Pather Panchali

The Song of the Little Road

Letters from Vienna #55

Having written so much about war, bestiality, cynicism, misery and murder of late I have a morbid fear of depressing even the most ardent of spirits. Yes, you might ask, Nietzsche speaks of being positive, despite the reality we’re all confronted with and of overcoming innumerable horrors, but how can one go on living knowing all one knows? Has life itself value if so much horror and evil so palpably exist?

The question of the value of life has confronted many; it is the key, for example, to understanding “War and Peace”, a most appropriate book for our day and age. And the question of the everyday is perennial. How are we to value it? How are we to see it? As banal and mundane or something completely different?

In 1955 a film was shown in New York that was a miracle and remains so today: “Pather Panchali”, (The Song of the Little Road) by Satyajit Ray. It is, I contend, the best motion picture ever made. How it came to be is an extraordinary story in its own right and deserves recounting. If there ever were proof needed that life itself is a miracle it’s this singular and extraordinary film.

As is my habit I’ll use (mainly) a single source, for the sake of simplicity, this time Andrew Robinson’s masterful account of Satyajit Ray: “The Inner Eye”.

“In 1944” Robinson tells us, Ray “made some woodcuts of simple vitality for an abridgement for children of the novel “Pather Panchali”. Some of the scenes that appealed to him then, such as the children huddling together during the storm, later found their way onto celluloid.”

“…A few years later, when the idea of filming “Pather Panchali” first took root in his mind, Satyajit considered approaching Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay for the rights to the novel; but he held back, fearful of a rebuff because of his lack of resources.”[1]

At the time, Ray was working in Calcutta as a junior visualiser for the British-owned advertising agency, D. J. Keymer, at a salary of eighty rupees per month. It was also a time of famine, when bodies literally littered the streets.

Around 1946 Ray began writing film scripts as a hobby, a year later he co-founded a film society and in “1948 the genial Harisadhan Das Gupta…embarked with Satyajit on an attempt to film Tagore’s “Ghare Baire” (“The Home and the World”). They were an ill-matched pair, and the whole venture had an air of farce about it, painful though it was for both of them at the time.”[2]

Failure, for every fledgling director, is almost always inevitable, at least at the very start. The question is: what does one learn from one’s mistakes? And how deep are the scars? How great is the blow to one’s ego, to one’s confidence and above all else: to the trust in one’s own judgement? Enough to put one off? For some, a minority, the passion endures but for the vast majority it falls by the wayside.

Ray railed at the poor quality of Indian cinema: “The raw material of cinema is life itself. It is incredible that a country that has inspired so much painting and music and poetry should fail to move the film-maker. He has only to keep his eyes open, and his ears. Let him do so.”[3]      

Later he was to write: “Of our film-producing provinces, Bombay has devised a perfect formula to entice and amuse the illiterate multitude that forms the bulk of our film audiences. Bengal has no such formula, nor the technical finesse which marks the products of Bombay. But Bengal has pretensions. And the average Bengali film is not a fumbling effort. It is something worse. It is a nameless concoction devised in the firm conviction that Great Art is being fashioned. In it the arts have not fused and given birth to a new art. Rather they have remained as incongruous and clashing elements, refusing to coalesce into the stuff that is cinema.”[4]

In 1949, when Jean Renoir visited Calcutta in search of locations and actors for “The River”, Ray spent time with the great director and a year later he saw De Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves” which “‘gored’ him.”

“‘I came out of the theatre my mind fully made up. I would become a film-maker…The prospect of giving up a safe job didn’t daunt me anymore. I would make my film exactly as De Sica had made his: working with non-professional actors, using modest resources, and shooting on actual locations. The village which Bandyopadhyay had so lovingly described would be a living backdrop to the film, just as the outskirts of Rome were for De Sica’s film.’”[5]

De Sica’s scriptwriter Zavattini’s “greatest assets,” Ray wrote “are an acute understanding of human beings and an ability to devise the ‘chain’ type of story that fits perfectly into the ninety-minute span of the average commercial cinema. Simplicity of plot allows for intensive treatment, while a whole series of interesting and believable situations and characters sustain interest . . . 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 Indian film-maker must turn to life, to reality. De Sica, and not DeMille, should be his ideal.”[6]

To a friend he confided: “The entire conventional approach (as exemplified by even the best American and British films) is wrong. Because the conventional approach tells you that the best way to tell a story is to leave out all except those elements which are directly related to the story, while the master’s work clearly indicates that if your theme is strong and simple, then you can include a hundred little apparently irrelevant details which, instead of obscuring the theme, only help to intensify it by contrast, and in addition create the illusion of actuality better.”[7]

Enthusiasm, intelligence and perception are all well and good but not enough in the film business; what Ray needed was extraordinary luck.

“The novel” Robinson tells us “that Ray had mentally committed himself to filming had by 1950 become a classic in Bengal. It first appeared as a serial in a Calcutta journal in 1928, on condition that it could be discontinued if it proved unpopular with readers; both its style and its author were then unknown. In fact, the story of Apu and Durga rapidly established itself in the imagination of Bengal, and the novel appeared in book form the following year. Although Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay wrote about fifty published works in all, “Pather Panchali” remains his best known.”

“It is based, to a great extent, on Bandyopadhyay’s own impecunious early life. He was born in 1894 in a village north of Calcutta.”[8]

Ray’s “adaptation involved drastic compression, elision and omission of scenes in the novel, as well as occasional additions. Out of a seemingly random sequence of significant and trivial episodes, Ray had to extract a simple theme, while preserving the loitering impression created by the original. ‘The script had to retain some of the rambling quality of the novel,’ commented Ray, ‘because that in itself contained a clue to the feel of authenticity: life in a poor Bengali village does ramble.’”[9]

““Pather Panchali” never had a proper script. Unlike every other Ray film, there is no red shooting notebook for it. Instead, he had a treatment which he had started on board ship from London and, from early 1952, a sheaf of sketches of the most important shots in black ink which he deposited, years later, at the Cinémathèque in Paris. Most of the film’s dialogue, three-quarters of which came from Bandyopadhyay, he kept in his head. By showing producers these sketches, which were of course unheard of in Bengali films, and telling them the story, he hoped to raise interest in a film with him as its director.”

“First, though, he took his treatment to Bandyopadhyay’s young widow – whose husband had died just after Satyajit’s return from London – to persuade her to part with the rights to the novel. She received him warmly, being an admirer of both Upendrakisore’s and Sukumar’s (Ray’s father, a writer and poet) work, and of Satyajit’s cover designs. She said that her husband had always believed his writing had film potential but that no one had seemed interested. She gave her agreement in principle, but no financial arrangements were discussed. When the news was announced in the papers, she received letters from friends rebuking her for her faith in an unknown; but, fortunately for Ray, she stuck by him throughout the long and painful gestation of his film.” This is the first stroke of luck Ray had.

“Like Renoir, who touted the script of “La Grande Illusion” round French producers for three years (often with Jean Gabin, his chief draw, rather than a famous story, in tow), Ray spent nearly two years trying to sell his idea on the back of the novel’s fame. Most of those who half-listened to him could not see beyond the fact that he offered neither songs nor dances; a few who had more imagination nonetheless insisted on a co-director. ‘They were stupid people,’ remarked Ray in the 1980s. ‘They believed only in a certain kind of commercial cinema. But one kept hoping that presented with something fresh and original and affecting, they would change.’”

 “One of them, who undoubtedly perceived commercial possibilities in the story if done, played a trick on Ray. This man met him, heard him out, and suggested a further meeting a week later to draw up a contract. In the mean-time he paid a visit to Mrs Bandyopadhyay with a proposal that the successful director Debaki Bose do the film and made a large offer for the rights. She turned him down.”[10] This is Ray’s second, perhaps even more extraordinary stroke of luck.

“Ray got only one genuine offer, and that fell through when the producer’s then-current film opened and failed.” One can imagine the depths of Ray’s despair. Yet, fortunately, he persisted.

“Four years before, he had written to Norman Clare, ‘It looks as if I’ll have to rot and be exploited in Keymer’s for some time [yet].’ He now decided to borrow around seven thousand rupees from his insurance company and another two thousand or so from his relatives, to shoot enough footage to persuade a producer to back the whole film.”[11]

Today a director can make a whole movie with poor quality equipment or one scene professionally. At that time this wasn’t an option. In borrowing money to start his film Ray took quite a risk. He could easily have fallen flat on his face, as most first-time directors usually do.

“He and Subrata Mitra (who he had got to know through Renoir) hired an old 16mm camera and set off one weekend for Gopalnagar, the village on which Bandyopadhyay had based his fictional one. It was the rainy season and they had to squelch through knee-deep mud to get there. They filmed in ‘the dim light of a mango grove, in pouring rain and in the falling light of dusk.’ Every shot came out.”

It is hardly surprising that Mitra, who had no experience as a cameraman whatsoever, could hardly sleep for worries and anxieties.[12]

“But the village itself Ray considered to be insufficiently photogenic. So, his next problem was to find a location suitable for the daytime scenes in the film (the night-time ones were always intended to be shot in the studio). Besides a house of the right general layout and decay…the story demanded a pond nearby, a river, fields and a railway line. In the event, Ray settled for two locations: the ruined house and pond in the village of Boral only six miles from the centre of Calcutta, and the fields (where Apu and Durga run together) and the railway line about a hundred miles away. The river he decided to drop. After negotiations with the owner of the house, ‘a nasty old man’ bedridden in Calcutta to whom they had to pay fifty rupees every month for the next two-and-a-half years, Chandragupta set to work on an extensive conversion.”

“They began shooting on 27 October 1952, in the fields. Ray felt that the scene in which Apu chases Durga through a field of white kash (similar to pampas grass) and sees a train for the first time, would make a fine come-on for a producer. But he did not appreciate just how tough a target he had set himself as a director. Some of the lessons it taught him he has recorded in various articles in “Our Films Their Films”; they concern, mostly, the correct use of camera and lenses, but one involved the direction of Apu. He was expected to walk haltingly through the kash as if on the lookout for Durga. ‘Little did I know then that it was twice as hard to achieve impeccability in a shot like that than in a shot of, say, charging cavalry.’ It did not help that Subir Banerjee was a decidedly unresponsive actor. Ray’s solution in the end was to lay small obstacles in the boy’s path for him to measure his progress by, and to have various assistants hiding in the kash on either side who would call the boy at prearranged moments. Ray’s perception of the way that De Sica handled the father in “Bicycle Thieves” (rather than the boy) helped to give him the confidence to direct his child actor as a puppet too.”

“The enthusiasm that comes from breaking new ground pervaded the production. In the words of Subrata Banerjee, who watched some of the shooting, ‘Satyajit seemed a different person. He was rarely withdrawn. There was an abandon about him. The warmth in his relations with others that was rarely evident came out clearly . . . He could easily set the mood for an occasion by his own behaviour. He seemed to live through the experiences of the characters he was creating for his film and so did the individuals who portrayed the parts.’ Banerjee’s wife Karuna agreed, as did the great majority of those who acted for Ray; their most frequent observation was that they ‘never felt they were acting’.”[13]

“The shooting in Boral did not begin until early 1953. There had been a gap of some months after those first shots in the field of kash in which Ray had made a fresh effort to interest producers in his footage.”[14]

“Seeing Ray’s footage, a producer called Rana Dutta eventually came forward, and advanced enough money for him to shoot some scenes in Boral. No one involved could be paid, bar one assistant, Santi Chatterjee (who remained with Ray until his death), and, among the cast, Chunibala Devi. Things were run on such a slender shoestring that Anil Chowdhury took to sleeping in taxis for lack of an alarm clock; the taxi-driver simply parked his vehicle on a tramway and woke up as soon as the first tram of the day appeared!”

“Shooting was in progress when some of Rana Dutta’s films opened and failed. There was no money now even to buy lunch. Chowdhury turned, in desperation, to Bijoya (Ray’s wife), who agreed to pawn some of her jewellery. It realised Rs 1300. They had to get the jewellery back later, in exchange for some belonging to Chowdhury’s sister, so that Bijoya could wear it at a ceremony just before the birth of her son Sandip in mid-1953; neither she nor Satyajit wanted his mother to discover what they had done for the sake of the film (they later found out Suprabha already knew but had kept the secret to herself).”

“The nadir of Ray’s hopes was reached in the latter part of 1953 and early 1954. He had shown his four thousand feet of edited footage to just about every producer in Bengal and they had been ‘completely apathetic’. In several attempts to find producers he had paid middle men with money raised by selling his art books and records, without telling even his wife, and had been cheated. The only bright spot was his absolute conviction that he was doing something important, certainly in Indian films, and perhaps internationally too. ‘The rushes told us that. The rushes told us that the children were behaving marvellously and the old woman was an absolute stunner. Nobody had ever seen such an old woman in an Indian film before.’”[15]

“Ray’s friends at the coffee house, and the British managers at Keymer’s, also helped to maintain his confidence. He had been showing them stills as the work progressed; R. P. Gupta remembered his feeling of excitement on first seeing these. One – a three-shot of Sarbajaya and Durga getting Apu ready for school – was selected for Edward Steichen’s great exhibition ‘The Family of Man’. Ray was also showing rushes to some of his friends. Chanchal Chatterjee told him: ‘This is India’s first adult film.’”

“The Keymer’s managers permitted Ray, who was the jewel in their crown, to take time off to shoot his film as he saw fit. This leave was both paid and unpaid. The manager of the Bombay branch, Robert Hardcastle, recalled visiting Calcutta on business some time in 1953/54 and seeing Ray’s sketches at the insistence of the Calcutta manager. He was very struck by ‘their power and atmosphere’. Shooting was at that time suspended and Ray told Hardcastle one of his main anxieties was that his elderly actress would die.”[16]

“The gap in the shooting lasted almost a year. In the early months of 1954 two sources of help appeared, one foreign, the other indigenous. Monroe Wheeler, of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, turned up in Calcutta in April in pursuit of materials for an exhibition of Indian textiles and ornaments. He got to hear of the film and visited Ray at his office. The stills he saw there excited him. ‘He felt it was very high-quality lighting, composition, faces, textures and so on,’ wrote Ray. ‘That gave him the notion it would be a film worth showing at his festival.’…He came to know Ray quite well, and ‘I think he got the impression I would come up with something exciting. “Do you think you could let us have this film for our exhibition?” he asked. “That’s a year from now.”’ Ray could hardly believe his ears.”[17]

“The second source was the Government of West Bengal, whose Chief Minister was then an energetic figure with a Brahmo background and Gandhian sympathies, Dr. B. C. Roy. He had helped Uday Shankar fund his film “Kalpana”. Satyajit’s mother had a woman friend with influence over Roy. Though very dubious about film-making as a way of life, she never doubted her son’s talent, and was distressed by the dashing of his hopes; so, she arranged for her friend to see the edited footage. The friend then persuaded Dr. Roy to see it too. He was sympathetic but, from the beginning, misunderstood the film’s nature, seeing it as a documentary promoting rural uplift, such as the need for road improvement. Clearly, he did not know the novel. But Roy directed his officials in the Home Publicity Department to examine the costs of backing “Pather Panchali”.”[18]

“They cared little for the novel either and still less about the film. Ray’s experience with them was one of pure frustration. One of the officials, watching the magical scene in which the procession of sweet-seller, Durga, Apu and a village dog is reflected in a pond, shouted out that the film was running backwards! But even when he became world famous, Ray managed to restrain his criticism of these philistine government officials.”

 “Contracts were drawn up, in which Mrs. Bandyopadhyay was paid for the film rights to the novel, Rana Dutta for the money he had already spent, and Satyajit Ray nothing. Nothing was put in writing about foreign rights either, though Ray made a verbal agreement with the head of the Publicity Department that he would share in these, should the film be sold abroad, as Ray suspected might happen. This was later overlooked by the Government – which meant that Satyajit Ray received no income whatsoever from “Pather Panchali”. ‘They get the money but I got the fame,’ he told Marie Seton a few years later.”

“The most tiresome aspect of this relationship was that Ray’s team had to render accounts for each stage of the shooting, before the officials would release the next instalment of money. ‘It was very unpleasant,’ he remembered. ‘It meant, for one thing, that we missed the rainy season, and we had to shoot the rain scenes in October. Throughout the rainy season we had no money. It meant going to the location every day with the entire crew and cast and just waiting. There were days and days of waiting and doing nothing . . . it was a kind of picnic, but not a very pleasant picnic. We would keep looking at the sky and at little patches of cloud which wouldn’t produce any rain.’”

“If it is amazing that they were able to make such an authentic film under these conditions, it is a miracle that they did not fall foul of other, totally intransigent obstacles. Three miracles to be precise, according to Satyajit: ‘One, Apu’s voice did not break. Two, Durga did not grow up. Three, Indir Thakrun did not die.’”

“Ray even came to see advantages in the delays. First, he learnt to assess the length of a scene in scenario form, and secondly, to edit a film in sections, thus saving time later. This way of editing soon became a habit with him, even when it was no longer a necessity. More important, he learnt a lot about technique from a severe scrutiny of the material he had shot before being forced to stop, which was about half the film, and he applied this hard-won knowledge in shooting the second half. He would always feel that the first half of “Pather Panchali” needed cutting, because ‘the pace sometimes falters . . . And there are certain things we couldn’t do anything about, like camera placements. I don’t think the relationship of the three little cottages is very clear in the film. You have to choose a master-angle which you keep repeating so that people get their bearings.”

“If you keep changing the camera angle, it becomes very confusing. In your mind the plan is very clear but to make it clear on the screen you have to use certain devices which we didn’t know at that time.’”

“The shooting of “Pather Panchali” was a mixture of the premeditated and the improvised. It is quite clear from Ray’s initial sheaf of sketches done in 1952 how much he improved his scenario by his long exposure to the locations themselves. All the elements in the opening sequence of the film – Durga picking up fruit and skipping home to Indir Thakrun, Sarbajaya drawing water wearily from the well with the suspicious neighbour watching her and then ticking off Durga for stealing – are there in the initial sketches, but in the film the inter-relationships are made more graphic because the neighbour actually sees Durga take a fruit and Sarbajaya is forced to overhear her caustic comments.”

“One of the premeditated sequences was the passing away of Indir Thakrun. Her solitary death, followed by the children discovering her corpse, was entirely Ray’s invention; as Durga playfully shakes her squatting form, it crashes over and her head hits the ground with a sickening thud. This is the only scene at which Chunibala demurred – not because of the potential injury but because she felt Indir’s death at the village shrine, as it is in the novel, to be more appropriate. Ray persuaded her both to do the scene his way and not to worry about hurting herself. He would always remember the mixture of elation and exhaustion on her face after taking that shot.”[19]

“The team was now up against a very tight deadline; the film had to be finished for screening in New York in May 1955. In six months he had to complete shooting and editing it, add the soundtrack – including the music, which was yet to be composed – get approval from the Government as the film’s producer, and arrange for it to go to New York. In one respect at least, Ray was fortunate; he was able to use most of the sound recorded on location. Since he and his actors were relatively unknown, they had managed to work in Boral and other locations in conditions of quiet. Never again – or only very rarely – would this occur.

The West Bengal Government officials, meanwhile, persisted in their obstructive attitude to the project. Early in 1955, a screening was arranged for Dr. B. C. Roy in the presence of Ray and others. Roy and his advisors felt that the film’s ending was insufficiently positive for the spirit of the times, and that it should be altered. Ray wisely said nothing and allowed others to defend his creation for him. Ironically, the argument that won the day was that a film should not tamper with the story of a classic novel because this would incur public disapproval; the very same point was often subsequently used by Ray’s Indian critics as a stick to beat him, particularly in his adaptations of Tagore which make significant departures from the originals.”

 “‘The effort to catch the Museum’s deadline took on epic proportions, and my editor and I were done up to a frazzle by the end’, wrote Ray. In fact, his editor Dulal Dutta at one point clasped Satyajit’s feet and said that he could not bear the strain any longer. Production controller Anil Chowdhury recalled that they were living in the Bengal Film Laboratories then – not bathing, shaving, or sleeping for six or seven days. At one point, Satyajit’s legs simply gave way beneath him as he stood up. The owner of the laboratory stayed up all night too to help them.”

“On the day of despatch, Ray had to go out to find a suitable trunk and make official arrangements for its sending. While waiting he fell asleep in a chair, so that people thought he must be ill. When the trunk was packed and finally ready to go, the team gathered round as if it were a bride about to go away forever to her husband’s home. Ray’s relative and coffee-house companion Subhash Ghosal had persuaded his employer J. Walter Thompson to send the film free to New York via Pan Am. Ray was afraid he would fall asleep at their office too, in front of all the sahibs, but he managed not to and the film departed safely for Monroe Wheeler.”

“It had no subtitles, and Ray had not had a chance to view, even once, what he had just despatched. Sitting in Calcutta, going through the motions of his job at Keymer’s, he nervously awaited news from the Museum of Modern Art where the film was to be screened in front of a hand-picked audience. Billed as “The Story of Apu and Durja”, it was one of six evening performances, including the first appearances in the US of the sarod player Ali Akbar Khan and the dancer Shanta Rao.”[20]

The film went down well in New York, ran for over seven weeks in Calcutta and for eight months at the Fifth Avenue Playhouse in New York.

For fellow directors, it was a revelation. Akira Kurosawa said: “I can never forget the excitement in my mind after seeing it. I have had several more opportunities to see the film since then and each time I feel more overwhelmed. It is the kind of cinema that flows with the serenity and nobility of a big river.”[21]  

---

[1] p. 58 Satyajit Ray, The Inner Eye, Andrew Robinson

[2] p.66 Ibid

[3] p.65 Ibid

[4] p.8 Satyajit Ray on Cinema

[5] p.72 Satyajit Ray, The Inner Eye, Andrew Robinson

[6] p.72 Ibid

[7] p.73 Ibid

[8] p.74 Ibid

[9] p.75 Ibid

[10] pp.76-77 Ibid

[11] p.77 Ibid

[12] p.46 Filmkünste Kamera

[13] p.78 Satyajit Ray, The Inner Eye, Andrew Robinson

[14] p.81 Ibid

[15] p.82 Ibid

[16] p.83 Ibid

[17] p.83 Ibid

[18] pp.83-84

[19] pp.84-85 Ibid

[20] pp. 87-89 Ibid

[21] p.91 Ibid