Suprabha Ray. The world knows her just by one line-wife of Sukumar Ray and mother of Satyajit Ray, who are considered legends in Bengal and in global arena respectively. But her existence and identity was much more than the above one sentence. As a Brahmo widow she refused to confine her life within domestic drudgery. She contested and challenged the patriarchal constraints of the early twentieth century colonial Bengal. She had an autonomous identity-as a teacher with a creative mind, as a singer and as a sculptor. Suprabha Ray is an embodiment of humanism, having an agency to create a space of her own, as well as guiding her son Satyajit Ray, the internationally acclaimed film maker and author, to create his own space.
Tumpa Mukherjee is an Assistant Professor of Sociology, Women's Christian College (affiliated to the University of Calcutta), Kolkata, India. She is an alumnus of Presidency College and University of Calcutta, Kolkata. She did her doctoral studies on Women Police in Community Policing: A Comparative Study of Kolkata Police with West Bengal Police (Districts of North and South 24 Parganas)' from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Her areas of research interest are Gender Studies; Police and Prison Studies. Her articles have been published in refereed journals, edited volumes (published from India and Germany), daily newspapers such as The Telegraph and The Hindustan Times and also on various social media platforms. Her published works include Community Policing in India: A Sociological Perspective; Women in Police in India. A Journey from Periphery to Core, and Indian Prisons: Towards Reformation, Rehabilitation and Resocialization (co-edited).
My father died when I was seven years and three months old. I along with my mother and elder sister shifted from North India to Calcutta (now Kolkata) and started staying at our maternal uncle's house in South Calcutta. Thus began a new phase in our lives. Every day while dropping me off to school my mother would tell me the story of Tulu mashi (Suprabha Ray) and how she struggled to bring up her only son Manik - Satyajit Ray, the internationally acclaimed film director. I don't know whether repeating the same narrative was catharsis for my mother or whether she wanted me to get inspired by the life of a great personality such as Satyajit Ray. As I grew up in high school we had to learn art, craft and needlework. While teaching me needlework my mother would again refer to Tulu mashi. She always felt I would have learned better had Tulu mashi taught me. So from my early childhood Tulu mashi - Suprabha Ray was a part of my life. In fact Suprabha Ray happens to be a part of folklore of all of us (me, my sister Tora Adhikari; my cousins Alekshya and Ayan Brahma) during the time we grew up. I had a strict and disciplined childhood with permission to see only Satyajit Ray's films telecast on national channels during the weekend. At heart I always cherished to know about Suprabha Ray.
The School of Women's Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, is a citadel where research and academic discussions on women in the late nineteenth and the twentieth century are held regularly. After completing my doctoral studies from the School of Women's Studies, Jadavpur University, I preferred a scholarly engagement on Suprabha Ray, thus concentrated upon exploring the life and times of Suprabha Ray. The title of the book Suprabha Ray. The Unvanquished has been adapted from Satyajit Ray's film Aparajito.
-I have always felt that mortal beings view the Taj Mahal, but forget to look at the foundation stone upon which this seventh wonder of the world the Taj Mahal stands erect. One such foundation stone was Suprabha Ray. As the world prepares to celebrate the birth centenary of Satyajit Ray, let us not forget the mother Suprabha Ray, who served as the beacon of light in his life. This book is a tribute to Suprabha Rays- women who lose their husband at a prime age and toil from dawn to dusk to raise their children, but then fade into oblivion. The book is not an end in itself but should be considered as a beginning to probe Suprabha Rays-the 'forgotten' women and their voices.
It is always a pleasure to write the Foreword to a book and the pleasure is enhanced when the author is personally known to me. In the instant case, I had come to know the author Tumpa Mukherjee about 14 years back when I was Home Secretary, Government of West Bengal and she had approached me for permission to study community policing in our state. Permission duly granted, she came back to me for permission to have it published. I went through her entire manuscript before granting her permission. Back she came again with a request for a Foreword, which I duly wrote. After a while, she presented me with a copy of the book. Much later, she called me and told me that she was writing a book on Women in Police in India. By then, she had joined the Department of Sociology in Women's Christian College, where she is an Assistant Professor now. I understand that that book has also come out and she had co-edited a book on prison reforms in India, a live subject indeed!
She contacted me sometime back saying that she was writing a biography of Suprabha Ray, wife of Sukumar Ray and mother of Satyajit Ray. Suprabha was, indeed, a relation of mine but she had passed away when I was only 12. Incidentally, my grandfather Pramadaranjan Ray was Upendrakisor Raychaudhuri's youngest brother. They lived in a traditionally large, extended family. Upendrakisor and his wife Bidhumukhi, daughter of Brahmo reformer, nationalist and activist Dwarakanath Gangopadhyay, had six children. On top of that, when Upendrakisor's brother Kuladaranjan lost his wife, he moved in here with his three children.
Later, when their neighbour Ramkumar Bhattacharya, Brahmo preacher, became a sanyasi, Upendrakisor took the responsibility of his second daughter Surama and brought her up as his own daughter. His daughter Punyalata's memoirs observe ""We were six and now we became ten"". Dwarakanath lost his first wife quite early and married again his second wife was the famous Kadambini Gangopadhyay, the first Bengali lady doctor. Their family also resided nearby. By this time, of course, Upendrakisor's daughters Sukhalata and Punyalata were married and so was Surama (to Upendrakisor's youngest brother Pramadaranjan), who was to be my own grandmother. Since my grandfather Pramadaranjan worked in the Survey of India and was mostly based in Shillong, my grandmother and her growing family always spent their annual breaks with Upendrakisor. It is not very clear into which house they moved. Upendrakisor had designed and built a large three storied house at 100, Garpar road to accommodate his family, printing firm U Ray & Sons and Sandesh. The house was ready by 1913 and most people have presumed that they were staying there at the time of Sukumar's marriage. However, assiduous researcher Siddhartha Ghosh had concluded that the Ray family moved into the Garpar house only in late 1914 or early 1915. In that case, they probably spent about a year at rented premises at 22, Sukea street, before moving into the Garpar house which was sandwiched between the Athenaeum Institution (immortalized by Satyajit Ray's Lalmohan Ganguly or Jatayu) and the Deaf and Dumb Institution. Incidentally, the house at Garpar still exists under the ownership of Athenaeum Institution, though renumbered as 100A. Sukumar was my father's first cousin, affably called Barda by the huge family, though he had passed away when my father was only 15. His widow Suprabha, who was Tulujethima to us, I remember as a grave lady clad in a 'than', but invariably kind to us youngsters.
3rd October 2017 was the 125th birth anniversary of Suprabha Ray. The present generation perhaps knows her just by one line-wife of Sukumar Ray and mother of Satyajit Ray, who are considered legends in Bengal and in global arena respectively. Notwithstanding her illustrious husband and son, she had an autonomous identity - as a Brahmo woman, as a teacher, as a sculptor and as a singer.
Sukumar Ray is an icon whose unique literary work is a treasure in the Bengali literature. Not even Tagore could hope to match the sublime lunacy of his non-sense verses, stories and illustrations.' The intellectually erudite Bengali society celebrate Sukumar Ray's unparalleled literary work even after ninety-seven years of his untimely death. The documentary to celebrate the birth centenary of Rabindranath Tagore directed by his illustrious son Satyajit Ray begins as, ""On August 7, 1941 in the city of Calcutta, a man died. His mortal remains perished; but he left behind him a heritage, which no fire could consume. It was a heritage of words and music and poetry, of ideas and of ideals and it has the power to move us today and the day to come."" The man behind the camera, Satyajit Ray, has left an unrivalled oeuvre in cinema. Ray is a genius, a great film maker, rooted in his complex Bengali culture and at the same time a detached, cosmopolitan intellectual. His films constitute an oeuvre; they complement and comment on each other. Ray's greatness is his ability to transcend, with utter lack of guile or pretension, his Bengali environment and speak to any observer about human frailties, aspirations, follies, and obsessions, in the same way that Chekhov or Mizoguchi address us through the thick mists of a foreign language. Every year on Satyajit's birth (2nd May) and death anniversary (23rd April) his films are telecast very religiously on national and private television channels in India. Symposiums and discussions are organized on Satyajit Ray and his films on such occasions. Satyajit Ray in the documentary on his father Sukumar Ray does mention a line on his mother Suprabha Ray. In his interview to noted film director Shyam Benegal, Satyajit Ray speaking about his childhood, mentioned a few lines on her. Satyajit Ray also wrote a few customary lines on his mother in books authored by him such as Jakhon Chhoto Chhilam (translated in English as Childhood Days A Memoir) and My Years with Apu. A Memoir, revealing his childhood days. Satyajit Ray from his hospital bed in a South Calcutta (now Kolkata) private nursing home, on March 1992, in his acceptance speech for the Honorary Oscar for Life Time Achievement 1991, does mention about personalities and films which influenced him in building his career as a film director. In his acceptance speech for the Oscar, Ray told the world how deeply he cherished it as he had grown up watching American films. He spoke of the admiration he had felt for directors such as John Ford, William Wyler, Frank Capra, Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch as he began learning the whole process of storytelling through image, sound and music. Satyajit Ray's speech was formal, hence the informal influences especially that of his mother, upon his life and formative works was not mentioned. Satyajit Ray, the visionary, was never fond of looking back, perhaps he thought it stagnates an individual.
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