Apur Sansar

Satyajit Ray (1959)

Plans to watch Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy this month in the proper sequence were thwarted – by a combination of my feebleness and a problem with the air conditioning in NFT1 on the evening I’d booked to see Pather Panchali and Aparajito back to back.  Although I felt guilty about it, I had to get out before the first film was over and didn’t return even after a breather.  I saw Pather Panchali on television, twenty years or so ago, but it’s frustrating that I’ve now seen The World of Apu, the last of the trilogy, but not the intervening Aparajito[1].  An additional frustration watching The World of Apu:  the whitish subtitles were often difficult to read – even if Ray’s actors are so expressive that you can usually get the gist of what they’re saying without the words.  (It’s interesting too – as it was in The Big City – that the characters choose to speak certain words and phrases in English rather than Bengali.)   The BFI’s programme notes for their Satyajit Ray season include a summary of the continuing work, sponsored by AMPAS, to preserve and restore Ray’s work.  On the evidence of this print, the project might usefully do some work on the subtitles too.   But The World of Apu is an emotionally supple and demanding film:  moaning about the subtitles makes me feel guilty all over again.

In a brief prologue the camera shows a glowing reference which Apu’s college teacher has written for him.  Apu has completed his ‘intermediate certificate’.  The teacher wants him to continue with a full degree course but Apu hasn’t the money to pay for it.  He earns a little from private tutoring but not enough, as his landlord reminds Apu in an early scene, to pay the rent for a small room in a building next to a railway line.  Apu’s main interest is in working on a novel which, when he describes it to an old friend, Pulu, who looks him up, is strongly autobiographical.  The film’s many rich and remarkable sequences include the first one after the prologue.  Apu wakes to find that rainwater has dripped onto his bedclothes and the pages of his manuscript that he evidently went to sleep with.  He takes the bed sheets out onto a balcony to wash them in the rain and ends up almost dancing in the downpour, drenched and exultant.   Dressed and shaved, Apu goes out into Calcutta in search of employment but he doesn’t get far:  a teaching job he inquires about requires a graduate; he takes one look at workers in a pharmaceutical factory and returns home.  When he and Pulu go out that evening, the latter suggests office work but Apu rejects this too as soul-destroying.  ‘Life is for living’, he tells Pulu, and that opening rain dance expresses Apu’s sheer joy of being alive.

The evening with Pulu, although it doesn’t occupy much screen time, moves through different stages – a meal, a walk over the railway bridge after dark (with clearly legible subtitles!) during which Apu recites poetry with feeling and too loudly.  There’s a continuing lively conversation between the two young men; this episode has an amplitude that makes you feel you’ve partaken of the whole experience.  Pulu invites Apu to come with him to his cousin’s wedding in a village called Khulna.  The passage that follows echoes the shifting quality of the evening with Pulu but in a more expansive way.  We watch the bride, Aparna, being got ready by her mother and other attendants and the arrival of the bridegroom’s retinue along the river bank, the groom borne in a litter, a band playing ‘For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow’.  Apu is seen lying asleep above the same river bank, a book of poetry on his chest.   As soon as the bridegroom appears it’s clear there’s something very wrong.   He’s evidently mentally ill and Aparna’s mother refuses to let the wedding go ahead.  If a marriage doesn’t take place at the appointed time, however, the bride is cursed – so a new bridegroom is required.   Pulu asks Apu if he’s willing.  Apu, unsurprisingly, refuses but, after mulling things over, changes his mind.   Satyajit Ray had the following to say about this part of the story:

‘A western viewer ignorant of orthodox Hindu customs must find the episode highly bizarre.  But since Apu himself finds it so, and since his action is prompted by compassion, the viewer accepts it on moral grounds, though given no opportunity to weigh the pros and cons of a seemingly irrational practice.’

I think this is right – but also that a Western viewer is likely to find the idea of arranged marriage so odd anyway that what happens here can be accepted as an extension of a practice that already seems crazy.   And, as Ray suggests, Apu’s decision makes sense, both morally and because of his determination to experience life.

Through his short-lived marriage to Aparna, Apu has intense experiences of life and death.  The sequences of their domestic life together are effortlessly intimate and eccentrically funny.  Aparna returns to Khulna, leaving Apu in Calcutta, in the boring office job he’s now taken to pay the rent.  The baby is premature and, although he survives, Aparna dies in childbirth. The lightness of the marital scenes makes the intervention of death all the more shocking and dislocating:  it brings the fluidity of The World of Apu to a halt – Apu seems nearly unable to move, and Ray’s camera slows down with him.  Soumitra Chatterjee, who plays Apu, looks to age decades.  An earlier volatility of feeling returns in the final part of the film – in terms of what happens in the relationship between Apu and his son Kajal – but the weight of bereavement never quite lifts, and this is right:  the brutal rupture of Aparna’s death can’t be erased.   While she is back in Khulna, she and Apu exchange letters and we hear Aparna’s voice reading one of hers, threatening playfully that if she doesn’t get the letter he owes her she’ll never love him again – ‘Never, never, never’:  the words are repeated, and their effect is soon very poignant.

The widowed Apu abandons his novel – standing on a high hill, he lets the wind carry the pages of the manuscript away.  He leaves Calcutta and goes to work in a mine.  He occasionally sends money for his son to Aparna’s family in Khulna but cannot bring himself to see the child, whose life he blames for his wife’s death.  Kajal, who lives with his grandfather, is undisciplined (on his first appearance, we see his face only after he’s removed a disturbing beast-bird mask).  When Apu returns to Khulna – following a visit and pleading from the now professionally successful but still loyal Pulu – the child at first refuses to speak to him.   Apu, having left Kajal’s grandfather funds for the boy’s education, is leaving when he sees the small figure of his son watching him, following him.  The film ends with Apu marching triumphantly forward through the landscape, carrying Kajal on his shoulders.  Because this final part of The World of Apu is so emotionally tough, the happy ending feels hard won.  I felt that Satyajit Ray had earned it but didn’t fully believe it – because Ray has so convincingly and unsparingly realised Apu’s and Kajal’s feelings for each other.  The accusing eyes of the son who’s been rejected by his father also reflect the father’s resentment of the child.   Surely these feelings, and the scarred early years of Kajal’s childhood, can’t be fully overcome?

I’m sorry that so much of the detail of The World of Apu was lost on me – through not having seen the first two parts of the trilogy beforehand and through my ignorance of Indian religious mythology and tradition.  When Aparna’s mother first sees Apu she compares him with the god Krishna:  I missed the fact that Krishna, like Apu, is a flute-player.   The absence of any reaction on the part of Aparna’s relatively wealthy family to the news that Apu is without means struck me as an omission but perhaps wouldn’t seem so to a better informed viewer.   Even so, the resonances within the film are clear:  for example, in an early scene Apu walks back home along the railway line and shouts at some pigs that are rooting around to get out of the way; the bereaved Apu stands by the same line contemplating suicide as a train approaches – when the train has passed it’s revealed that a pig has been hit by it.   The hoots of the trains and the notes of Apu’s flute mingle expressively, and the score by Ravi Shankar heightens the emotions of the story without overpowering it.   Images like the men labelling vials in the pharmaceutical factory, one of them meeting Apu’s eyes as he watches in dismay, are extraordinarily succinct and powerful.   Soumitra Chatterjee, who featured in many later Ray films and remains a leading figure in Indian film culture, has a wonderfully animated face and his characterisation is richly layered:  he’s unusually skilled at suggesting someone thinking hard and deep.   Sharmila Tagore, who has also enjoyed enduring success as an actress, was only fourteen years old when she played Aparna.  You can sense her tentativeness but she is naturally expressive and humorous.  Swapan Mukherjee is Pulu and Alok Chakravarty is Kajal.  Ray’s screenplay was adapted, like the second part of Aparajito, from Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s novel of the same name.

27 August 2013

[1] Afternote:  Fast forward nine years … I saw Pather Panchali and Aparajito at BFI’s retrospective to mark (slightly belatedly) the centenary of Satyajit Ray’s birth.