14 Stories That Inspired Satyajit Roy

A rich zamindar dreams that his daughter –in –law is an incarnation of goddess Kali; a housewife steps out of her lower middle –class household into the big city to work as a sales girl; Goopy and Begha fight the evil plans of the king of Shundi to rescue the kingdom of Halla; a group of friends run into a self –proclaimed sage who claims to have been friends with Plato, Jesus and Buddha, Nobbles at the court of Awadh, the chess addicts Mir and Mirza, move to an undisclosed location to play undisturbed as their kingdom falls around them.

Short stories were the inspiration for fourteen of master film –maker Satyajit Ray's movies. Every one of them a classic –Devi, Jalsaghar and Shantranj Ke Khiladi, among them, Fourteen brings together all of those stories in one volume. These tales, by the likes of Rabindranath Tagore, Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay, Rajshekhar Basu and Premchand, are milestones in Indian literature –quite apart from their cinematic glory. The anthology also contains two stories by Ray himself –'Athithi' and 'Pikoor Dairy' – that illustrate his own craft as a writer.

From the drametic to the strakly real, the humourous to the dark, the lyrical to the prosatic, Fourteen sparkles with narrative brilliance. Read together, these stories also provide us with the context for a new insight into the mind of one of India's most loved and revered film –makers.

Bhaskar Chattopadhyay is a writer and translator. His translations include No Child's Play (HarperCollins Publishers India,2013) and The house by the Lake ( Scholastic, 2014), both written by veteran Bengali writer Shirshandu Mukhopadhyay. A Statician and an MBA, Bhaskar had a successful corporate career, after which he launched his own company Art Square (www. artsquare.in), which is India's largest online art gallery. He lives in Bengaluru with his wife Sweta and sons Ishaan and Emon, and loves reading, writting and watching movies at his leisure. Bhaskar can be reached on Bhaskar.