- Lived:
- 2 May 1921, Calcutta (Kolkata) → 23 April 1992, Calcutta — a life of world fame conducted almost entirely within a few miles of the house where it began
- Field:
- cinema — director, screenwriter, composer, designer; and, on the side, one of the most successful Bengali writers of the century
- The Big Idea:
- With borrowed money, an amateur crew and a pawned set of jewellery, he filmed ordinary Bengali life so truthfully that world cinema had to widen to make room for India — and then made nearly everything in his films himself: script, casting, camera, cutting, music, posters, even the lettering.
- In their words:
- "The raw material of the cinema is life itself."
- If you remember one thing:
- A Calcutta advertising artist spent three years and every rupee he could raise filming a village boy running through white kash grass — and the film he could barely finish, Pather Panchali, gave Indian cinema a permanent seat at the table of world art.