Satyajit Ray: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn
1921 to 1992
Quick answer: Satyajit Ray the film-maker was also Bengal's finest writer of short uncanny stories. A craft guide to Bankubabur Bandhu, Khagam and the mild clerk who meets the strange.
Quick facts
- Born: 2 May 1921, Calcutta
- Died: 23 April 1992, Calcutta
- Wrote in: Bengali
- Known for: Ek Dojon Goppo, the Feluda stories, the Professor Shonku diaries
- Signature move: The timid middle-class narrator who meets one uncanny thing and is changed in a way no one else can see
- Start with: Bankubabur Bandhu
Satyajit Ray wrote fiction between films, for the children's magazine Sandesh that his grandfather had founded and he revived in 1961, and he wrote a great deal of it: the Feluda detective stories, the Professor Shonku diaries, and several collections of a dozen stories each, beginning with Ek Dojon Goppo (1970). The stand-alone stories are where his craft as a story writer shows most clearly. Bankubabur Bandhu (1962), Khagam, Anath Babur Bhoy, Ratanbabu ar Sei Lokta and Bipin Choudhurir Smritibhrom are uncanny tales built on one strange premise and a very ordinary Bengali man.
Written for young readers, they are short, clear and plotted, and adults have never stopped reading them. This page is about how Ray uses the timid clerk as a lens, and how a film-maker's sense of the single shot shapes a story.
What he actually does on the page
He puts a small, mocked man in the path of something enormous and gives him the whole story. Bankubabu is a village schoolteacher ridiculed by the local gentry; the visitor who lands in a bamboo grove one night speaks to him alone, shows him the universe in a few minutes, and leaves him with a courage nobody in the village can account for. Bipin Choudhurir Smritibhrom is a prosperous Calcutta man told by a stranger that they met in Ranchi on a trip he cannot remember, and the story is his slow panic at a hole in his own memory, and the very human explanation that ends it.
He writes like an editor cutting a film. Scenes are short and fixed on one physical image: the bamboo grove, the compartment window, a ring on a finger, a snake charmer's hut. Khagam is a traveller who watches his companion kill a sadhu's pet snake and then, over one night in a forest bungalow, watches the companion change, detail by detail, and the story's horror is entirely in the order in which the details are shown. Ray's Bengali is plain and quick, and his English translations, several of them his own, keep it so.
The signature move
Anath Babur Bhoy is the cleanest example. Anath Babu is a retired man whose only hobby is the search for a real ghost; he has visited every haunted house in Bengal and been disappointed by all of them. The narrator, a young man on holiday, is drawn into his last attempt at a ruined mansion. Ray spends the story on the old man's cheerfulness and method, the torch, the flask, the schedule, and on the narrator's mild scepticism, and he saves the single uncanny image for the final page. It is delivered as a fact of the body, not as a shriek, and the story stops one line later. The move is patience: a whole story of preparation for one shot, and the discipline not to hold the shot too long.
Stories to read first
Begin with these.
What to steal for your own stories
Drills, not rules.
What not to copy
The children's-magazine tidiness when your story does not want it. Ray's tales resolve because Sandesh's readers were twelve; a writer for adults may need to leave the door open. His female characters are few and thinly drawn, a limit he acknowledged in his films more than in his fiction. And his effects depend on a very exact middle-class Calcutta of the 1960s and 70s; the timid clerk is a type you should find in your own city.
Life at a glance
- 1921: Born in Calcutta into the family of Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury, founder of the children's magazine Sandesh.
- 1955: Pather Panchali, his first film.
- 1961: Revives Sandesh and begins writing fiction for it; Professor Shonku appears the same year.
- 1962: Bankubabur Bandhu, the story of a village schoolteacher and a visitor from another planet.
- 1965: Feluda, the Calcutta detective, makes his first appearance in Sandesh.
- 1970: Ek Dojon Goppo, the first of his collections of twelve stories.
- 1992: Honorary Academy Award and Bharat Ratna; dies in Calcutta in April.
What writers can take from this
- Choose the narrator no one would believe.
- Storyboard your story: one image per scene, written on cards.
- Save the uncanny thing for the last page, and describe it as you would a piece of furniture.
- Give the strange visitor better manners than the humans.
- Read Patolbabu Filmstar to see how a story with no uncanny element uses the same patience.
Try it yourself
Write 1,000 to 1,200 words about a retired, slightly ridiculous person who has pursued one harmless obsession all their life (ghosts, rare stamps, a perfect cup of tea, a bird never seen). On the day the obsession is finally rewarded, describe the reward as plainly as a piece of furniture and end within two sentences of it.
Questions
What is Satyajit Ray's best short story?
Bankubabur Bandhu is the most famous because of its link to The Alien and later films. Khagam and Anath Babur Bhoy are the ones Bengali readers most often name for pure craft.
Where should I start with Satyajit Ray's fiction?
An English collection of his stand-alone stories, such as 20 Stories or The Best of Satyajit Ray, before the Feluda and Shonku series. Read Anath Babur Bhoy and Khagam first.
Why is Satyajit Ray important as a writer?
He created the modern Bengali uncanny tale and gave generations of readers their first detective, their first scientist and their first alien, all in a plain, quick prose shaped by a film-maker's eye. His short fiction is a model of economy in any language.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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