The forerunner of Bengali Renaissance

Upendra Kishore Roy Chowdhury----- writer of juvenile literature, musician, artist, and a pioneer of Bengali printing industry. He was born in the village Masua in mymensingh district on 10 May 1863. His early name was Kamodaranjan Roy. At his age of five, one Hari Kishore Roychowdhury, a relative of Upendra's father Kalinath Roy received him as an adopted son. He was then renamed as Upendra Kishore Roychowdhury. Upendra passed the Entrance examination in 1880 with scholarship from Mymensingh Zila School. He studied for a while at Presidency College in Calcutta but passed BA examination in 1884 from Calcutta Metropolitan Institute.
Upendrakishore was born Kamadaranjan Ray, to Kalinath Ray, a scholar in Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian. He was expert in English and Persian languages and in the traditional Indian and British Indian legal systems. He became a topmost expert for interpreting old land deeds written in Persian and in helping the landowners to get the best deal from the newly introduced British legal system in India. He became affluent and in due course the family was able to afford two elephants.
At the age of five, Kamadaranjan was adopted by Harikishore, a relative who was a zamindar in Mymensingh. Harikishore renamed his adopted son Upendrakishore, and added the honorific 'Raychaudhuri' as a surname.
Upendra passed the Entrance examination in 1880 with scholarship from Mymensingh Zilla School. He studied for a while at Presidency College, then affiliated with the University of Calcutta but passed BA examination in 1884 from the Calcutta Metropolitan Institution (now Vidyasagar College). Upendra took to drawing while in school. He published his first literary work in the magazine Sakha in 1883.
Upendrakishore first introduced modern block making, including half-tone and colour block making, in South Asia. When the reproduction using woodcut line blocks of his illustrations for one of his books, Chheleder Ramayan, were very poor, he imported books, chemicals and equipment from Britain to learn the technology of block making. After mastering this, in 1895 he successfully set up a business of making blocks. He experimented with the process of advanced block making, and several of his technical articles about block making were published in the Penrose Annual Volumes published from Britain. In his own lifetime, a printing expert from abroad commented that Upendrakishore's contribution was far more original than that of his counterparts in Europe and America, "which is all the more surprising when we consider how far he is from hub-centres of process work". He also went on publishing books, but initially he had them printed in other printing presses. His residence and business was located at 22, Sukeas Street (now the premises has been renamed 30B, Mahendra Srimany Street) from 1901 to 1914. The Sandesh magazine was first published in 1913.
In 1914 he founded what was then probably the finest printing press in South Asia, U. Ray and Sons at 100 Garpar Road. Even the building plans were designed by him He quickly earned recognition in India and abroad for the new methods he developed for printing both black & white and colour photographs with great accuracy of detail. It was with the intention of running this business that his son Sukumar Ray spent a few years at the University of Manchester's printing technology department.
He invented several techniques related to halftone block making, of which the "screen-adjusting machine" for the automatic focusing of process cameras, was also assembled in England following his design. The British handbook of printing technology, the Penrose Annual, Volume X, 1904-05, mentioned about him in an editorial note that, "Mr. Ray is evidently possessed of a mathematical quality of mind and he has reasoned out for himself the problems of half-tone work in a remarkably successful manner ... (His printing developments) enable the operator to do uniform work with the fullest graduation and detail in it and with the minimum amount of manipulative skill in the negative-making and etching." The Penrose Annual Volume XI of 1905-06 published his paper about the new technique of 60-degree screens in halftone block making.
He became an expert in drawing during his school-life. His first literary work was published in the famous juvenile magazine Sakha when he was a BA student in 1883 and from then on continued his literary work. Upendra played a pioneering role in the fields of Bangla juvenile literature by creating rhymes, folktales, fairytales, mythological tales, and science fiction adding fine drawings. He started publishing a monthly juvenile magazine Sandesh under his editorship which is now-a-days the most popular juvenile magazine published from Calcutta.  
Upendra Kishore started experiment on printing of halftone pictures by establishing studio, darkroom, etc in 1896. He prepared various diaphragm, ray-screen adjuster, etc by research and became the inventor of diotype and ray-print process. Upendra wrote a number of books, of which most important are Chhotoder Ramayan, Sekaler Katha, Chhotoder Mahabharat, and Mahabharater Galpa. World famous filmmaker satyajit ray was his grandson. Upendra Kishore Roy Chowdhury breathed his last on December 20 in 1915.
December 20 marks the 103rd death anniversary of Upendra Kishore Roy Chowdhury.
The writer is a freelance contributor.