Fritz Study Guide

Satyajit Ray was born on May 2, 1921, in Calcutta, the capital of British India (now Kolkata). His father died in 1923, and he was raised by his mother as an only child. Ray was fluent in both Bengali and English, having been educated in both languages, including at Presidency College in Calcutta where he earned a BA in economics. In 1940, Ray’s mother convinced him to attend art school Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, which was founded by Rabindranath Tagore. Through this experience, Ray gained an appreciation for Indian art and culture and read books that would influence him in his pursuit of filmmaking. He dropped out of art school in 1943 and returned to Calcutta, where he spent nearly a decade working in advertising. While in London for work in 1950, Ray saw the Italian neo-realist classic The Bicycle Thief (1948) by Vittoria de Sico and decided to devote himself to filmmaking. On his return to Calcutta, he worked as Jean Renoir’s assistant on the filming of The River and, thanks to Renoir’s encouragement, resolved to go ahead with his first film, Pather Panchali (1955). Though it had little financial support and took three years to complete, the film was a major critical and commercial success and even won a major award at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival. Ray would go on to create 36 films, including features, documentaries, and shorts, and become known as the greatest Indian filmmaker of all time. Among the many honors he received throughout his life are an Academy Honorary Award for lifetime achievement and the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian award. Though he is most famous for his films, Ray was also a prolific fiction writer whose novels and short stories specifically targeted young readers. In 1961, Ray revived the children’s literary magazine Sandesh, founded by his uncle in 1913. He would continue editing the publication until his death in 1992 at the age of 70.

Satyajit Ray lived and worked in India at a momentous period in its history, having borne witness to the country’s hard-fought independence after nearly a century of British rule. While the story of “Fritz” does not explicitly delve into the ramifications of this colonial legacy, Ray does allude to India’s pre-independence era, as he at one point describes the city of Bundi as resembling “old Rajputana,” evoking a name for the region of Rajasthan that was allegedly coined by the British. Nevertheless, explorations of the ongoing effect of the kind of cross-cultural contact spurred by Britain’s occupation of the Indian subcontinent course through much of Ray’s work, both literary and cinematic. The multi-faceted dynamic between “East” and “West” (here, India and Europe) is indeed present in “Fritz,” illustrated most prominently by the story of the doll’s origins and the assumption that due to his Swiss identity and cultural and religious heritage, Fritz should be buried rather than cremated after death (the latter of which is the common practice of Hindus in the region). By 1971, the year that “Fritz” was first published in Bengali, India was more than two decades out from independence, yet artistic and cultural production from the era remained centered around the effects that such consequential political and economic shifts were continuing to have on the region, especially the growing tension between tradition and modernity. Ray’s corpus is no different, and the prolific author and filmmaker provided his audiences with empathetic and humanistic takes on a complex and diverse society in the midst of ongoing change.

Satyajit Ray’s literary works are part of a vast corpus of twentieth-century Bengali literature, a subset of Indian literature written in the vernacular language Bengali. Poet, playwright, and author Rabindranath Tagore is one of the most well-known Bengali writers from the twentieth century. Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, is best known for his poetry, and his poem “The Fort of Bundi” is referenced in the beginning of “Fritz.” English translations of Tagore’s poetry include The Gardener (1913), Fruit-Gathering (1916), The Fugitive (1921), and highly acclaimed Gitanjali: Song Offerings (1912). Bengali literature is especially well-known for short stories, of which Ray was a particularly prolific writer. Some of Ray’s best-known short stories, which target young readers, include “Khagam,” “Indigo,” “The Pterodactyl’s Egg,” and “Patol Babu, Film Star,” all of which can be read in Satyajit Ray: The Collected Short Stories. In Bengal, however, Ray’s most popular works center around two fictional characters: Feluda, a detective and private investigator inspired by Sherlock Holmes, and Professor Shonku, a scientist and inventor. Their stories can also be read in translation, in anthologies such as The Complete Adventures of Feluda, vols. 1 and 2, and The Diary of a Space Traveler and Other Stories (2004, translated by Gopa Majumdar). Many of Ray’s short stories, especially “Fritz,” also evoke elements of the fantastique, a term that refers to a subgenre of (especially French) literature poised between fantasy and magical realism. More specifically, the fantastique is defined by the presence of supernatural or uncanny events and a hesitation on the part of both characters and readers to accept such events as real. The history of the genre extends as far back as medieval times, encompasses both literary and cinematic works, and often overlaps with “horror” or “gothic.” A few prominent examples of fantastique literature include the nineteenth-century works of German author E.T.A. Hoffmann, Guy de Maupassant’s short story “The Horla” (1887), and the Frankenstein novels penned in the late 1950s and early 1960s by the late Jean-Claude Carriere.