
reading investigative,
like, you know, detective,
kind of novels, reading Feluda,
and he has a series of stories in
Feluda. That's that's really good.
Then professor
is like the other ones. These are for
young adults, and he has these bunch of
short stories also.
If you are not into reading, there's a
repertoire of his movies that you could, watch
starting from,
Like, there are these 3, like, in the
Opu trilogy movies. And then
if you watch,
like, further than the seventies, he became more
political, which was, I think, a reflection of
how,
Bengal, like, you know, his, like, you know,
where he belonged. The politics over there kinda
shaped his narrative, I think, in his movies.
And then there's this movie called Devi and
Charulata where he beautifully and these
3 are one of, like, you know, some
of my favorite movies of how he depicted
women characters in that movie. He had a
very unique way of depicting,
women characters.
So, I would say in the movies, then
you can just follow the chronology.
But,
till the 1992, where, you know and he
started making more movies that was an intersection
between families
and values, like, kind of moved and delved
into that genre also, but very heavily based
on also politics and what was going on
in the society.
In his writings,
I would say since most of his writings
were, like, for magazines
or, like, were published, like, short stories for
magazines.
They are not very organized. Like, later, people
have organized those those stories into, like, an
anthologies or books which are available now. But,
that's the beauty. I think Ray's work doesn't
have,
that kind of thing that, oh, you read
1 and you can start from anywhere, and
I think the flavor is intact, like, everywhere.
We'll return to Momita later in the podcast.
And being able to trace
the inspiration
for a science fiction writer, a science fiction
filmmaker
will become particularly interesting
in this next section.
But first, I asked Andrew Robinson that same
question. Where would he start if he was
recommending that somebody comes to raise work? Oh,
I think the films are undoubtedly
what people should go for and
not too many of them. I mean, there
are about 30 feature films,
but I think
just about everybody who's interested in world cinema
will have seen
the first
trilogy of films, the Uproot trilogy.
That is perhaps the most famous,
but I would like to suggest you see
the chess players as well because that's the
film that got me going, and it's partly
in English, which helped.
Most of his films are in Bengali alone,
but this is partly in English so you
can follow the
rather,
trenchant conversations
between Richard Attenborough as the British general
and his ADC,
who doesn't agree with him.
And then the king of out who is
the British are trying to make him abdicate
his throne so they can grab Lucknow and
the state that the king rules over. And,
eventually,
they get their way, and Richard Attenborough told
me that that
every breath in my body was was against
what the general was doing, but I was
I was still acting the part, and I
had to do it as well as I
could. Yes.
So he managed to pull it off.
I recommend that film. And there are some
others. There's there's there's a there's a a
love story set in Victorian, Calcutta
called Charulata, which everyone has seen. Peter Sellers
loved that film.
People like that. In fact, all over the
world, people love Charulata.
Okay. Wasn't Peter Sellers supposed to be,
or
highlighted as a possible for one of the
roles in one of his other films?
Yeah. Sure.
Peter Sellers and he met in Paris,
in in 1967
over lunch,
and they got on very well.
Peter Sellers was was surrounded by,
waiters in in in the restaurant because they
loved inspector Clouseau. And even though he couldn't
speak any French, he pretended he spoke in.
And we haven't found that very funny,
and they became friendly.
And Peter Sellers agreed to play
the part of a rich industrialist
in Ray's,
would be science fiction
film called The Alien,
which
he had written
back in Calcutta in 1967,
and he found
enthusiasm from Arthur c Clark.
Arthur c Clark said,
let's try and get this made into a
Hollywood film.
He and Arthur discussed it actually while they
were watching
Stanley Kubrick filming,
2,001, a Space Odyssey in London because Arthur
was the the screenwriter,
and
he introduced Ray to Kubrick, and Kubrick really
revered Ray. He he loved his work.
So from that point, Arthur and Ray were
talking quite a lot, and I knew both
of them,
you know, later in life.
So I was friendly with Arthur as well.
And,
Arthur pursued it. Ray then
got
to a friend of Arthur's. In fact, it
was his partner
because Arthur was gay.
And the Mike Wilson was his name.
He became
the would be producer of the science fiction
project,
And he then introduced him to Sellers, and
then he went to Wilson went to Hollywood
and persuaded
Columbia to
back the film.
And so Ray ended up in Columbia
watching Peter Sellers shooting a film there
and talking to legendary figures like,
Bridgette Bardot and people like that at parties.
But he got the impression
that,
Mike Wilson
was
was was talking
big, but not going to deliver. And
in the end, things went wrong, but Columbia
remained very, very interested in producing the film
if they got rid of if he got
rid of Mike Wilson as producer.
And that's what happened. And for almost 15
years, Columbia said we would like to do
this film with you.
And then,
things went wrong, and we can talk about
that if you wish. I would like to.
Yeah. So, I mean, people might not know
because the first film was never made. It
was called the alien. Can you tell us
sort of a little bit about the synopsis
of what was gonna be in this film?
Sure. Sure. It's about
a
young humanoid figure who
is piloting a spaceship, and the spaceship crashes
in
a remote village in Bengal,
far from the city,
and it crashes at night into a pond.
And the villages don't notice
it to begin with because it sinks into
the pond, and the only bit of it
that's showing is the golden spire of the
spaceship sticking out of the pond.
Now they have no idea that there is
this humanoid
creature inside.
They think it's most of them think it's
a temple,
and they start to think they should worship
it because they think it's risen out of
the ground
instead of come down from the sky. They
know nothing about where it's come from. They
think it's come out of the ground, and
it must be
a a a a really important
religious
building of some kind. So
they think, let's worship it. And then the
the humanoid creature silently and invisibly comes out,
and they still can't see it because it
has magical powers.
And it starts to do strange things in
the village
invisibly.
For instance, it it it ripens
the paddy field of one of the villages
overnight,
and he is amazed and can't explain this
at all. And then it sees a mango
tree, and
and,
it it ripens the mango fruit at the
wrong time of year.
And then and then it sees a funeral
going on
of,
an old very old man, and his grandson
is bending over his corpse on a funeral
pyre.
And the alien
invisibly makes the old man open his eyes.
The corpse opens its eyes in front of
the boy, the grandson,
and then closes them again.
And the grandson sees this and is very
shocked.
And the villagers don't see it, so they
don't know what's happened. But the the grandson
is convinced that this,
something
magical is going on.
And, eventually, a US engineer who's been sent
into this village to dig 2 wells,
He's from Montana, and he's this kind of
can do figure.
He,
he works with a local Indian industrialist
to try and dig out the pond or
at least that's what he wants to do
to find out what this
strange
building in it is.
And that's when the alien inside the spaceship
suddenly realizes that he's in trouble.
And so the last scene of the film
has the spaceship
suddenly,
rushing out of the pond and disappearing back
into
outer space,
before they can dig it out and,
harass the alien,
with equipment.
So, you know, it's about the landing of
a a a rather innocent and,
humorous
young
humanoid,
figure without any eyes, by the way. This
is one thing that Ray thought would be
interesting. It has sockets for eyes, but no
eye,
and he called it a sort of whimsy.
That was the word he used for it.
He he said it's not really a a
serious
figure, but,
I tried to put some real science in
as well as
science fiction, and and I call it a
whimsy.
And that's really the cause of what went
wrong, I think. It was it was a
kind of comical
creation and,
then it was
it caused
interesting controversy in Hollywood.
In what well, hang on just a second.
So it I I can imagine in the
19 sixties, I'm a bit of a science
fiction fan. Right? So thinking back to the
films of the 19 sixties, that would have
stuck
out a lot. Right? It would have been
amazing,
but it would have stuck out a lot.
It wasn't the sort of thing that was
made in the Yeah. It might have worked
in the eighties, you might think.
Yes. There might be that sort of Absolutely.
Yes.
So tell us about the controversy then. Well,
1967
was when Roe was hoping to make it.
And
long and short of it is that father
Clark kept on encouraging him. Columbia kept on
encouraging him.
They got rid of Mike Wilson,
and the producers at Columbia said, well, let's
pursue this.
But it was a very difficult project for
an Indian director to make,
even the one as famous as Ray.
He was not from Hollywood in any way.
So there were financial difficulties,
technical difficulties,
and
many many other problems, and so it kept
on being delayed.
But in the end,
in 1982,
well, 1st race or Close Encounters of the
3rd Kind in the late 19 seventies,
and he thought, oh, dear. This is a
bit similar to my story.
And then he saw ET
by Steven Spielberg
in 1982,
and his heart fell
because,
there was
definite similarities
between his script
and the story of ET.
Not identical, but many similarities.
And
he frankly thought
something's been going on here, which is not
really
very honest because I know that my script
was circulated
in large numbers in mimeographed
form back in 1967
throughout
America as he put it, and certainly a
lot within Hollywood.
Copies were made to try and sell it
to different companies.
And Ray never
quite could get to the bottom of it,
but he felt that,
frankly speaking, the script had been seen
by the producers of ET.
Spielberg denied this.
In 1984, he went to see Arthur Clarke
in
Sri Lanka where Arthur lived,
and and he got a bit annoyed when
Arthur said, look. I think there are some
similarities,
rather strange similarities between ET and Ray's script.
And Spielberg said,
look,
when that script was circulating in Hollywood, which
he admitted it had, I was a kid
in high school.
Now that's just not true.
He was not a kid in high school.
He was 20 years old in 1967,
and he was becoming a movie director in
his twenties.
So it's just not accurate,
and I I I think the problem is
that there's no doubt the script was available.
Ray didn't want to pursue the similarities,
he said I have better things to do,
so we'll never know for sure. But I
can tell you this,
in 2010,
Martin Scorsese,
the American director who was
a a huge admirer of Ray,
and he he really does treasure Ray's work.
There's no question.
Again and again, Scorsese has spoken about how
he loves Ray's work ever since he was
a teenager.
Scorsese openly said in 2010,
I have no qualms in admitting that
Steven Spielberg's ET was influenced by Satya Jit
Ray's Alien,
and even sir Richard Attenborough pointed this out
to me as he put it.
Right. Okay. And many others have, quite frankly.
It's not a surprising fact nowadays.
It's certainly difficult to pinpoint exactly where the
inspiration for an idea came from.
When I was speaking to Momita,
I was thinking about the
space race and how that influenced space films.
But those films were very much about the
space race, about humans going out into space.
And those big sci fi films of the
time were really about
alien invasions.
So something like ET,
something like the alien would really have stood
out at the time.
Arthur c Clark, writing in The Times in
response to Andrew Robinson's
profile on Sacagit Ray,
says, it's quite true that as the initial
financier of the alien, I wrote to Ray
pointing out some striking parallels between the two
screenplays and suggesting that he contact Spielberg.
My chief concern was that he might be
accused of plagiarism
if the alien was ever made.
I certainly never encouraged legal action. Artists have
better things to do with their time. In
any case, encounters between children and friendly ETs
are an old concept in science fiction.
Notable examples are Theodore Sturgeon's,
May Wu's Jet in 1946,
and Robert Heinlein's novel,
Star Beast from 1954.
When I broached the subject with Spielberg
on his recent visit to Sri Lanka, he
replied rather indignantly,
tell Satyajit I was a kid in high
school when his script was circulating in Hollywood.
I'm quite happy to take his word on
the matter and would hate to cause any
ill feeling between 2 of the greatest geniuses
the movies have ever produced.
Arthur c Clarke writing from Sri Lanka
to The Times.
Obviously, as discussed, the slight issue there is
that Spielberg was in fact 20
at the time. Here's Momita Dasgupta
again. I was just,
going over
things and, you know, the alien story. I
knew about this alien story, like, you know,
that,
it was it dates
much before Spielberg, like, you know, and then
he took this.
But I was actually listening to
an interview, which is in Bengali. I wish
I could, you know, tell you, but it
was it did not have any,
subtitles.
But,
but Satyajit Ray was actually talking in that
video. It's available on YouTube.
And,
you know,
something really struck me, which was, like, very
original for the time that he belong.
Over there,
you know and he was expressing a little
bit of dissatisfaction
that, you know, Spielberg has already made Ity
by then
and the uncanny
resemblance between Ity and his work.
And he was like, you know, now if
I were to make it, like, I would
be the one who looks like he's plagiarized,
but very uncanny resemblance. Like, you know, the
3 fingers and he his alien had he
used to raise 3 finger. Their alien raised
4 fingers.
And, like, you know, the structure like, this
little boy, the alien almost looked like this
little boy with, like, you know, socket like
eyes.
And then but there were very subtle differences.
And
while I was listening to that and I
was actually, you know, envisioning
what the movie Spielberg made, like, I could
actually understand
his distinction,
and I found something, like, you know, really,
really
I don't know. It kind of blew my
mind at that point. So, you know, all
these IT movies and, like, around that, the
sci fi movies that we used to work,
look at over there.
The creature would mostly be robot like would
be a robot, and they would be pressing
buttons in their spaceships
to get, like, around that time, like, you
know, how they envisioned aliens.
But his
way of looking at,
alien was very different. So he was going
by his intuition about life.
And he said that, you know, life exists
because there is, like, some chemical reactions and,
like, the amino acids
is the basis for all life. So if
life has to exist in different planets, it
would exist the same way. It wouldn't be
very different from what it is, what how
we see life.
So he talked about,
this alien
who is this who looks like a little
boy. It's almost weightless. It can stand on
a leaf. It cannot, like you know, it
is so weightless. It can stand on a
leaf, but it is actually made out of
veins
and vessels and blood vessels and a very,
lifelike form. And even the spaceship
where he would live was also very organic.
Like, you know, it would be made out
of, like, you know, lifelike things because in
order to support life, you need life.
And I found that was very striking, his
vision about,
alien and his alien
and the life
that he envisioned was very, very
original
at that point.
I mean, of course, later, there have been,
like, you know, we we see a lot
of movies and things. But in that point
in 19 sixties when no one had made
any movies about any aliens, like, his idea
about aliens and how he wanted to portray
his alien,
I thought,
like, you know and this whole
little thing that life is life. It is
same everywhere. And, you know, I I don't
know. The biophysics and physicist
inside me kind of got excited about that
that vision
of Ray.
As a listener to this podcast, I assume
that you're interested in physics.
And if you're still wondering whether you should
delve into such a great work for one
last time, here's Andrew Robinson.
Science in the broader sense
quite often in the films, really quite often.
Physics, I would say, is
apart from the science fiction is restricted
largely
to comment on
machines,
such as railway trains, that kind of thing,
and how they work,
and then astronomy. He he he had a
keen interest in astronomy.
And there are in his last film, there's
a there's an exchange
about astronomy where
the the the elderly man who's the hero
of the film says to his
great nephew that isn't it strange that,
the sun and the moon
are of roughly the same size
in the sky
they appear to be,
and that the Earth is the right size
for solar and lunar eclipses. Isn't that a
strange fact? How do you explain it? And
the boy can't explain it.
So,
the the elderly
hero says, well, it's it's true, and it's
one of those magical mysteries
in in in astronomy, which we can't really
explain.
And and so they make a a sort
of joke out of it, but it's semiseries.
And and I think it's fair to say
that there are a few other references of
that
kind, but I don't want to give you
the impression that Ray is a physicist.
He's not that, but he's very, very sympathetic
to the scientific
attitude, and
in no way was he openly
religious.
I mean, very many
Indian
directors are sympathetic
to
Hinduism
and other Indian religions,
but Ray was pretty much,
free of
religious
devotion of any kind. His he was dominated
by
rational thinking,
I think, throughout his life, but he was
immensely creative as well. And, of course, creative
people
have other sources of inspiration.
But he did say and I'll
I'll stop here. He did say science,
I think, will explain the mystery of creation
and the creation of life
in the same way
as the
the atom has been explained by Physics
eventually.
But I don't think Science will ever explain
creativity,
how ideas occur in a flash. He said,
I I don't think science will explain that.
Thank you so much to Momita Das Gupta
and Andrew Robinson for talking to me for
this episode of the Physics World Stories podcast.
And don't forget you can read more about
Satyajit Ray from Andrew Robinson on the Physics
World website, physics world dot com, and in
the Physics World magazine this month. We'll be
back next month with something else from this
wonderful world of physics. And thank you very
much for listening.
Physics world.