Different rays

To mark Satyajit Ray’s 100th birth anniversary year, India International Centre has put together a physical-cum-digital exhibition of his calligraphic covers, book jackets, title cards, illustrations, and more

As a child, this writer remembers pinning her hopes on Sandesh. It was a monthly ritual of waiting and wanting. Sandesh, — not the mawa-milk sweet — but the monthly literary digest for children that was originally brought to life by Upendrakishore Ray, and later revived by Satyajit Ray in 1961. On the one hand, Ray was befriending one Bengali child at a time with his Feluda series, on the other he was touching young minds with vivid illustrations for Sandesh. A monthly dose of the magazine’s cover, and this writer would mull for days if a lion’s mane could branch out like a tree, if mahouts sat on plush velvet seats or if mauve and orange always looked attractive with splashes of white. His dwellings on design created bolder imprints on adult minds, too.

Satyajit Ray

Ray between the Covers is part of India International Centre’s (IIC) Pen, Ink, Action: Satyajit Ray at 100 project. The Delhi-based organisation has been celebrating Ray’s vision since May 2, 2021, and a display of his covers and types was long overdue. “We have focused on an audience that’s not fundamentally associated with Bengali culture. Ray’s covers are often discussed in professional design circles and within the [Bengali] community. But not many from other communities know of his 360-degree engagement with art,” shares Indrani Majumdar, who works at IIC’s programme office. Majumdar, curator of the display, adds that the gallery has a corner for his books so that visitors can “feel” a jacket lend itself to the story. The books are there in both English and Bangla. The attentive addition of this corner brings home a book cover’s tactile significance.

Covers for the book of poems titled Hukkahua (left), and for The Emperor’s Ring

Majumdar feels there’s a vast world awaiting us in Ray’s artistic revelations: “We have a lot to learn from his pieces, and I don’t mean design students only. I think school modules can subtly draw kids’ attention to his meandering in colour and typography.” The filmmaker had started his career as a visualiser at the British advertising agency, D J Keymer. His ad art reflected his fluency in folk motifs, pattachitra paintings and alpanas. Around the same time, Ray revolutionised Bengali book cover traditions when he started designing jackets for Signet Press, recalls Majumdar. “He pioneered the use of Indian, especially folk elements in commercial art. In the book titled Param Purush Sri Sri Ramkrishna, Ray not only used religious namaboli motifs, but also the typical font in a religious scripture or Pnuthi. Take the Bengali version of The Man Eaters of Kumaon by Jim Corbett, for instance. The artwork depicts the stripes on a tiger’s body and the mark of a bullet gives you the title of the book. That cover extends till the back and there, the size of the bullet mark is bigger, meaning the bullet has penetrated through the big cat’s body. That’s how he was drawing the reader into a manuscript,” she explains.

Indrani Majumdar

The exhibition has covers from the poetry collection, Hukkahua, from the Feluda detective series and Professor Shonku science fiction series. It will also take viewers through his title credits and not-so-famous illustrations. Majumdar is grateful to Ray’s son, Sandip, who has helped them host this  rich display.    

On February 28 to March 13  
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