Nemai Ghosh: Satyajit Ray’s Boswell

Nemai Ghosh (1934-2020) photographed Satyajit Ray at work and scenes from his films from 1968 to 1992.

Anyone drawn to Satyajit Ray and his films owes a debt of gratitude to Nemai Ghosh (1934-2020), who photographed Ray at work and scenes from his films from 1968 right to the end of Ray’s life in 1992.

In Ray’s own words written in 1991, “For close on 25 years, Nemai Ghosh has been assiduously photographing me in action and repose—a sort of Boswell working with a camera rather than a pen. In so far as these pictures rise above mere records and assume a value as examples of the photographer’s art, they are likely to be of interest to a discerning viewer.”

The master photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson—who was fascinated by Ray’s films, especially ‘The Music Room’ ( Jalsaghar) —certainly recognised this. Cartier-Bresson called Ghosh the “photo-biographer” of Ray, and stated with perfect truth in his foreword to Satyajit Ray at 70 , a collection of Ghosh’s photographs and worldwide tributes celebrating Ray’s seventieth birthday: “He allows us to be intimate with film-making, and to feel with great fidelity the drive, the alertness and the profundity of this giant of cinema in all his majestic stature.”

So do I, as the biographer of Ray in the 1980s. Years after Ray’s death in 1992, it was a unique privilege for me to work with Nemai on a large-format, copiously illustrated book using the finest from his tens of thousands of images, along with script extracts and vivid drawings by Ray himself. Entitled Satyajit Ray: A Vision of Cinema , the book comes closer to the mind and heart of a great film-maker’s ‘inner eye’ than perhaps any other book on the cinema.

Ray trusted Ghosh, who worked for the love of Ray’s films, not for money; indeed, his obsession with Ray swallowed up the last rupee of his savings. So he was allowed to become a fly on the wall during all stages of the process of film-making. As Nemai himself writes of Ray in his preface to A Vision of Cinema : “Afterwards, seeing the pictures, he would frequently ask: ‘When did you take it?’ Whatever he was doing—whether writing, designing, acting, directing, operating the camera, editing, composing and recording the music, or simply meditating in the middle of noise and crowds like some sage—Manikda [Ray] was preoccupied. In his eyes, I felt I could see the whole film. I tried to catch that impression.”

For me, Nemai—who was awarded the Padma Shri in 2010—represented the best of Bengal, with his uncommon combination of talent, dedication and modesty, captured in the final words of his preface: “From the lanes of Kalighat Road in Calcutta to the Rue de Rivoli in Paris—and the appreciation of a giant like Cartier-Bresson—was a big leap for a simple man from a middle-class Bengali family. As the moon is illuminated by the light of the sun, very many people have come into the light because of Ray. It was my good luck that one day my stars shone on me too. Whatever inspiration and education I have received in my life are like pebbles I have collected from the shores of the sea called Satyajit Ray.”