Chandak Sengoopta has had a less-than-conventional training. He studied to be a medical doctor in Calcutta, did his doctoral research in the US on the history of medicine and is now a historian of colonial and postcolonial India in Birkbeck College, London. His first book was a study of the notorious Viennese philosopher Otto Weininger’s controversial work on identity, while his next two books – Imprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting was Born in Colonial India (Macmillan, 2003) and The Most Secret Quintessence of Life: Sex, Glands and Hormones, 1850-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2006) – were on the biopolitics of identification technologies. Within this sphere of interests, his new book, The Rays Before Satyajit: Creativity and Modernity in Colonial India, seems like an apparent oddity. However, on close scrutiny, it is not. This book spin out of Sengoopta’s major new project to write a capacious biography of Satyajit Ray – pioneering India filmmaker, illustrator and author. But while doing his research, Sengoopta came to appreciate that Ray, in spite of his talismanic presence in modern Indian culture, was not a lone ranger in the pursuit of his craft but an exceptional product of a modernity that his family had keenly imbibed and embodied. His father and grandfather were much-admired authors in Bengali literature and members of his extended family had their share of lovable, creative quirks. This is the known bit, at least for those who are versed in the cultural history of Bengal. But what is pertinent is that the Rays had shaped and were in turn shaped by the deeply felt materiality of modernity in colonial India, with Calcutta being the fulcrum of this vibrant sensorium. To that end, the real story of Satyajit begins much earlier, in the mid-19th century. What perhaps drew the science historian in Sengoopta is that Ray’s illustrious peers in what has been – with substantive deterrents – called the Bengal Renaissance, took a decisive role in the proliferation of technological modernity, in inventions and their applications, in forming a line of active reformists whose discontent with the old was not just social and cultural, but also industrial. Hence this book not only finds continuity with Sengoopta’s previous work but also manages to break into new grounds as far as history of Bengal’s 19th center dominions of culture and thought are concerned, an area otherwise overwrought with institutionalised historiographies.

Sengoopta’s subject – the Ray family – is an unusual historical subject because history is often smitten by either trailblazing individuals or by larger social forces, condition and claims. A family is indeed the mettle for storytellers – Joseph Roth’s The Redetzky March, Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude being some of the supreme examples of this genre that I know of. Second, the story of Ray is also in many ways the story of Calcutta between the mid-19th to mid-20th century – a city of scrupulous contradictions – full of the verve and enthusiasm of a metropolis in the throes of far-fetched change, of intrepid reform and rebellion of science and invention and also vocal, inglorious orthodoxy. The city is in itself a character in this narrative and it flows in and out of the Ray household as effortlessly as the winds of change that had been shaking up every house those days which cared to keep its windows open. Hence the comparison to a family saga in which members are caught in the whirlwind of indefensible transformation is not presumptuous but actual. Like a fine storyteller, Sengoopta’s task was to bring the two – the colourful family and the protrusive city – within one overarching narrative without in any way compromising on the demands of attentive, threadbare historiography. Sengoopta manages this feat with wonderful clarity, never losing sight of the historical in his search for the familial. The experience of reading the book is hence immersive, its narrative reads like a novel full of arrestee characters and pregnant moments while its exhaustive annotations keep us grounded in real time and in touch with the historian’s uncompromising craft.

More than half of the book is about Upendrakishore Raychaudhuri, Satyajit’s grandfather (1863-1915). The first parts reads like part-bildungsroman, part Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. From his days at the Brahmo shop in Mymensingh to Calcutta’s Cornwali’s Street where he settled after marriage, Upendrakishore’s life was, to an extent, endemic of the age. Zealous young people, attracted by the teachings of iconoclastic reformists, were regularly taking to Brahmoism, seeking to make a decisive contribution to the climate of reform that was sweeping much of Calcutta’s middle classes. The Turgenev bit solicits attention when we learn that almost of them, from the sprightly Upendrakishore to the frail Pramadacharan Sen were renounced by their orthodox Hindu fathers for taking to Brahmoism. It was a generational conflict as much as it was a conflict between an assertive, deeply patriarchal and decadent religious orthodoxy that was being challenged by a new liberal doctrine that had put the education of women and the spiritual release from the portals of idolatry at the heart of their rebellion. Upendrakishore embraced the new faith, married the daughter of a radical Brahmo figure and settled among Calcutta’s hoary gentlemen community. He took to writing books for children, established the seminal literary magazine Sandesh, played music, continued his role in the Brahmo movement and made pioneering contributions to the emerging technology of halftone photography. By the time he established U. Ray & Sons, his printing workshop, the transformation of Upendrakishore from a confounded young adult to polymathic reformer, musician, literature and trailblazing innovator was complete. He also dropped ‘Chaudhuri’ (the elite zamindari suffix) from his family name as he took to the new faith, signaling a semantic break with the past as much as it was an ontological dissociation. The first of the Ray moderns was born.

Sengoopta highlights Upendrakishore’s amazing experiments with photography and the passage below hits at not only his self-tutored brilliance but also keenness to be part of a global discourse on how best to print photography. Sengoopta write: “When Upendrakishore began his investigations into half-tone process in mid 1880-’s, the technology was fairly new everywhere but in extensive demand…Despite his location in colonial Calcutta and his lack of an academic scientific identity, he became a significant figure in the global history of half-tone research within only a few years of commencing his entirely solitary exploration of the technology, winning praise in Britain for displaying ‘not only a clear grasp of the subject’ but for suggesting ‘new methods of work’.” (p 209) This is the crux of this book: that unless one understands the industrious side of the Ray’s encounter with modernity, one is not in a position to fully comprehend either the narrative of modernity in India or the crucial role  that being part of global technological breakthroughs finally played in that embrace of modernity.

The span of Upendrakishore’s life is also most glorious period for both reformist Brahmoism and Calcutta’s piquant cosmopolitism. By the time Sukumar (1887-1923), Upendra’s eldest son and Satyajit’s father came back from London to take over the family business, the national climate had altered significantly and many of the older questions of colonial rule were not finding newer addresses. Sukumar was no ordinary go-getter but radical wit, a bon viveur, organiser, printer, technologist, illustrator and above all an extraordinary writer. Upendrakishore bequeathed to Sukumar the love for the new heights what was merely children’s literature. What was not really on Sukumar’s side was years and his early death plunged the family into financial wreck and scientific forbearance.

Starting with Upendrakishore, the Rays gradually moved away from any uncritical reception of the eastern systems of thought, so much so that Satyajit fun himself immersed primarily in western art, music and cinema when he was a young man in the 1940’s. However, in his cinema ten years later, Ray would return to probe the Indian life with more rigor than anyone had ever done on celluloid. This was the lasting inheritance from the two towering Rays before him – a deeply imbibed western modernity that was pushed to the limits of representation – in paper or in image – through the lived reality of being South Asian. Ray’s cinema is well known but it is through his graphic art and illustration, his literature for young adults and in Sadness, which he continued to edit intermittently, that he carried his father and grandfather along. Sengoopta’s cast of characters and their time is much wider and more interesting than this review can hope to talk of. Perhaps an eon like that produces figures of such generosity of spirit and with such love for the unknown charms of life, the sciences and the nation in general. The Ray biography is well worth the wait, but this book should find a much wider acclaim and readership that is usually reserved for an imprint of a inversely press.

The Rays Before Satyajit: Creativity and Modernity in Colonial India By Chandak Sengoopta Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2016, 418pp