On Renoir’s sets Ray made the acquaintance of a still photographer, Subrata Mitra. This 21-year-old photographer was on the sets everyday and clicking photographs. They got talking and before long Mitra was showing Ray some of his photographs. He was gratified by Ray’s interest but still taken by surprise when a few montrhs later Ray called to offer him a job on the film he was making. “Someone who had not shot even a foot of film became the cinematogrpaher of Pather Panchali,” he recalled with a wry, dry smile years later.

However, Renoir , Bansi Chandragupta and Mitra were perhaps the only three who along with Ray believed that it would be possible to shoot an entire film outdoors, without make-up and with new faces. Most of the professionals Ray spoke to about the film told him that it was not possible to make a film that way and dissuaded him from attempting such an idea.

It was at this juncture that Keymers transferred him to their head office. Ray spent six months in London and when not working he was watching films. He joined the London Film Club and in four-and-a-half months saw 99 films among them Renoir’s La Regle du Jea and Vittirio de Sica’s Ladri di Biciclette (Bicycle Thieves). The latter was one of the first films he saw at the Curzon along with A Night at the Opera and it proved that Pather Panchali was not a foolish dream, it could become an exciting reality.

From Renior Ray learnt the art of economy of expressions, using minute and appropriate details to heighten the elements of mis-en-scene. From Vittirio he learnt how to compensate for a wafer thin plot with rich social and cultural observations. Bicycle Thieves proved to him that it was possible to make a film with an amateur cast, on a shoe-string budget and shoot on location. Armed with this knowledge he returned to India to marry his cousin Bijoya and pursue his dream of Pather Panchali. In ’52 Ray started work on his first film with Subrata Mitra as his cinematorapher, Bansi Chandragupta as his art director and Dulal Dutta as his editor. He assembled a cast of enthusiasts many of whom had no acting experience. Kanu Banerjee was signed on to play Harihar, the poet-priest who struggles to keep his family of five in their dilapidated village home. Eventually after the arrival of Apu, he has to leave for the city and after months of worrying silence returns with a happy smile and a sari for his daughter only to learn that Durga had succumbed to pneumonia. Uma Dasgupta, a novice to acting, was cast in the all-important role of Durga and with her irrepressible smile and uninhibited sponteneity, made a memorable debut.

Karuna Banerjee, the wife of an executive, made a convincing Sarbojaya who battles poverty, accusations of theft and death with steely determination and an acid tongue. Subir Banerjee, another debutant, was an endearing Apu with his dark, curious eyes and dancing gait. Runki Banerjee as the child Durga made a fleeting appearance and a lasting impression. But the belle of the ball was undoubtedly Chunibala Devi who played Indira Thakrun, the wizened and antiquated aunt of the children. She’s a drain on Harihar’s meagre resources, and yet so much a part of the family that no one misses her till she’s gone. She dies quietly in a mango groove, lost to the world till Apu and Durga stumble upon her inert body. With her creaking joints and wrinkled face, Chunibala Devi lent the film a special kind of magic and became as integral a part of Ray’s film family as she was of Harihar’s in the film. Just as Sarbojaya and Harihar feared for her health in the film, so too did the unit hoping that nothing would happen to the oldest member of the family while they were on the road.

However, before he could get his show on the road Ray needed finance. He had done a book of drawings of frames from the film. They were fairly elaborately done in wash, in black and white (the sketchbook is now with the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris). Ray would go from door to door, meeting producers and distributors, telling them the story and showing them his sketches, hoping to interest them into putting up the money. From BN Sircar to a seedy producer operating from a dingy hotel, he was turned away by everyone. Disappointed but not disheartened, Ray and Mitra decided to start the film on their own. They shot some footage using a 16 mm camera. Ray mortgaged his life insurance, then pawned his Western music collection and finally, in desperation, he began selling off his mother’s and then his wife’s jewellery. The money quickly ran out and the film ground to a halt.

It was heartbreaking for his mother to see the haunted look in her son’s eyes and she made an appointment with the then Chief Minister of West Bengal, BC Ray. His wife, Bela had been a close friend and Mrs Ray used her friendship to appeal to the CM for a state grant so her son could live out his dream. The CM immediately dispatched a letter and Ray was given the funds that had been allocated for highway constructions despite the fact that he refused to accede to a request from the Director of Information to play down the poverty and show some rural prosperity at the end. The Director advocated a happy ending in lush green paddy fields because he was afraid Ray’s grim picture of human deprivation would damage India’s image abroad. Ray’s argument was, “Can a film-maker working in India afford to shut his eyes to the reality around him that is so poignant and so urgently in need of interpretation in terms of cinema?”
Perhaps the Director had been right in his own way. Reportedly, at an early screening of the film in New York, some people walked out because they couldn’t bear to see people eating with their hands and Nargis in later years did rail at Ray for playing up our poverty. But Pather Panchali also brought a letter from R Sudarshan, Assistant President, UN Development Programme, New Delhi applauding Ray for hs unique treatment of basic human conflicts and struggles. “In his sensitive portrayal of poverty and his sombre, perceptive and eloquent sensibility has done and can do more to touch the hearts of people than all the data on the human condition in our Human Development reports and poverty statistics,” wrote Sudarshan.

With timely finance from the West Bengal government, Pather Panchali was on the road again. Ray was shooting with three cameras—an old Mitchell, an Eyemo and a Wall camera. “Whatever was available for hire, we were using, and they didn’t always come with the right lens,” he admitted to Shyam Benegal in an interview years later.

He would gather together his cast and crew for 4-5 days in a month and shoot the film 10-12 miles from Calcutta, later matching portions perfectly in Calcutta’s studios. Sometimes it wasn’t possible to even shoot for these 4-5 days because money had run out again. Once there was a six months gap in shooting and when Ray went back to shoot the billowing fields of white kaash flowers were gone.

It took Ray two-and-a-half years to complete the film. He admitted that he and his technicians learnt film-making through the process of making Pather Panchali. “We knew nothing,” he confessed with rare candour. “We were most of us new, and in fact the editor had cut only one film before that. The final cut was done over a period of 10 days and 10 nights, working all the time because we had a deadline to catch.”

The deadline had been set by Monroe Wheeler of the New York Museum of Modern Art. When visiting Calcutta Monroe had happened to see some of the stills from the film and been struck by their “very high quality lighting, composition, faces, textures”. He promised Ray that he would premiere the film at the Museum along with an exhibition on Indian art.

A month later John Houston arrived in India hoping to film The Man Who Would Be King. He chanced to see half-an-hour of rough cuts from Pather Panchali and went back to New York raving about the film to Wheeler. That convinced Wheeler to arrange for a special screening of this amazing little film at the Museum. Working through 10 days and nights, Ray managed to dispatch a hastily finished print to New York where it was screened without sub-titles in May, ’55. The audience were entranced. Edward Harrison who was one of those at the Museum that day, became a permanent fixture in Ray’s life. This American distributor released all of Ray’s films in the US until his death in ’67.

Back in India a proud BC Ray arranged a screening for the then Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru at Calcutta’s Lighthouse Miniature Theatre. Nehru seated between the two Rays, saw the film and was deeply moved by it. He immediately decided that Pather Panchali would be India’s official entry at the Cannes film festival. At Cannes the film won a special award and an exultant Ray was ready to unveil his masterpiece for the city of joy.

The film opened in Calcutta in August, ’55. In the ’40s and ’50s Bengali films and, for that matter, even commercial Hindi cinema was an unappetizing mix of melodrama and song-’n-dance. Bengali films at the time in fact, were no different from traditional Bengali theatre or jatra as it was popularly called and Ray started Pather Panchali with the intention of breaking away from convention.

It was a film unlike any one had seen before. It meandered through rice fields, past ponds that looked like sheets of stained glass, captured the hushed stillness of dusk and found pleasure in a humming telegraph pole and an approaching train. It spent precious reels trailing an innocuous candy-seller and used long stretches of silence and the strains of Ravi Shankar’s sitar to talk about death’s visit. For Ray the biggest challenges were capturing the flickering light of the fireflies and following the course of a monsoon shower from the first drops of rain falling on an angler’s bald pate to the water dripping off the hyacinths in the pond to Durga’s exuberant rain dance.

Pather Panchali was too daringly different to appeal immediately to an audience brought up on a diet of high-pitched family dramas. And not surprisingly, the film opened to a lukewarm response in Calcutta when first released.

But within a week or two as word of its international honour spread, crowds flocked to the theatres drawn by the five billboards Ray had designed himself. The film that had been lying in the cans for three months because a top-ranking bureaucrat had serious doubts about whether anyone would come to see this “rather dull and slow-moving film”, ran for 13 weeks. The West Bengal government recovered its investment in the first run itself and in subsequent re-runs both at home and abroad made healthy profits leading Ray to comment wryly, “they got the money, but I got the fame.”

In one city theatre after six weeks Pather Panchali was replaced with SS Vasan’s Insaniyat despite enjoying a good run, because Vasan had booked weeks in advance. Ray was surprised by a visit from Vasan soon after. The Movie Moghul had just seen Pather Panchali and been highly impressed. “If I had known my film would replace Pather Panchali I would have withheld the opening,” he told Ray, adding appreciatively, “You have made a great film, Sir!”

Compliments flowed from far and wide. Pual Keal described the film as “beautiful, sometimes funny and full of love, it brought a new vision of India to the screen”. Abid was entranced by a film that he hailed as “pure cinema” and spoke in lyrical terms about the countryside that lives in “the quiver of every leaf, in the ripple on the surface of the pond, in the daily glory of its mornings and evenings”. Even the master, Akira Kurusava in later years appreciated Ray for the “quiet but deep observations, understanding and love of the human race which are characteristic of all his films”. Pather Panchali drew rave notices for its imaginative photography, its lyrical poetry and its deep humanism. But it was Ritwick Ghatak who in an article spoke about the theme music of Pather Panchali that recurs 7-8 times in the film. “Anywhere, anytime you hear that tune, it will remind you of the endless greenness of Bengal’s villages,” he observed. It was a pertinent observation and a tribute to Pandit Ravi Shankar’s genius.

The theme music usually heard played on a bamboo flute, evolved in Ravi Shankar’s mind even before he had seen the film. “He hummed it to me, I said it was marvellous and this would go very well with the film. It comes back at certain points and gives the film a unity,” Ray informed. It wasn’t just the theme music that made Pather Panchali memorable.The sequence in the rain, wordless but for the 3-minute solo piece on the sitar in Raag Desh, was another stroke of inspiration. And even the climax makes a deeper impact because of Panditji’s score.

Ray had initially followed the book and shot a bitter wailing outburst from Sarbojaya to convey to Harihar the news of Durga’s death. But he did not like the way the sound hit his ears. So he shot the scene a second time with no dialogue. Even then it didn’t seem right. So he conferred with Panditji and instead of the sound of weeping we heard the dilruba’s soulful lament in the upper reaches of Raag Patdeep. It made for an heart-rending conclusion to a film that leaves you dewy-eyed as you watch Harihar, Sarbojaya and Apu climb into a bullock cart and leave the home that is a treasure throve of memories. Memories of moments that make Pather Panchali unforgettable.

Roshmila Bhattacharya
roshmila@hotmail.com