When E .T., the Extra-Terrestrial was released in 1982, audiences were captivated by the tender story of a stranded alien befriending a child. Yet few know that nearly two decades earlier, Satyajit Ray had written a screenplay titled The Alien, centred on a benign extraterrestrial who forms a bond with a young boy in rural Bengal. Though Ray’s project never materialised into a film, its conceptual similarities to E.T. later sparked international debate. Whether coincidence or not, this proves that Ray’s thoughts and ideas were ahead of time; not confined by region or nationality, they had a universal resonance.
As this 2nd of May marks the 105th birth anniversary of Satyajit Ray, we would like to turn the focus to a lesser-explored aspect of his practice: Ray the Artist, illustrator/ storyteller, designer, and typographer: Where the medium was not celluloid, but paper instead.
Before he became the filmmaker the world knows, Ray was already deeply formed as a visual and graphic artist. From commercial art and film posters to book covers and typefaces, he moved across forms with remarkable ease. His visual practice not only shaped his cinematic language but also stands independently as a significant body of works. What’s striking is the range of his illustrative language: Ray had immense artistic control over his line on paper, drawing out illustrations flawlessly while practicing across different styles and visual grammar.
After graduating in Economics from Presidency College, Calcutta, Ray enrolled at Visva-Bharati University in Shantiniketan at his mother’s insistence. His formal artistic education was under the guidance of stalwarts such as Nandalal Bose and Benode Behari Mukherjee. His exposure to Chinese landscape painting, Japanese woodcuts, and Indian miniature traditions, along with formative visits to Ajanta, Ellora, and Khajuraho, shaped his aesthetic sensibility. In My Years with Apu (1994), Ray described this encounter with classical Indian art as an “eyeopener.” His use of light and shadow, reflecting his admiration for Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci, along with his sensitivity to rhythm and landscape, was cultivated early at Shantiniketan. The assimilation of Eastern and Western artistic vocabularies became a cornerstone of his visual and cinematic style.
Ray’s professional career began at the British advertising agency D.J. Keymer, where he worked as a junior visualiser. Here, he imagined modern advertising with motifs drawn from Bengali folk art. In works such as the Jabakusum advertisements he brought a distinctly Indian graphic sensibility into modern commercial design. His aptitude for graphic design soon led him to Signet Press, where, over the course of a decade, he designed nearly ninety book covers.
In works such as the Jabakusum advertisements he brought a distinctly Indian graphic sensibility into modern commercial design. His aptitude for graphic design soon led him to Signet Press, where, over the course of a decade, he designed nearly ninety book covers.
In his cover for Abanindranath Tagore’s Khirer Putul, Ray has a striking use of colour and bengali motifs. The calligraphy recalls curvilinear forms of alpana, a traditional Bengali folk art. This use of colours and ornamentation with a modern and clean sensibility set a new benchmark for book design in India. During this period, his graphic language matured further. His illustrations for Rajkahini by Abanindranath Tagore, stories of Rajput valour, demonstrate a sophisticated synthesis of Rajput miniature aesthetics and a grounded realism reminiscent of rural life. Ray reduces excessive decoration, uses white space with confidence, and gives the figures a certain weight and immediacy. His ability to visually distill narrative essence anticipated the compositional precision of his later films.
This exacting visual sensibility extended into typography as well. For Ray, lettering was never an afterthought added once the image was complete; it was part of the image itself. He was dissatisfied with the stiffness of existing Bengali metal type, which could not always convey the suppleness and character of the script as he experienced it in handwriting and calligraphy. In response, he began reworking letterforms with greater freedom and sensitivity, bringing to print some of the rhythm and grace of the drawn line. His experiments extended to the English alphabet as well, producing distinctive typefaces such as Ray Roman and Ray Bizarre.
Ray’s engagement with typography was both practical and deeply artistic. At a time when existing Bengali metal fonts were inadequate in conveying the script’s subtlety, he undertook the task of redesigning letterforms with greater sensitivity to proportion, rhythm, and visual coherence. His typographic experiments extended to the English alphabet as well, producing distinctive fonts such as Ray Roman and Ray Bizarre. These efforts demonstrate not merely stylistic innovation but a fundamental rethinking of graphic communication, through which Ray significantly transformed modern Bengali book design.
In 1961, Ray revived Sandesh, a children’s magazine originally founded by his grandfather, Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury. The magazine gave him a space in which writing, illustration, layout, and design could come together. Its covers, often playful and vividly composed, drew on folk motifs and geometric patterning. The caged leopard illustration that’s capturing the scene so precisely in monochrome, is one of the numerous such examples where he makes the narrative come to life with ink and paper.
His transition to filmmaking was thus not abrupt but organic. Cinema, in that sense, did not mark a break from his earlier practice. It extended habits of looking, framing, and visual problem-solving that had already been sharpened on paper.
As his directorial debut, Pather Panchali remains an iconic and poignant portrayal of the resilience of the human spirit. The film emerged partly from Ray’s illustrations for an abridged edition of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s novel. He went on to storyboard the film in detailed sketches, a practice he continued throughout his career. These preparatory images became central to the making of Pather Panchali, shaping the way scenes were imagined before they were filmed. His command of composition, perspective, and tonal balance, honed through years of drawing, became defining features of his cinematic language.
Each frame in a Ray film bears the discipline of a painter’s eye. In his process, the sketch came first, which set the mood for the scene; and it usually was this sketch that he tried to recreate in his camera through light, tonality, and camera placement. Even costumes and sets were often conceptualised in his famed kherorkhata (red notebook), where he detailed the visuals of his scenes to the tee.
Ray also designed many of his own film posters. The posters for Mahapurush and Pratidwandi reveal a surrealist photomontage sensibility, while those for Mahanagar and Seemabaddha display a minimalist, almost pop-art inflection. The chiaroscuro effects in the Ghare Baire poster further demonstrate his nuanced understanding of tonal contrast and spatial depth.
When one looks at Ray’s practice as a visual artist, one better understands the precision behind his cinema: films made by someone who, both intuitively and through training, thought in images. While his innovations and legacy in Indian graphic design are no less significant than his impact on cinema, Ray’s genius transversed disciplines, creativity that has no bounds.
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Supriya Lahoti is a museum professional and art consultant. Jayesh Mathur is an architect, independent scholar, and Indian art collector.
