He was a strange man even in the Calcutta of the '60s. Calcutta then was not the city of narrow horizons it later became. It was teeming with oddballs -- anarchists, Trotskyites, Mao worshippers, beatnik buffs, diehard alcoholics, acid freaks and loonies believing in the flat earth theory. The intellectual-to-population ratio then was high even by the usual Bengali standards.

Satyajit Ray stood out, literally, for his height. I first saw the six-foot-and-four hulk step out of a green coloured station wagon in front of Metro cinema on a Sunday morning. That was some time around 1963, when his Mahanagar (The Big City) had just released. He hurriedly picked up a magazine from the kiosk in front of the theatre, probably the Life, and almost ran back to the car. I found him a little stooped, as though he was keen to hide his height, if not stature.

Even so early, Ray's cultural stature had become more daunting than his physical height. During the release of the Apu trilogy, between 1955 and 1959, his apotheosis was complete. The coffee-house crowds began referring to him by his pet name, "Manikda". Gatecrashing into his home on Lake Temple Road in Ballygunj on flimsy excuses became so common a cultural pastime that Sandip, his schoolgoing son, always full of pranks, posted a notice on the front door demanding an admission fee of eight annas. By the '60s, he was too famous a figure to visit his favourite haunt, the corner room of the Chowringhee coffee house, which was called -- still is -- the House of Lords.

After I got involved, as a precocious teenager, with the Calcutta Film Society, I remember the select audiences at a projection theatre, where we watched classy movies, waiting to read Ray's reaction after the screening to decide on the volume of applause. His deification was pretty unusual, for Bengal's cultural nerve centre was always in its literary community, Rabindranath Tagore being a classic example. With Ray, it was the turn of a filmmaker to occupy that throne.

It happened because of the international aura that Ray had acquired so early. In this age of media explosion, it is difficult to gauge the worldwide acclaim that Ray commanded in that era. In the '60s and the '70s when his reputation became stratospheric, each of his new releases got article-length reviews in The New Yorker or in The Times of London. Prime minister Indira Gandhi scrupulously invited the visiting foreign dignitaries to private screenings of the new Ray movies. He became a national icon showcased to the world in a way that no Indian art personality ever had been. With the exception, perhaps, of Tagore.

Film historian Penelope Houston commented that "Ray's Bengal" would remain "cinema's India", "unless someone else comes along to change it". Well, nobody else quite came along that way. Raj Kapoor was popular in India and the erstwhile USSR but did not have the refinement to be noticed by the high priests of culture in New York or London. V. Shantaram's fare was burlesque of the box office. Ray's contemporaries from Bengal, like Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen, were the local flavours at best. Talents like Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Kundan Shah, Ketan Mehta and Adoor Gopalakrishnan hadn't risen yet.

Even if they were there, it would presumably not have made much difference. For nobody else in the Indian film industry is as multi-faceted as Ray. Much before the release of his trilogy, his reputation as a book designer stood on a solid plank. His Feluda stories for children top the chart of Bengali books even today. A generation ago, children used to skip their home work to read these stories as they appeared in the puja annual numbers. He was above all a man of great social charm who could delight every gathering, from the enlightened chic to the local wannabe.

And there was a rather odd and inescapable Englishness in his personality. More than his accent, which had a BBC quality about it, it was his sharp understatements that sounded alien in the typical Indian social evenings. Talking about a particularly lewd Hindi film in the house of a French diplomat in Calcutta, he said even a colour-blind would see its similarity with "Picasso's paintings in a parti-cular period". Once he invited a famous leftie to his home and the leftie, seething with class hatred for this bourgeois filmmaker, said his home was frequented by far too many "nice fellows" for his taste. "Don't worry," Ray told him, "let me know when you're coming and I'll invite quite a few uncouth guys to satisfy you."

In a filmmaking career spanning 37 years, with 29 feature films, Ray left a body of work, and an array of international awards, which can be the envy of every art personality. However, it is the Apu trilogy that remains the cornerstone of his oeuvres. They are astonishingly rich in character, depicted with a naturalness that one expects from documentaries. From the American art-houses, the Apu films touched the creative minds as an overpowering coming-of-age story, in perfect tune with the genre of adolescent fiction that was later to explode on the American fiction and TV cartoon shows. In The Simpsons, the cartoon saga of Bart Simpson's education which is now popular in India, there is an Indian convenience-store owner whose name is Apu (this Apu is a Patel, of course).

At the various stages through which a film progresses -- the script, sets, locations, cutting rooms and re-recording studios -- Ray was a picture of the dictator, his words having the ring of army commands. His was the last word, and the unit members accepted it. His production staff and many of his actors stayed with him for decades. They were a disciplined army. Ray was terribly hands-on. At the time of making Ghare Baire, his last major film before a paralysing heart attack in 1983, the tall man was crouched behind the Arriflex camera as it rolled on a trolley.

Ray made his films till his last days, fighting a heroic battle against illness. He shot his last films mostly indoors as doctors wouldn't allow him work on locations. These films therefore lacked the magical splendour of the sunshine and rains of Pather Panchali. His grip on every department of production was loosening, so the films did not have the classical precision of, say, Charulata. However, even in his minor works, he did not waver from his deepest artistic commitment to present, in his own words, "truth wedded to art".

That perhaps explains why his best films were shot in black and white. Indian cinema had been drenched in colour long before Ray began loading the Eastman colour rolls on his camera. It was a trade-off in which colour added glamour but took away from cinema its role as a critical observer of the reality. Even today, when Steven Spielberg, the messiah of techno-cinema, has to tell a stark story like Schindler's List based on a pro-Jewish German's attempt to save the victims of the Nazi holocaust, he chooses black and white film, not colour. Ray had an obligation to the country of his birth to chronicle the joys and sorrows of its people. He accomplished it in black and white, literally.

Sumit Mitra is senior editor, India Today.

AUTEUR GALLERY

GURU DUTT (1925-64): Studying dance under Uday Shankar, and working as a telephone operator in Calcutta, he had stints as actor and choreographer before becoming the John Huston of Bombay in the 1950s, directing realist films with stylised imagery and exquistire songs. With CID (1956), he introduced Waheeda Rehman and propelled her to stardom. Kagaaz Ke Phool, India's first CinemaScope film, made by him, foreshadowed his suicide. His films, like his life, remain a symbol of self-destructive romanticism.

SHYAM BENEGAL (Born 1934): A cousin of Guru Dutt, he had hundreds of ad films to his credit before directing Ankur (1974), his first feature film, a memorable parable of caste, class and sexual conflict in rural India. Regarded closest to inheriting Satyajit Ray's mantle, yet using professional talents in the film industry, he covered for two decades the middle ground of Indian cinema, striking a delicate balance between realism and entertainment. He also contributed to bringing into prominence a crop of acting talents like Shabana Azmi, Smita Patil, Om Puri and Naseeruddin Shah.