This may be from a collection of stories about a character named Professor Shonku, The Diary of a Space Traveller & Other Stories (originally published, I believe, in a Bengali magazine). The author was Satyajit Ray, whose name fits your memory of it.
Provided by the publisher, the summary reads:
It all began with the fall of a meteorite and the crater it made. In its centre was a red notebook, sticking out of the ground—the first (or was it really the last?) of Professor Shonku’s diaries.
Professor Trilokeshwar Shonku, eccentric genius and scientist, disappeared without a trace after he shot off into space in a rocket from his backyard in Giridih, accompanied by his loyal but not-too-intelligent servant Prahlad, his cat Newton, and Bidhushekhar, his robot with an attitude.
What has become of the professor? Has he decided to stay on in Mars, his original destination? Or has he found his way to some other planet and is living there with strange companions? His last diary tells an incredible story . . . Other diaries unearthed from his abandoned laboratory reveal stranger and even more exciting adventures involving a ferocious sadhu, a revengeful mummy and a mad scientist in Norway who turns famous men into six-inch statues.
(A sadhu, by the way, is similar to a monk or an ascetic.)
Wikipedia has a list of the Shonku stories, have a look through that to see more. The story you remember seems to be Professor Shonku and the Mysterious Dolls, which is about Shonku’s confrontation with a Scandinavian scientist who freezes famous people into statue-like dolls.
Could this maybe be your story?
