Page 175 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

162 The Apu Trilogy

Panchali is still my most popular film in India,’ he agreed. ‘It’s
a phenomenon that never ceases to surprise me.’ He could not
really explain why. When pressed, he said with a slightly irritated
laugh: ‘I think by and large Bengalis love to have a good cry and
this is a film which gives it to them.’ Ray always disliked Bengali
sentimentality, and its near-companions hard-heartedness and
hypocrisy.
Pather Panchali’s fame outside India has long disturbed many
prosperous Indians (especially in Bollywood), because of the
film’s depiction of poverty, on which Bosley Crowther focused
in his notorious New York Times review. Only through Nehru’s
personal intervention, as we know, did Ray’s maiden venture
reach the Cannes Film Festival in 1956, and thereby establish
India on the map of world cinema.
A quarter of a century later, the very same official objection
to the film was raised in the Indian Parliament, this time by
Nargis Dutt, MP, the attractive heroine of the 1957 blockbuster
Mother India (Bollywood’s answer to Pather Panchali) and one
of the biggest box-office stars of her time. Dutt publicly accused
Ray of distorting India’s image abroad – first in a parliamentary
debate, and then in a magazine interview that was symptomatic
of Ray’s long-running difficulties with his Indian audience
outside Bengal:

Interviewer: What does Ray portray in the Apu Trilogy and
why do you object to it?
Dutt: He portrays a region of West Bengal which is so
poor that it does not represent India’s poverty in
its true form. Tell me something. Which part of
India are you from?
Interviewer: UP [Uttar Pradesh].
Dutt: Now, tell me, would you leave your 80-year-old
grandmother to die in a cremation ground,
unattended?
Interviewer: No.

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