The Unvanquished
Satyajit Ray (1956)
In Pather Panchali (1955) the boy Apu and his sister Durga are quite thrilled by the sight and noise of a passing railway train. Among the many strengths of the second film in Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy is the variety of emotions experienced by the young hero and his mother as they ride on or wait for trains, or hear them in the distance. One train carries Apu (Pinaki Sengupta), now aged ten or eleven, and Sarbajaya (Karuna Banerjee) away from Benares – following the death of Apu’s father, Harihar (Kanu Banerjee) – to the Bengali village of Mansapota. Another train, a few years on, takes the teenage Apu (Smaran Ghosal) from Mansapota to Kolkata, where he wins a scholarship to study: he’s apprehensive but excited on his first rail journey to the big city. Whenever Sarbajaya hears the sound of trains travelling in the opposite direction, it reminds her of her son’s absence, offers hope that he could be on his way to her. At the end of one of his rare visits home, Apu stands on the station platform, anxious to get back to Kolkata but acutely aware of his mother’s desperate loneliness without him. He postpones his return, giving her a brief reprieve.
Aparajito begins in Benares (in 1920), Harihar’s ancestral home, where he, his wife and son were headed at the end of Pather Panchali. An impressive opening sequence shows the locals’ ablutions – bathing their bodies or cleaning their teeth – in the Ganges. (Subrata Mitra was again Ray’s cinematographer and, like its predecessor, this film is shot in black and white.) Harihar works as a priest in Benares until he catches a fever and falls gravely ill. When he briefly comes to and asks for water, Sarbajaya sends Apu to run and fetch it from the sacred Ganges; she pours the water into her husband’s mouth, and Harihar dies instantly. In Mansapota, Apu is made to follow in his father’s footsteps by training as an apprentice priest but he’s hungry for formal education. At this stage, Aparajito, as well as its protagonist, seems to be marking time: the narrative feels essentially transitional (at least for anyone who knows this is the second of three parts). The story starts to acquire a life of its own once Apu persuades his mother to let him attend the local school. By the end, the accumulation of train journeys – of moving from one place to another – has given the film’s transitional quality a deeper meaning.
Although not as naturally expressive as Subir Banerjee in Pather Panchali, Pinaki Sengupta is reliably more animated when Apu encounters life beyond domestic routines and religious duties. He’s much amused (unlike Miss Quested in A Passage to India) by the sight of monkeys zipping up and down outside a temple. He’s even more amused by the horseplay of schoolboys, which Apu watches from a wistful distance. When he starts school he’s soon the star pupil, reading fluently as his penniless Brahmin father taught him to do, impressing the headmaster (Subodh Ganguly) and the regional schools inspector (Mani Srimani). The sequences in both the little rural school and Apu’s college in Kolkata are consistently strong – and entertaining: the village headmaster quizzically inspecting a cartoon of himself that the boys have drawn; a Kolkata professor (Hemanta Chattopadhyay) explaining figures of speech – metonymy, synecdoche, euphemism. The professor offers an example of the last – ‘the saying of a disagreeable thing in an agreeable way’ – when he suggests that Apu (now Smaran Ghosal), asleep in class, may not be giving the lecture his complete attention. Apu has dropped off because he’s exhausted. He has a scholarship but is still short of funds. His landlord (Kalicharan Roy) runs a printing press, where Apu works the machinery, out of college hours, in lieu of paying rent.
Nearly thirty years after Pather Panchali and Aparajito, Satyajit Ray realised a long-held ambition to bring to the cinema screen Rabindranath Tagore’s novel The Home and the World. That would also be an apt alternative title for Aparajito, which dramatises Apu’s move away from his remaining family and, to an extent, his cultural roots. He knows that Kolkata gives him the chance to expand his horizons, and the gift he receives from the headmaster when he leaves the village school confirms that: a globe of the world. It won’t fit in the small suitcase that Sarbajaya carefully packs for her son and he must carry it separately. If Apu doesn’t yet have the world at his feet, he has it in his hand as he sets off for college. He holds on to the globe for dear life.
Ray’s description of the mother-son relationship is unflinching. The fretting, miserable Sarbajaya mostly gets on Apu’s nerves (and it’s not hard to see why) but he’s conflicted about abandoning her. That is how his mother can’t help seeing it – and feeling it: she withers in Apu’s absence though she tries to conceal her illness from him. When he learns her life’s in danger, he travels back to the village, to find that she has already died. Sarbajaya’s end comes at night, with fireflies sparkling in the darkness. Her decline and demise, and Harihar’s, are very different from the passing of Indir and Durga in Pather Panchali except that Ray makes each one of these four deaths memorably unique. Apu’s great uncle (Ramani Sengupta) asks him to stay in Mansapota and perform his mother’s funeral rites. Apu replies that he’ll perform the rites in Kolkata. He sets off again for the railway station.
9 July 2022
