The Apu Trilogy

Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

Andrew Robinson

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781786729620
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

" I can never forget the excitement in my mind after seeing 'Pather Panchali' ", noted Akira Kurosawa. Satyajit Ray's three films about the boyhood, adolescence and manhood of Apu, Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956) and The World of Apu (1959) - collectively known as The Apu Trilogy - are established classics of world cinema. The Trilogy was the chief reason for Satyajit Ray's receiving an Academy Award for lifetime achievement in 1992, just before his death. This book by Ray's biographer and world authority Andrew Robinson is the first full study of the Trilogy. Robinson - who came to know the director well during the last decade of his career - covers the literary and cultural background to the films, their production, their music composed by Ravi Shankar, their aesthetic value, and their complex critical reception in the East and the West, from 1955 up to the present day. Extensively and beautifully illustrated and a pleasure to read, The Apu Trilogy will appeal to anyone captivated by the unique world created by Satyajit Ray.

1

Self-taught Film-maker:

Satyajit Ray’s Formative Years

‘I never imagined that I would become a film director, in command of situations, actually guiding people to do things this way or that,’ Satyajit Ray said in the mid-1980s, three decades after making his first film Pather Panchali, the beginning of the Apu Trilogy. ‘No, I was very reticent and shy as a schoolboy and I think it persisted through college. Even the fact of having to accept a prize gave me goose-pimples. But from the time of Pather Panchali I realised that I had it in me to take control of situations and exert my personality over other people and so on – then it became a fairly quick process. Film after film, I got more and more confident.’

Ray was born, an only child, in Calcutta on 2 May 1921, into a distinguished though not wealthy Bengali family notable for its love of music, literature, art and scholarship. His grandfather, Upendrakisore Ray, who died before Satyajit was born, was a pioneer of half-tone printing, a musician and composer of songs and hymns, and a writer and illustrator of classic children’s literature. His father, Sukumar Ray, was a writer and illustrator of nonsense literature, the equal of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. Both men were also universally considered to be the epitome of courtesy, artists in their lives as much as in their works.

They regarded themselves as Brahmos, that is, Christian-influenced Hindus who rejected caste (Brahminism), idolatry and the Hindu festivals, though not the teachings of the original Hindu scriptures, the Vedas and the Upanishads. Although Satyajit would regard the social reforming side of Brahmoism as generally admirable, he was not attracted to its theology (or to any theology, for that matter). He said: ‘As material for a film’ – for example, his film about nineteenth-century Hindu orthodoxy, The Goddess/Devi – ‘I feel Hinduism is much more interesting than Brahmoism. As a child I found Hinduism much more exciting than Brahmoism, and Christianity too. When I think of Brahmoism I think of solemn sermons mainly. I don’t think of being free from the shackles of orthodoxy.’ (Parts of the Ray family remained relatively orthodox Hindus, which did not prevent the maintenance of very friendly relations with their Brahmo relatives.)

Of his grandfather Upendrakisore, one of whose stories Ray adapted to make the musical The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha/Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (by far his most popular film in Bengal), he wrote:

My grandfather was a rare combination of East and West. He played the pakhwaj [drum] as well as the violin, wrote devotional songs while carrying out research on printing methods, viewed the stars through a telescope from his own roof, wrote old legends and folk-tales anew for children in his inimitably lucid and graceful style and illustrated them in oils, water-colours and pen-and-ink, using truly European techniques. His skill and versatility as an illustrator remain unmatched by any Indian.

Of his father, who was the subject of a documentary film, Sukumar Ray, made by Satyajit for his father’s birth centenary in 1987, he remarked: ‘As far as my father’s writing and drawing goes, nearly all his best work belongs to his last two and a half years’ – after, that is, his father contracted kala-azar, the disease that eventually killed him in 1923 at the age of only 35.

Satyajit was less than two and a half years old then. He retained only one memory of his father. It belonged to the courtyard of a house on the banks of the Ganges outside Calcutta, where the family had gone for the sake of Sukumar’s health. His father was sitting indoors by the window painting. He suddenly called out ‘Ship coming!’ Satyajit remembered running into the courtyard and seeing a steamer pass by with a loud hoot. As a sort of private tribute to this memory, the painting Sukumar was then at work on appears in Ray’s documentary.

He had many memories, however, of the house in north Calcutta where he lived with his father’s extended family until the age of five or six. It was designed and built by his grandfather as a house-cum-printing-press. Here was printed, apart from Upendrakisore’s and Sukumar’s books (and other books written by the family), the monthly children’s magazine Sandesh (a title meaning both ‘news’ and a kind of milk sweet famous in Bengal), which was founded by Upendrakisore in 1913, edited by Sukumar after grandfather Ray’s death and revived, much later, in the 1960s, by Satyajit and other family members.

From very early on he was fascinated, for instance, by the whole paraphernalia of printing, as is clear from the printing press at the centre of Ray’s film Charulata. Manik (meaning ‘jewel’) – as the small Satyajit was known in the family – became a frequent visitor to the first floor. When he entered, the compositors, sitting side by side in front of their multi-sectioned typecases, would glance up at him and smile. He would make his way past them to the back of the room, to the block-making section with its enormous imported process camera and its distinctive smells. ‘Even today,’ wrote Ray in his memoir of his childhood published in Sandesh in 1981, ‘if I catch a whiff of turpentine, a picture of U. Ray and Sons’ block-making department floats before my eyes.’ The main operator of the camera, Ramdohin, was his friend. He had had no formal education; Upendrakisore had trained him from scratch and he was like one of the family. Presenting Ramdohin with a piece of paper with some squiggles on it, Manik would announce: ‘This is for Sandesh.’ Ramdohin would solemnly wag his head in agreement, ‘Of course, Khoka Babu [Little Master], of course,’ and would lift the boy up to show him the upside-down image of his drawing on the screen of the camera. But somehow the drawing would never appear in Sandesh.

In early 1927, however, the firm had to be liquidated, because there was no one in the family able to manage it competently. The joint family had no option but to leave the house and split up. Manik and his widowed mother were fortunate to be taken in by one of her brothers, who lived in an up-and-coming part of south Calcutta. Satyajit would live in this uncle’s various houses for the rest of his childhood and youth until the age of 27, when he acquired sufficient financial independence to move out. While he was growing up he would never have much money. He did not miss it, though; and in adult life he would simply maintain the relatively spartan habits of his early years. In fact, he felt himself to be rich and seemed surprised if one queried this. ‘I mean I have no money worries as such,’ he said, ‘thanks to my writing’ – he meant his dozens of best-selling stories and young people’s novels starring his detective Felu Mitter, two of which he filmed – ‘not from films really. I’m certainly not as rich as Bombay actors – by no means; but I’m comfortable, I can buy the books and records I want.’

Although the move was a drastic change, Manik did not feel it as a wrench. ‘Adults treat all children in such a situation as “poor little creatures”, but that is not how children see themselves’, he commented in his memoir, articulating his fundamental attitude as perhaps the most natural director of children in cinema, beginning with the boy Apu and his sister Durga in Pather Panchali.

Nevertheless, whether he thought of it or not as a child, he was now thrown back on his own resources. He had been taken from a world of writers, artists and musicians, where West mixed freely and fruitfully with East, science with arts, into a typically middle-class milieu of barristers and insurance brokers, with the exception of his mother, an aunt about to become a famous singer of Tagore songs and, a little later, a ‘cousin’ Bijoya, Satyajit’s future wife, who was musical and interested in acting. There were no children of Satyajit’s age in the new house. Though he often saw two other girl cousins, Ruby and Nini (Nalini Das, who would later edit Sandesh with him), they were somewhat older and he seldom talked to them about himself. Yet in later life Ray did not think of his childhood as lonely: ‘Loneliness and being alone – bereft of boys and girls of your own age as friends – is not the same thing. I wasn’t envious of little boys with lots of sisters and brothers. I felt I was all right and I had a lot to do, I could keep myself busy doing various things, small things – reading, looking at books and looking at pictures, all sorts of things including sketching. I used to draw a lot as a child.’

As with many only children, he was also a close observer of his elders and noticed that his uncles and their friends in their twenties and thirties did not always behave as if they were elders; they had a noisy passion for games like ludo, for instance. The adult Ray said that he must have been ‘imbibing’ a great deal about people at this time without being aware of it. Certainly, the two decades he spent with his maternal uncles gave him an invaluable grounding in the mores of the Bengali middle class, both as characters for films and as a cinema audience.

Like the lonely wife Charu, wandering round her house in the first seven minutes of Charulata, Satyajit was highly sensitive as a child to sounds and lighting. Half a century later, he could remember various vanished street cries and the fact that in those days you could spot the make of a car, such as a Ford, Humber, Oldsmobile, Opal Citroen or La Salle (with its ‘boa horn’), from inside the house by the sound of its horn.

Small holes in the fabric of the house taught Satyajit some basic principles of light. At noon in summer rays of bright sunlight shone through a chink in the shutters of the bedroom. Satyajit would lie there alone watching the ‘free bioscope’ created on a wall: a large inverted image of the traffic outside. He could clearly make out cars, rickshaws, bicycles, pedestrians and other passing things.

Stereoscopes and magic lanterns were popular toys in Bengali homes of the period. The magic lantern was a box with a tube at the front containing the lens, a chimney at the top and a handle at the right-hand side. The film ran on two reels with a kerosene lamp for light source. ‘Who knows?’ wrote Satyajit in his memoir. ‘Perhaps this was the beginning of my addiction to film?’

Visits to the cinema began while he was still at his grandfather’s house and continued when he moved to his uncle’s house. Until he was about fifteen, when Satyajit took control of his cinema outings, they were comparatively infrequent and each film would be followed by ‘weeks of musing on its wonders’. Although his uncles enjoyed going, they did not altogether approve of the cinema and for many years they restricted Manik to certain foreign films and ruled out Bengali productions as being excessively passionate for the young mind. This suited him well enough, as he had disliked the only Bengali film he saw as a boy. He went to it by accident: an uncle had taken him to see the first Johnny Weismuller Tarzan film, but the tickets had all been sold. He saw the dismay on Manik’s face and so took him down the road to a Bengali cinema. The film was Kal Parinay (The Doomed Marriage) – ‘an early example of Indian soft porn’, according to Ray, who remembered the hero and the heroine – ‘or was it the Vamp?’ – newly married and lying in bed, and a close-up showing the woman’s leg rubbing the man’s. ‘I was only nine then, but old enough to realise that I had strayed into forbidden territory.’ His uncle made repeated whispered efforts to take him home, but Manik, already precociously dedicated to the cinema, turned a deaf ear. It was not that he was enjoying the film, simply that he was determined to get to the end.

In Calcutta those were the days of Silents, Partial Talkies and One Hundred Per Cent Talkies and, at the grandest cinema in town, a Wurlitzer played by a man called Byron Hopper. The choice of foreign films was quite impressive. Much later, out of curiosity, Ray decided to check the files of the Calcutta Statesman for a certain date in 1927 and found six films playing: Moana (by Robert Flaherty), Variety (a German production by E. A. Dupont), The Gold Rush (by Charlie Chaplin), Underworld (by Josef von Sternberg), The Freshman (with Harold Lloyd) and The Black Pirate (with Douglas Fairbanks).

Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd made a tremendous and lasting impression on Satyajit. So did The Thief of Baghdad and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Other memories of Hollywood films seen in the 1920s included:

Lillian Gish, in Way Down East, stepping precariously from one floating chunk of ice to another while fiendish bloodhounds nosed along her trail; John Gilbert, as the Count of Monte Cristo, delirious at the sight of gold in a treasure chest; Lon Chaney, as the Hunchback, clutching with dead hands the bell ropes of Notre Dame, and – perhaps the most exciting memory of all – the chariot race in Ben Hur, undimmed by a later and more resplendent version, for the simple reason that the new Messala is no match for the old and dearly hated one of Francis X. Bushman.

Stories of romance and passion, even of the foreign variety, remained generally out of bounds, but when he was about eleven Satyajit did get to see several of Ernst Lubitsch’s films: Love Parade, The Smiling Lieutenant, One Hour with You, Trouble in Paradise – ‘a forbidden world, only half-understood, but observed with a tingling curiosity’, he later wrote. Trouble in Paradise particularly stuck in his mind, showing that Lubitsch’s sophisticated wit appealed to Satyajit even then, though revealingly the scene as he remembers it is wordless – like many high points in the Apu Trilogy: ‘It opened with a moonlit shot of the romantic Grand Canal in Venice. The inevitable gondola appeared, glided up the glistening water, and, as it moved closer, turned out to be filled with garbage. The fat gondolier pulled up the boat in front of the villa, collected some more garbage and, at the point of rowing off, burst into an aria by Verdi.’

One kind of film permissible to him as a boy that did not appeal, either to Manik or to his family, was the British film. Technical superiority notwithstanding, it was marred by the same faults that Ray would ridicule in the typical Bengali cinema of the thirties (and after, he continued to think): stagey settings, theatrical dialogue, affected situations and acting. ‘We laughed at Jack Hulbert not mainly because we were tickled, but because we did not want our British neighbours in the theatre to think that we had no sense of humour’, he wrote – and this was about as close as he came to the British in Calcutta until he took a job in his early twenties.

As the 1930s wore on, Satyajit saw films more and more frequently, including some Bengali ones. He began to keep a notebook with his own star ratings and learnt to distinguish the finish of the different Hollywood studios. He even wrote a fan letter to Deanna Durbin (and received a very polite reply). But at no point did he consider that he might direct films himself. This idea did not strike him until his late twenties, well after he had left college, although an astrologer to whom his mother insisted on taking him when he was 22 had predicted that he would become internationally famous ‘through the use of light’. (Ray forgot all about this prediction until after he had finished Pather Panchali in 1955, when his mother reminded him. He had no belief in astrology and always refused requests from palmists to supply an imprint of his hand.)

He also read a lot in these early years, but as with films he was mainly interested in books in English, not in Bengali – he read little of Bengal’s greatest writer Rabindranath Tagore until much later, for instance – apart from the ancient stories and folk tales which as a young child he enjoyed hearing told in the Bengali versions of his grandfather and one or two other writers. (He recalled making one of his uncles read him at least four times a particular grisly episode of the Mahabharata in Upendrakisore Ray’s retelling, involving severed and exploding heads.) His favourite reading was the Book of Knowledge, ten copiously illustrated, self-confidently imperial volumes, and later, the Romance of Famous Lives, which his mother bought him; there he first encountered Ludwig van Beethoven and developed an adolescent taste for western painting from the Renaissance up to the beginning of Impressionism. He also liked comics and detective stories, the Boy’s Own Paper (in which he won a prize for a photograph of Kashmir when he was fifteen), Sherlock Holmes stories and P. G. Wodehouse; and thus he came to believe that London was ‘perpetually shrouded in impenetrable fog’ and that most homes in England had butlers. Throughout his youth, and to a great extent in later life too, his taste in English fiction was light, rather than classic.

And he developed yet another interest in the arts, one that was distinctly unusual for a Bengali: western classical music. It came upon him, Ray wrote later, ‘at an age when the Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry’ and fast became an obsession. He already owned a hand-cranked Pigmyphone which had been given to him when he was about five by a relative through marriage, the owner of one of the best record shops in Calcutta. The song ‘Tipperary’ (which appears incongruously in Pather Panchali) and ‘The Blue Danube’ were two of the earliest pieces of music he played on it. When he was about thirteen he began listening to some other records, mainly by Beethoven, that happene...