Indian Cinema : On the little road

Indian film that has found a place among the world classics
At first sight, the idea seemed clever by half as Calcutta TV ran Pather Panchali last
month to go with the live telecast of the solar eclipse. "Corny as ever," said many as they
settled down before the telly, determined not to be distracted by anything from the great
cosmic spectacle.
In a short while, however, the film was to turn the tables on the eclipse, making it seem
rather flat, if not downright intrusive. When the film had run its length, telephones rang
without respite at the houses of people involved in its making, including Satyajit Ray, the
director.
The spate of congratulations mostly couched in phrases like "how real it seems even
today ", could not have been more timely. 1980 is the silver jubilee year of Pather
Panchali ("The Song of the Little Road") - the one Indian film that has found a place
among the classics of world cinema. Besides, it brought Ray, 59, overnight fame and
began the process of elevating him to a kind of ambassadorship of Indian culture shared
by Ravi Shankar, the sitar player.
In Pather Panchali, Ray uses a rambling but remarkably authentic novel by
Bibhutibhusan Bandopadhyay, serialised in the 1930s. Harihar, Sarbajaya, and their two
children, Durga and Apu, form the impoverished, nondescript family whose life in an
equally nondescript Bengal village provides the story.
Heavy Odds: Harihar dreams of being a poet but can eke out a living only by staying far
away from his family as a lay priest. Sarbajaya holds the fort, fighting a grim battle
against poverty. Apu and Durga are like nature's own children whose cloistered world is
jolted the day they see an express train thundering towards the big city. On the way back,
they are lashed by torrential rain. Durga catches pneumonia and dies. Harihar comes
back, and the family leaves the village in search of a new home.

With this wafer-thin story, a largely untried cast, a battered camera and rock-bottom
finances, Ray made a film that won 12 national and international awards including the
Best Human Document award at Cannes (1956), the Best Film and Best Direction award
at San Francisco (1957) and the Selznick Golden Laurel (1957).
The West Bengal Government pulled Ray out of a financial hole by buying the film when
he was up to his neck in debt trying to finish it. For Rs 2.1 lakh spent on the film, the
state Government netted till last year Rs 24 lakh worth of profits including Rs 9 lakh
from abroad.
Re-living: Last fortnight, when a section of the state's film-buffs (film club membership:
40,000) were moving the Post and Telegraph authorities to issue a commemorative stamp
on Ray, some of the people who had been on the cast betrayed a significant apathy.
Kanu Bandopadhyay, 75, who played Harihar and was one of the few professional actors
on the cast, said he had "few illusions" about Pather Panchali which certainly did not
mean anything "to me and to my career". He thinks his best performance was in Bhagwan
Shri Ramkrishna, a sloppy devotional drama that became popular. "In this kind of a film,
people remember you. In Ray's kind, people remember only Ray," he growled.
Bandopadhyay, who is a minor actor anyway, lives in a house as uninspiring as that of
Harihar's crumbling cottage in the film. With cataract in both eyes, he clings all day long
to his screechy transistor set which, he says; is "my only window to the world". In the
evenings, he is "bitten by the memory bug". That is the time when he is led into a tramcar
which rattles past Calcutta's threatre-land in the north, "taking me past those great
billboards". At the terminus, he changes trams to return to his seedy home, "about the
time when the shows end." Pather Panchali earned him a measure of fame, but he relives
his past in a tradition in which "the actor was king".
Karuna Banerjee, 58, now a mother of one and a grandmother of another, who played
Sarbajaya, lives in Delhi and leads a "housebound life". She is kinder to Ray than
Bandopadhyay. She had had about two-and-a-half years' experience with the Indian
People's Theatre Association before Pather Panchali and is quite modest about her
performance in that film. "Much depended on the director and his conception of the
theme and characters. Most of us were new. But everything was so normal, so easy, that
we never thought that we were doing something artificial which was going to be edited
and projected."

Karuna, who acted in four of Ray's films and two others, says that she "did not find Ray
dominating at all. I found him absolutely unobtrusive," she says, and adds: "He had a
peculiar power to extract performances, in the sense that everything was so real."
Forgotten: To Subir Bannerjee, 33 who played the little boy Apu at the age of eight, the
25th year of Pather Panchali would have passed unnoticed if he had not been tracked
down by the press at the engineering factory in the suburbs where he is employed as a
milhand. Like Uma Dasgupta, who played Durga, Subir was never to appear in another
film. Uma, 40, plump and mother of two children, fondly remembers the day when an
assistant director in the Ray unit met her at the school and asked her to play Durga
because she resembled Karuna Banerjee, who played Sarbajaya.
In a sequence, Durga steals a gold trinket from a neighbour's house, the neighbour insults
Sarbajaya and she beats her daughter mercilessly till the little girl is half-dead. "I've the
most vivid memory of Karuna Banerjee beating me black and blue, and Ray exhorting
her from the other end of the camera to deal still more naturalistic blows," giggles Uma.
One Performance: People who have acted in Ray films confirm that a single appearance
does not guarantee another call. Uttam Kumar, Bengal's matinee idol, was cast by Ray
only once, and that too in Nayak the story of a big star. Said Tapen Chatterjee who played
the singing hero in the Ray musical, Goopi Gayen Bagha Bayen: "He takes a person only
when he resembles somebody in the script."

Karuna Banerjee as Sarbajaya (left), with Kanu Bandopadhyay (centre), and as she is
today
Chatterjee was offered a role in Ray's film in the making, Hirak Rajar Deshe, only after
he lost 10 kg in one month. "I starved and worked out at the gym until I looked like the
character in the script. The point is, he chose me because he had in his head what I'd look
like without those tyres and double-chin," Chatterjee adds gleefully.
For a role in Pratidwandi (1970), that of a hospital nurse who is a seductress when off
duty, Ray chose a baby-faced belly dancer, Shefali, who was a floor show sensation of
the 1970s. Shefali never made another appearance in Ray films. Barun Chanda, the
youthful-hero of Seemabaddha ("Company Limited") in 1971, was dropped after his one-
time success. Madhabi Mukherjee, the famed actress who was a great Ray favourite for
playing the thinking woman, was dropped the day the delicate lines on her face showed
signs of hardening.
Director's Films in other departments of film-making, such as script-writing, composing
the musical score, camera-work, editing, sound-recording, and even make-up, Ray is a
perfect autocrat, subjecting all components to a single artistic purpose. Ravi Shankar did
the score for Pather Panchali. Now Ray composes his own music on a cottage piano,
writes his own script, and his scenario contains copious instructions for changes of
lenses, decor, lighting, makeup and cuts. He mostly looks through the camera himself and
handles it on his own.

At the cutting room, the editor's job is narrowed down merely to applying the scissors
where he is asked to. He designs his own publicity posters as there are few more
competent design artists than Ray in Bengal.
Way back in 1952, when work began on Pather Panchali. Ray was introducing into the
Indian cinema this concept of the "director's film". Says Mrinal Sen, the film-maker:
"Ray was the first in India to make the individual's cinema."

Uma Dasgupta as moppet Durga and now at 40

Years later, the same urge for the "individual's cinema" spawned the French new wave.
Young directors scouted for subjects in the streets, photographed with hand-held
cameras, shot straight into light, and threw editing laws to the winds. They made up for
lack of conventional film grammar with a new suppleness of the medium, challenged the
industry by keeping budgets low, and ensured box-office returns by throwing in a lot of
"bedroom scenes".
"Rather Dull": The Messiah of the French new wave, Francoise Truffaut, scornfully
belittled Pather Panchali when it was first shown in Paris. But, as Truffaut and his
friends later admitted, Ray too was attempting to use the medium as easily and
independently as a poet or a novelist uses his pen. He was Indian cinema's first author.
In the making of Pather Panchali there were two long gaps totalling 18 months. At the
initial stage. Ray pawned his wife's ornaments to raise money. Though the state
Government bought it during production, Bidhan Chandra Roy, the chief minister, who
was an able administrator but without much taste for the arts, thought the ending to be too
cynical and even suggested a happier finale.
As Ray peddled his script to producers, many of them took him for a madman of sorts. In
1954, even after offering to buy the film, a state Government bureaucrat noted on the file:
"Pather Panchali is rather dull and slow moving." The initial hostility to Pather
Panchali was largely due to the lack of mental preparation of the Indian audience for this
kind of cinema. The Indian viewers had been fed for years on the Hollywood fare, and
wanted their own cinema to be modelled on Hollywood.

Multicrore Ventures: In 1955, Cecil B. DeMille was spending $15 million in

Hollywood on his extravaganza. The Ten Commandments. In Bombay, V. Shantaram was
shooting the Indian blockbuster, Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baaje. Judy Garland was singing
her way through in George Cukor's A Star is Born.
Walt Disney was indulging in all kinds of expensive showmanship with the two films
released in that year - 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and The Vanishing Prairie. Raj
Kapoor had bid goodbye to the early boldness of Awaara and was shooting a trite Shri
420. In Bengal, Suchitra Sen and Uttam Kumar had teamed up in an insipid Tagore
comedy, Chira Kumar Sabha.
Ray derived his inspiration for Pather Panchali from a different soil altogether. He
toured Europe a few years earlier as visualiser in the British advertising agency, D.J.
Keymer. Between designing campaigns for tea and biscuits, he was avidly watching the
post-war Italian cinema and was being swayed by the simplicity and frankness of
a Miracle in Milan or Bicycle Thieves.
Critics have later discovered in Pather Panchali shades of Bicycle Thieves, of Donskoi's
trilogy on Maxim Gorky, of Robert Flaherty, the American document arist, and of
Dovzhenko's Earth. But, As Ray himself later wrote: "..your approach should derive not
from Dovzhenko's Earth.......but from the earth, the soil, of your own country - assuming
of course that your story has roots in it."
Negligible Impact: Unlike Vittorio De Sica (the maker of Bicycle Thieves) or Truffaut,
Ray created little or no impact on the film industry of his own state, not to speak of the
country. Despite Ray, Bengal has slid into the backwaters of Indian cinema, disproving
an assertion of the British film historian, Penelope Houston, in 1963 that "Satyajit Ray's
Bengal will be the cinema's India."
In 1954, Bengal made 54 films, a fourth of the country's production. Last year, the state's
languishing studios rolled out 32 films, about 4 per cent of the country's total. Even
Hyderabad produced 115 films in that year.

Bengali films are largely black-and-white and are made on shoe-string budgets. Of the
state's 450 permanent show houses, only 14 show Bengali films and 46 others show them
occasionally. A Bengali film's budget hardly exceeds Rs 8 lakh and is normally kept
within Rs 5 lakh. This contrasts with Bombay where film budgets usually vary between
Rs 1 crore and Rs 4 crore.
A director of Ray's eminence reportedly charges Rs 1 lakh as combined fees for script-
writing, music direction and direction. With one film in a year, his income should be Rs
80,000 less than that of a private make-up man of a Bombay superstar. The make-up man
charges Rs 160 per shift, and the star works four shifts.
Bengal's two other outstanding filmmakers, Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak, have made
films of a different genre. In fact, there have been few competent filmmakers other than
them. The state Government is making a serious attempt to cajole film-makers from other
states. Shyam Benegal and P.N. Sathyu for example, to work in West Bengal. Ray's
Bengal, one notices with great effort, has finally ceased to be the cinema's India.