The man who watched Ray

A bug on a windowsill. That is how Satyajit Ray once affectionately described Nemai Ghosh: an ever-present, quietly watching, never-in-the-way presence. It is perhaps the most precise metaphor for what Ghosh did over 25 years as he stayed close, stayed still, and let the world of Ray unfold before his camera.

The result is now gathered into a stunning volume titled Faces and Facets: Satyajit Ray in Colour, which is nothing short of a visual biography, something Henri Cartier-Bresson himself acknowledged when he called Ghosh the ‘photo-biographer’ of Satyajit Ray.

The book accompanies Faces and Facets: Satyajit Ray in Colour at DAG, New Delhi, an exhibition featuring never-before-displayed photographs by Nemai Ghosh that focus on his extensive, decades-long documentation of the filmmaker. It features rare colour images of sets, actors, and behind-the-scenes moments that highlight not only the unique artistic partnership between Ghosh and Ray but also document the auteur’s life and work, offering a glimpse into the genius of Satyajit Ray through Ghosh’s intimate, unobtrusive lens.

This year marks Satyajit Ray’s 105th birth anniversary, and the timing could not have been better. His family called him Manik, meaning jewel in Bengali, and those who loved and respected him added ‘da’ as Bengalis do for an elder they hold dear.

There is no better occasion to sit with this photo book and ask: what does colour do to a man we thought we already knew in black and white? The answer, it turns out, is quite a lot.

Ghosh first encountered Ray in 1968 on the sets of Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne in the small town of Rampurhat, West Bengal. “Everything about him intrigued me,” Ghosh writes in the book’s preface. What began as fascination became devotion, and devotion became an archive of nearly 90,000 photographs, one of the most exhaustive visual records ever created of a filmmaker by a single photographer.

The book opens with Ray in his study. It is his cave, yet an airy room, with heaps of papers and books, the kind of room that seems to hold the shape of its occupant’s thinking process. Ray sits stoically in his chair with a pipe in his mouth, his legs anchored against a table in his Calcutta home. It is the same chair, he once said, that he needed to feel creative. The image is sharp enough to catch the grain of paper, the shimmer of an ashtray, and the low spread of afternoon light.

Here is where he wrote scripts, composed music, sketched costumes, and drew posters: a one-man studio disguised as a sitting room. The photographs do not just show a filmmaker at rest. They show the environment in which Ray’s cinema was conceived.

Colour in Ghosh’s hands restores what black and white had filtered out. You see the warmth of Ray’s interiors. You see the particular fatigue on his face during recovery after his 1984 heart attack as he paces in the verandah with the portrait of his mother hanging behind him. You see the textures of sets, the hues of costumes he designed, the light falling differently on his face when he is directing versus when he is thinking. Between photographer and subject, the camera was a shared understanding.

On the sets, Ghosh caught Ray at his truest self. There is Ray demonstrating to actors how a scene should feel, his face shifting expressively, carrying the emotion he wants transferred to the screen. There is Ray alone in a music studio during a lunch break, a cigar in his mouth, keyboard and books all around, composing in solitude. The pictures from the sets are nearly a cinema of their own.

One particularly striking photograph captures Ray’s interaction with sitar maestro Ravi Shankar when Shankar called upon his old friend following Ray’s heart attack in 1984. Then there is an image with French actor Gérard Depardieu, an encounter that underlines just how far Ray’s cinema had travelled beyond borders. Andrew Robinson, who has written extensively on Ray and whose captions enrich this volume, brings the same biographical approach he applied to Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye. Together, Ghosh’s lens and Robinson’s text ensure that this is not merely a coffee-table book but a document of a life lived entirely in the world of cinema.

Ghosh was awarded the Padma Shri in 2010, and his photographs now sit in the permanent collection of India’s National Gallery of Modern Art. But perhaps his greatest achievement is simpler. He gave us Ray not as a monument but as a man: thinking, working, laughing, and creating the extraordinary in ordinary afternoon light.

The exhibition runs till July 4.