Page 106 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

Pather Panchali: Critique 93

Taken together, as with Kurosawa’s films and Japanese society
but markedly more so, Ray’s films describe a whole culture.
Pather Panchali, Aparajito and The World of Apu are very dif-
ferent in their dominant moods and in the rewards they offer
the viewer. They reflect the consciousness of Apu as it evolves
from innocence, and this gives them a coherence that it is tempt-
ing to call musical. As a whole, the trilogy is reminiscent of the
development of a raga, the basic classical Indian melodic form,
in which the music flows, sometimes meandering, through its
prescribed phases towards its emotional catharsis – from Apu’s
introduction into the world to his reunion with his small aban-
doned son in the finale of The World of Apu. A raga traditionally
has three sections: First, the alap, ‘the very slow introductory
movement of a raga, featuring the gradual and meditative
unfolding of its structure, theme and rasa [emotion] ... consid-
ered the highest form in Indian music ... [with] no measured
time cycle’, in the words of Ravi Shankar. Secondly, the more
complex jor, which is still a solo exposition but which introduces
a rhythmic pulse and has a gradually increasing tempo. Finally,
the jhala, when the strings of the instrumentalist are joined by
the beat of the tabla in a fixed rhythmic cycle that nevertheless
allows for ample improvisation, and the tempo increases to a
climax at the end. Pather Panchali may be compared to the alap,
Aparajito to the jor, and The World of Apu to the jhala phases
of a raga.
At the beginning of Pather Panchali, Apu does not, of course,
exist: for some considerable time into the film, the family con-
sists of Harihar, Sarbajaya, little Durga and Indir. We first see
Apu as a baby, rocked by the ancient Indir Thakrun, but we
first meet him as an eye. He is by then about six. On Sarbajaya’s
instructions, Durga wakes up Apu for his first day at school by
gently prising open his reluctant eyelid. He is a skinny, shy little
boy with a ravenous curiosity, and frequently a hunger for food
too – but his mother can seldom provide what she would like to
give him. No matter: he and his sister live in their own worlds,

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