Satyajit Ray’s rendezvous with aliens

Satyajit Ray was 10 when he first encountered sci-fi in his grand uncle Kuladaranjan’s Bengali translation of Jules Verne’s ‘Mysterious Island’. He was fascinated by how the story tickled his imagination while remaining anchored in scientific details. 

In an article titled ‘SF’ he wrote for New Magazine in 1966, Ray shared his own unique bifurcation of the sci-fi genre into the ‘prosaic’ and the ‘poetic’. Verne’s prosaic narratives balanced scientific rigour with carefully restrained imaginative liberties. H G Wells’s ‘The Time Machine’ (1895), on the other hand, claimed to transport humans between the past and the future with the pull of a lever, leaning into the poetic liberties of experimental world-building. Wells makes the art of not fully explaining things believable through what Ray calls ‘a dash of scientific patter’ and ‘a modus operandi that is made to sound absurdly simple’.

Ray devoured the works of authors such as Arthur C Clarke, Ray Bradbury, John Wyndham and Theodore Sturgeon, motivating him to helm stories involving science and technology. To revive their family magazine Sandesh and inspired by his father Sukumar Ray’s story ‘Heshoram Hoshiyar’s Diary’, Ray developed the character Professor Shonku in his story ‘The Diary of a Space Traveller’ (1961). The Shonku stories slowly matured in their scientific authenticity, as Ray began to keep himself abreast of the latest happenings in science, including the research on the mysterious Nazca Lines in Peru by Maria Reiche.

Ray categorised sci-fi into roughly four tropes: arrival of monsters from unknown lands, mutation of these monsters, humans against forces of an alien planet and humans menaced by their own technology. The last category finds expression in Ray’s own short story ‘Anukul’, published in 1976, also adapted by Sujoy Ghosh into a short film. A robot servant begins to grasp the relationship dynamics between two individuals in a household and takes an informed, ‘human’ decision towards the end. The man who sells the robots at the shop warns the curious owner, ‘You must talk to him politely.’ Looking back, ‘Anukul’ reads like an early take on artificial intelligence and its moral stakes.

In a 1982 interview for AIR with sci-fi author Sankarshan Roy and psychologist Dr Amit Chakraborty, Ray admitted to being convinced of the presence of paranormal entities after a close family member shared an account of an anomalous experience. A deep interest in parapsychology led Ray to write a short story called ‘Bonkubabur Bandhu’.

In the story, Bonkubabu, a primary school teacher in Kankurgacchi, Kolkata, has a brief, enigmatic encounter with an alien who lands on Earth instead of Pluto. Loved by his students yet mocked by his adult peers, the content yet restive school teacher’s life changes after meeting ‘Ang’ from planet ‘Craneus’. Using a telescope-like device, Ang shows him glimpses of the Aurora Borealis in the North Pole, which leaves the less-travelled Bonkubabu in awe. As he learns about Ang’s food habits, age and linguistic abilities, Bonkubabu is humbled to know that the alien is superior to humans. Bonkubabu returns to his modest life wiser and a lot more confident than before. Ray adapted the short story into a treatment script for a full-fledged feature film called ‘The Alien’. The script made its way to Columbia Pictures but faced difficulty owing to complications with a middleman. The film’s blueprint included highly detailed sketches of the alien and its other artefacts, bearing uncanny resemblances to depictions in a lot of Steven Spielberg’s works, including ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ (1977), ‘E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial’ (1982) and the sci-fi series ‘Taken’ (2002). Ray’s script was circulated in Hollywood in the late 1960s, which led to speculations that its ideas were known to American filmmakers.

Peppering his narratives with crumbs of science, magical absurdity and hyper realism, Ray laid major emphasis on a character’s behavioural changes while in pursuit of inner truth. In his argument, these tales also counted as sci-fi since they were deeply rooted in human psychology. 

In his film ‘Parash Pathar’ (1958), a middle-class bank clerk, tired of his daily struggles, stumbles upon a philosopher’s stone that turns anything it touches into gold. In one of the standout scenes, when the clerk (played by Tulsi Chakrabarti) witnesses this miracle, he responds with a hysterical, helpless cry. Each time the stone appears, a shrill aural motif amplifies the moral confusion created by materialistic temptation. The comically treated satirical narrative explores how temptation drives the human psyche into a dangerous madness. The film’s essence reminds one of John Steinbeck’s novella ‘The Pearl’ (1947) and John Huston’s ‘The Treasure of Sierra Madre’(1948). Both probe the moral weight of guilt and greed in the human condition.

For Ray, sci-fi was not just an agent of scientific awareness but also a way of understanding storytelling and a provocative search for truths about contemporary society. He strongly believed that a writer’s meticulous observation of everyday human experience, which any writer uses as a springboard, follows a highly scientific approach subliminally.