Barun Roy: The hidden facets of greatness

From Pather Panchali to Aparajito, Satyajit Ray's movies touched our emotions in many ways

In a couple of months from now, on May 3, to be precise, it will be the 60th anniversary of the first-ever screening of Pather Panchali (Song of the Road), Satyajit Ray's debut movie about life in a poor village in 19th century Bengal, that has made him one of the world's greatest film-makers. However, it wasn't in Calcutta (now Kolkata) that the milestone event took place but, ironically, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. A visiting MoMA executive was so impressed by the great lyrical beauty of even Ray's incomplete raw footage that he offered to sponsor it for 1955 MoMA showing if Ray could finish filming in time.

For Ray, however, it wasn't at all an easy job. He didn't have enough savings of his own, being just a junior graphic designer at an advertising agency. He raised some money against his insurance policies, and even pawned some of his wife's jewellery. But that wasn't enough either. And professional producers weren't interested to fund the project, as there was no song-and-dance stuff. In desperation, Ray turned to B C Roy, then the chief minister of West Bengal, who ordered a loan under the mistaken belief that the proposed film was going to be a documentary on road development!

The film's local release three months later was greeted with cynicism. Audience was remarkably thin at first and not much even a couple of weeks later. Some critics said it was too slow to sit through. Others rapped it for glorifying poverty and showing India in a bad light. It was not before the film was adjudged the Best Human Document at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956 that the local movie fraternity woke up to the arrival of a great new creative genius.

Lyrical charm aside, I think Pather Panchali's claim to greatness, as that of several other Ray movies, also lies in other, often unnoticed, ways they touch and twinge our emotions. For example, in Pather Panchali, when, after Durga's death, Harihar and Sarbajaya decide to leave their ancestral village and seek a new life in Benares, where Harihar had a loyal clientele, Apu looks among Durga's things for a few items he could keep as his beloved sister's mementos. Suddenly, he finds the bead necklace that she had earlier been accused of but had denied stealing. He promptly runs to an algae-covered pond nearby and throws the necklace into the water. The algae parts a little, then slowly closes up, forever hiding a poor girl's desire for a better life.

In Aparajito (The Unvanquished), the next in the Apu trilogy, Sarbajaya returns with Apu to their village home after Harihar's death in Benares, hoping that her son would follow in his father's footsteps and become an itinerant priest. But Apu has other goals in mind. Having won a scholarship, he wants to pursue a college degree and so has gone away to Calcutta, promising to come home on long holiday breaks. But every time the evening train passes by, Sarbajaya thinks Apu will be home. When nothing but silence greets her, she collapses under a tree in utter frustration, while a cluster of fireflies builds up and whirls for a while, deepening the loneliness around her.

Perhaps the most wrenching of Ray's emotional strokes is in The Postmaster, that gem of a Tagore short story in Teen Kanya (Three Daughters, 1961), where Ratan, a little orphan girl, looks after Nandalal, the new village postmaster. She even develops a deep bond with her mentor when he, with little else to do, offers to teach her how to read and write. Then, all of a sudden, fed up with village life, he resigns to go back to Calcutta. Ratan is shocked. She feels doubly hurt when Nandalal offers her money for her services. In a bitter, silent rebuke, she stops for a while, then simply walks away, putting down the pail of water she brings for his daily bath and leaving a shamefaced Nandalal swallow his own spit.

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