Apu Trilogy

Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956) and Apu Sansar (1959)— trace the life of a Bengali family and their son Apu, as he moves from childhood in a rural village, through his youth in Benares where the family later moves, to manhood and marriage in Calcutta.

The Apu Trilogy, which made Satyajit Ray India’s first internationally recognised director, helped to redefine cinema for the most serious Indian filmmakers at this time and influenced and encouraged many others internationally. Such was the power of Ray’s work that Japanese master director Akira Kurosawa remarked: “Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon.”

Ray was born in Calcutta 1921 to a family of distinguished intellectuals and grew up surrounded by art, literature and music. His father and grandfather, who were closely associated with India’s social reformist Brahmo Samaj movement and its leading poet and dramatist Rabindranath Tagore, were printers and publishers who also wrote and illustrated children’s stories and poetry.

Increasingly passionate about movies, Ray helped establish the Calcutta Film Society in 1947, organising special showings of Hollywood, European and Russian films. He began writing film reviews and in 1948 published a short but perceptive comment entitled “What is Wrong with Indian Films”. It criticised the predominance of saccharine sweet musicals and religious mysticism in Indian cinema and declared: “The raw material of the cinema is life itself. It is incredible that a country which has inspired so much painting and music and poetry should fail to move the moviemaker. He has only to keep his eyes open, and his ears. Let him do so.”

Soon after writing this essay, Ray met French film director Jean Renoir who encouraged him to begin making his own films. In 1950 the talented 29-year-old illustrator was sent to London for six months to work in the advertising agency’s head office. Ray spent most of his spare time there watching movies—more than 90 odd films—including Vittorio de Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1948) and several other Italian neo-realist cinema classics.

The Bicycle Thief, Ray wrote in a 1951 essay, was “a triumphant rediscovery of the fundamentals of the cinema” and the “simple universality of its theme, the effectiveness of its treatment, and the low cost of its production make it the ideal film for the Indian filmmaker to study.”

“The present blind worship of technique emphasises the poverty of genuine inspiration among our directors,” Ray continued. “For a popular medium, the best kind of inspiration should derive from life and have its roots in it. No amount of technical polish can make up for artificiality of theme and dishonesty of treatment. The filmmaker must turn to life, to reality. De Sica, and not [Cecil B.] DeMille, should be his ideal.”

Ray had been commissioned in 1945 to illustrate a children’s edition of Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road), the popular semi-autobiographical novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandhipadhyaya. Inspired by de Sica’s film, Ray decided to make the novel the subject of his first film and spent the two-week boat trip from London back to India preparing shooting sketches and a basic plan for its production.
Pather Panchali, which is set in the early 1900s, has a relatively simple plot. In fact, the film largely consists of a series of short, loosely-connected vignettes tracing out the life and times of a poor Brahmin family in rural Bengal and the birth and childhood of their only son Apu. Head of the family, Harihar (Kanu Banerji), who dreams of being a poet, has brought Sarbajaya (Karuna Banerji), his pregnant wife, and Durga (Uma Das Gupta), his daughter, from Benares back to the ancestral rural home. The young family also takes care of an aged aunt, Indir Thakrun (Chunibala Devi).

Pather Panchali follows the trials and tribulations of this poor family: the first conscious experiences of Apu (Subir Banerji), his early school years and close bond with his sister Durga, and their adventures in the nearby forest and fields. The underlying strength of the film is Ray’s unsentimental but intensely artistic exploration of many universal themes. He carefully examines the interaction of life and death, the aged and the young, and makes subtle references to the tensions between rural and city life and how it is being changed by new technology—in this case electricity and the railway.

In one memorable sequence, which also cuts to the last difficult moments of Indir’s life, the children, who have been quarrelling, are playing in fields far from home and come across some high tension electricity pylons. Fascinated by the humming sound of the wires they walk on through long grass, see the smoke of a distant train and then run to the railway tracks. The train, which has previously been an occasional background sound in their lives, is seen in all its power, the hope of a better life beyond their immediate environment. Their quarrels are forgotten in their fascination with the train but on the way back home they stumble across Indir who has collapsed and is dying in the woods.

Pather Panchali has some extraordinarily joyous moments combined with periods of deep sadness, including the death of Indir, and then the tragic loss of Durga, who catches a fever after a dancing in the monsoon rains and dies just before her father’s long-awaited return.

The success of Pather Panchali allowed Ray to begin work immediately on Aparajito (The Unvanquished), also based on a Bandhipadhyaya novel, which was completed in 1956 and won the Golden Lion award at the 1957 Venice Film Festival. This film is more complex in terms of plot and characterisation compared to Pather Panchali and set new standards for Indian cinema actors.

Set in the 1920s, Aparajito begins in the holy city of Benares on the Ganges where the family, still in shock over Durga’s death, had moved. Harihar is attempting to maintain Sarbajaya, his wife, and the 10-year-old Apu (Smaran Ghosal) by reciting Hindu scriptures and selling religious trinkets to pilgrims visiting the holy river. While the family is still poor and Harihar’s health is declining, he is happy to be reunited with his wife and son, who is animated and excited about city life. Tragedy strikes, however, when Harihar catches a fever and collapses one day after climbing the steps from the river and dies soon after.

Having lost her husband and only daughter, Sarbajaya decides to relocate to her uncle’s village in Bengal where Apu resumes his education at the local school. The central focus of Aparajito is the changing relationship between Apu (now played by Santi Gupta) and his mother. The years go by and Apu wins a scholarship to a Calcutta college and leaves the village. Sarbajaya is proud of her son but concerned about who will care for her in his absence.

The final part of the film alternates between Apu’s life with his school friends in Calcutta and what he considers to be boring vacations in the quiet village with his mother. Apu is unconscious of his mother’s loneliness and disdainful of village life. Sarbajaya, who scolds him for not writing to her enough, is torn by her isolation and the recognition that the young man must make his own way in the world. As in Pather Panchali, the train is a potent symbol in the film: for Apu it is his lifeline to the outside world; for Sarbajaya it is a vehicle of hope that carries Apu back to the village for his brief vacations.

Angry and confused, Apu blames the baby for his wife’s death and refuses to take any responsibility for the child and wanders the countryside in a state of deep despair. Five years later he decides to visit his son. Although his in-laws are bitter and the child rejects him at first, father and son form a bond and Apu resolves to take full care and responsibility of the young boy.

It is difficult to exaggerate the artistic beauty of the Apu Trilogy, which has some astonishingly poetic and haunting imagery that resonates long after specific details of the films’ plots have faded from the one’s more immediate memory. Apu and Durga’s discovery of the train outside their village or Durga’s joyous dance in the first monsoon rains in Pather Panchali; Sarbajaya’s emotional pain as she tries to come to terms with her son’s longer absences from home in Aparajito; and the extraordinary intimacy of the newly-married Apu and Aparna in Apu Sansar.

Another one of the many indelible moments in Apu Sansar is Apu’s interview with the manager of a small factory. The job? Handwriting labels for food jars. The interview concludes and Apu is taken to the workroom and looks into the dark and dirty hellhole. Nothing is said and the camera barely moves. The blank gaze of a worker says more than a thousand words of dialogue, not just about this soul-destroying job, but the system that produces this misery.

The greatness of these films, however, lie not just in the lyrical cinematography, honesty of the actors’ performances and the intense music of Ravi Shankar, but in the universal themes Ray deals with and his underlying optimism. Despite the extraordinarily tragic moments in the trilogy, and there are many, Ray always provides a sense of hope that no matter how great the difficulties confronting his characters the struggle for genuinely caring human relations can overcome all adversity. Commenting on the initial success of Pather Panchali and Aparajito, Ray declared in 1958: “Personally I have been lucky with my first two films, but what is really important and exciting is not the immediate gain, but the ultimate vindication of the belief that I hold dearest as an artist: art wedded to truth must, in the end, have its rewards.” (Richard Phillips)

Pather Panchali - The Train Scene