Song of the Little Road
Satyajit Ray (1955)
The first part of Satyajit Ray’s ‘Apu Trilogy’ concerns one family, living in Nischindipur, a village in rural Bengal, in the second decade of the twentieth century. Adapted by Ray from Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s 1929 Bildungsroman of the same name, Pather Panchali is a fine example of how a film artist, in illuminating a circumscribed world, can express larger human truths, even though praising the film in those terms understates the socio-economic reality – the poverty – of the family’s life, which Ray describes in thorough, vivid detail.
The story begins shortly before the birth of the character who will be the trilogy’s title character and protagonist. Harihar Roy (Kanu Banerjee), educated but impecunious, earns a paltry living as a Hindu priest but still dreams of success as a playwright and poet. His already careworn wife, Sarbajaya (Karuna Banerjee), keeps house, cares for the couple’s daughter, Durga (Runki Banerjee), and is pregnant with their second child. In and around the family’s dilapidated dwelling there’s a sparse but varied collection of animals – cats, a dog, livestock (a couple of chickens and goats, a single cow). The household also includes Harihar’s ancient cousin, Indir Thakrun (Chunibala Devi), who lives a hand to mouth existence in a literal sense. She exasperates Sarbajaya by stealing food from the Roys’ already meagre larder. We see Apurba (Apu) as a newborn and an infant but chiefly as an eight-year-old (Subir Banerjee). By now, Durga is thirteen (and played by Uma Dasgupta) and the sister-brother relationship is central to Pather Panchali.
The (black and white) visualisation of the landscape and changing seasons is lyrically imaginative yet Ray and his cinematographer, Subrata Mitra, never indulge in facile idealisation of the natural world. As rain falls, lily pads flip over, almost as if choreographed; the snakes that slide into the family home aren’t so lovely. In a field of wild sugarcane where the siblings often go, the white kaash flowers in bloom, taller than the children themselves, are enormously beautiful but, when Apu is briefly lost among them, an unnerving wilderness. The field is appealing to him and Durga not just as a playground but as a vantage point from which to watch a distant railway train. In the same spot, the children find and put their ear to an electrical grid, listening to its mysterious hum. These signals of modern technology are quite alien to Apu’s and Durga’s experience but nonetheless intriguing to them: the train rattling by is the sound of the world beyond Nischindipur. That world also impinges in visits to the locality by a travelling theatre (jatra), whose show spurs Apu into homemade playacting, and a uniformed Indian military band, parping out ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ to a puzzled, rapt audience.
Pather Panchali features two deaths, which make a powerful impression by virtue of the difference and the link between them. As Apu and Durga return through the forest from one of their train viewings, they come upon Indir, sitting on a tree stump and apparently asleep. When Durga speaks to and gently shakes Indir, her dead body falls to the ground. At the start of monsoon season, Durga dances ecstatically in the torrential rain. This is Ray’s most powerful illustration of the beauty and brutality of nature. The dance is an elating but fateful image: Durga catches a chill, develops a fever, and dies. The contrast between the passing of an extraordinarily old, exhausted woman and the extinction of an early teenage girl whose life has barely begun is more poignant because it was Durga who discovered Indir’s corpse – encountering death for the first time not long before her own. In early scenes, the child Durga steals mangoes from a tree in the garden of the Roys’ better off neighbour, Mrs Mookerjee (Rama Gangopadhaya), to give to Indir. Near the end of the film, after Durga has died, the hitherto querulous Mrs Mookerjee calls on Sarbajaya with a gift of fruit from the tree.
Ray’s cast comprises an amazing collection of eloquent faces and bodies. There’s a temptation to assume, because they inhabit their characters so completely, and perform so naturally and luminously, that the cast can’t have had prior acting experience. This was far from the case although the experience varied. Kanu Banerjee was an established Bengali film actor and Karuna Banerjee an amateur actress with the Indian People’s Theatre Association. Uma Dasgupta had appeared in productions at her school. Ray advertised in newspapers, inviting boys between five and seven years to audition for Apu; Subir Banerjee didn’t apply but was spotted by Ray’s wife in the Kolkata neighbourhood where they lived at the time. The most amazing face and body of all belong to Chunibala Devi as the bent-double, cadaverous Indir. Devi was a former stage actress whom Ray persuaded to come out of retirement to play the role. Well into her eighties, she died before Pather Panchali was released but not before Ray came to her home (in one of Kolkata’s red-light districts) with a projector to show Devi the film.
At certain moments of dramatic importance, Ray removes the sound of the characters’ voices. These interruptions are few and well chosen; the most startling occurs near the end of the film. Unable to make ends meet from his local work, Harihar journeys to the city and is away for several months. He returns, unaware that his daughter has died, and excitedly shows his wife the gifts he’s brought the family. When he asks where Durga is, Sarbajaya breaks down. Her scream is supplied by a burst of keening music that’s uncharacteristic of Ravi Shankar’s score but the hardest part of it to forget. The mother is perhaps the film’s most remarkable character. At first, Sarbajaya comes over as a dreary nag; you gradually realise that her default scolding expresses the depth of her love for her family and concern that it may not survive. She and her husband eventually decide to leave Nischindipur and head for Benares, Harihar’s ancestral home. The film ends with Apu and his parents, and their very few possessions, leaving the village in an ox-cart. Ray manages to make this an image of desolation and of possibility. Pather Panchali is widely recognised as a classic, and so it should be.
3 July 2022
