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Mamata Banerjee pays tribute to Satyajit Ray on the auteur’s death anniversary

Today is the 26th death anniversary of one of India’s greatest filmmakers – Satyajit Ray. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee thus took to Twitter to pay homage to the cine icon, who is counted among the world’s greatest auteurs.

Mamata Banerjee pays tribute to Satyajit Ray on the auteur’s death anniversary

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Today is the 26th death anniversary of one of India’s greatest filmmakers – Satyajit Ray. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee took to Twitter to pay homage to the cine icon, who is counted among the world’s greatest auteurs.

“Homage to legendary filmmaker Satyajit Ray on his death anniversary,” she wrote.

Mamata ended her tweet with the words “Maharaja Tomare Selam” (Obeisance to you, O King!) in Bengali both as a salutation to the legend and referring to a very famous song from one of Ray’s movies.

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Ray, who was born on 2 May 1921, is hailed as one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century. Honoured with the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian honour, in 1992, Ray and his movies won 32 National Awards, a Golden Lion, a Golden Bear, two Silver Bears and an Academy Honorary Award in 1992. He also won numerous other honours at various film festivals around the world.

His style of filmmaking is often compared to the likes of Japanese giant Akira Kurosawa, Soviet maestro Andrei Tarkovsky, American great Orson Welles, French auteur Jean Renoir and Italian icon Vittorio De Sica – the last two of whom were among the early inspirations for Ray.

Ray was a polymath. Besides filmmaking, he also excelled as a prolific writer of short stories, drew the art of all of his works himself, and composed the music in all his movies.

The 1955 film ‘Pather Panchali’, his first, is an internationally celebrated movie to this day. He followed the story with ‘Aparajito’ in 1956 and ‘Apur Sansar’ in 1959. Together, ‘The Apu Trilogy’ is counted among the greatest films in cinema history. It is one of the only two Indian films to find place in the TIME magazine’s ‘All-time 100 Movies’ list – the other being Guru Dutt’s ‘Pyaasa’.

Ray is also credited with introducing memorable characters through books or cinema for children. He created the iconic Bengali detective Pradosh Chandra Mitter aka ‘Feluda’.

“Maharaja Tomare Selam”, quoted by the West Bengal CM, is a song from Ray’s 1968 movie ‘Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne’ – a favourite of children and adults alike to this day.

‘Mahanagar’, ‘Charulata’, ‘Nayak’, ‘Chiriyakhana’, ‘Ganashatru’ and ‘Agantuk’ are some of his most well known works in Bengali cinema. He directed only two Hindi films in his career – ‘Shatranj Ke Khilari’ in 1977 and ‘Sadgati’ in 1981.

Ray passed away on 23 April 1992 aged 71.

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