Lester and Ray: Two Masters with One Vision

Two great filmmakers emerged from Sri Lanka and India three-quarters of a century ago - Lester James Peries and Sathyajit Ray.

- Gamini Akmeemana

Both had a great deal in common, culturally speaking, and the first features they made, establishing them as masters of cinema, paid homage to rural cultures, folklore and identities, though both came from urban, westernised backgrounds.

Sathyajith Ray (19211992) was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India. Lester James Peiries (1919-2018) was born in Dehiwela, suburban Colombo, when both India and Sri Lanka were British colonies. Ray worked in Britain as a young man (in advertising), and the young Lester met renowned British documentary filmmaker Basil Wright (creator of the classic documentary 'Song of Ceylon') and was deeply influenced by him. Lester was introduced to Wright by pioneer photographer Lionel Wendt, who was Lester's mentor. Lester's brother Ivan Peiries was a leading modernist painter at the time.

Ray was born in a Kolkata home which housed a printing press run by his grandfather. He started a career in advertising as a young man, working for a British firm and was sent to London by his employers, but he dreamed of making films. He may have been influenced by the great French filmmaker Jean Renoir, who visited India in 1951 to make The River, a lyrical, sensuous story about the friendship between the children of a British family and an Indian child.

Ray already had the idea of filming Pather Panchali (Song of the Road), the first part of a coming-ofage trilogy by Bengali novelist Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. When he told Renoir about it, the latter told him: “It's a wonderful idea. Go ahead and do it.”

It's possible that The River made a deep impression on him, though Ray maintained that it was Vittorio de Sica's neorealist film 'The Bicycle Thief' which he had seen earlier, that set his heart on filmmaking.