The Image-Maker

Sukumar Ray’s most vivid images were saved for his classics of nonsense verse, but his singular eye, writes Nabarupa Bhattacharjee, found its earliest expression in photography

- Nabarupa Bhattacharjee

The Three Men London 1912 Sukumar Ray

SUKUMAR RAY, BENGAL’S BELOVED CHILDREN'S writer and poet, and father of filmmaker Satyajit Ray, was also a serious photographer in the early years of the 20th century. Arguably the equal of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, and singlehandedly responsible for the creation of Bengali nonsense literature, Sukumar’s poems, stories and plays stand alone. That he is not better known outside Bengal can only be explained by the difficulty of rendering the inventive exuberance of his Bengali in a different language. Like his father (and later his son), Sukumar was a renaissance man, a man of a formidably wide range of interests and talents, including photography which he began experimenting with while still a teenager. Though limited visual and textual evidence exists on or around his practice, this piece attempts to recapitulate his lost discipline, to estimate the possible influences and stances Sukumar took by observing only two of his photographs and some other associated memorabilia, with an eye to the image making practices of his time.

Upon receiving the Guruprasanna Ghosh scholarship from the University of Calcutta, Sukumar sailed to England to study photography and photo-engraving from the London College of Communication and the Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. Sukumar Ray then spent two years in England, from 1911 to 1913. He wrote to his family often and his letters to his father, Upendrakishore Ray, who was an acclaimed printmaker of the age, serves as the principal source to learn about his photographic education and experimentation. Here is an extract from a typical letter, translated from the Bengali:

Northbrook Society

21 Cromwell Road, London

4th January 1912