B. S. Ranga

B. S. Ranga was a photographer, producer, actor, director, cinematographer, and screenwriter in India. He has made several great films mostly in Kannada, Telugu, and Tamil language. Bindiganavile Srinivas Iyengar Ranga was born on 11 November 1917 in a village of the Kingdom of Mysore during British India called Magadi. Now, Mysore is in the Karnataka state of India.

Ever since he was a child, Ranga was attracted to art and did a lot of art related activities. He even met a lot of stage and art personalities and had interacted with them. He was drawn towards photography, and hence he chose to enter photography field as his profession. He has three sons and one daughter.

At the age of 17, Ranga sent some of the photography work that he did to the exhibition at the Royal Salon that is located in London. Impressed by his work, Ranga was given the title of Honorary Fellow at the Royal Photographic Society. After traveling to different countries, he came to Mumbai to pursue his career in photography and direction, production, cinematography, scriptwriting as well as a lab technician. He met Krishna Gopal who was a cameraman and a lab technician in the film industry. From there on, his wide career in film industry started, and he played the roles of director, producer, scriptwriter, cinematographer and sometimes all together for productions house that he owned. He has given almost five decades of his life to the film industry. After working on a few movies with Gemini Studios, he opened his production house. It was called Vikram Productions. During 1960s-1970s, Vikram Productions gained fame and prominence. Most of the movies were made under this banner.

His first movie as a director was Pardesi that was released in the year 1940. In the same year, he released two directorial movies, Pyaas and the other one was Prakash. In 1941, he directed Bhakta Tulsidas. He has also directed Mehman and Fox Movietone News in the year 1942. He was the cinematographer for the movie Bala Nagamma along with SAilen Bose that was released in the year 1942. The cast of the movie was Kanchanamala Govindarajula Subba Rao along with others. His other movies as a cinematographer are Sthri Sahasam (1951), Devadasu (1953), Tenali Ramakrishna Tenali Ramakrishna on Zee Telugu is the Telugu dub >> Read More... (1956), etc.

B. s. Ranga has won two national awards for his outstanding career in the film industry. He got “President’s Silver Medal” (Best Feature Film in Telugu for Tenali Ramakrishna in the year 1956). Notable actors Akkineki Nageswara Rao and N.T. Rama Rao was featured in this movie. He also received President’s Award for the first color film ever produced in the Kannada language, Amarshilpi Jakkanna. When he was 93 years old, Ranga passed away on 12 December 2010 at Chennai, Tamil Nadu.