Page 177 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

164 The Apu Trilogy

Ray did not bother to refute such stuff, but others jumped
to his defence including the actor and theatre director Utpal
Dutta, who joked that ‘this holy cow should have stuck to her
Mother India role’, and the Forum for Better Cinema – a group of
respected film-makers and writers – who wrote to Nargis Dutt
as follows:

The Modern India you speak of is the India of dams, of sci-

entists, steel plants and agricultural reforms. Do you honestly
believe that it is this India that is portrayed in the so-called

commercial films of Bombay? In fact, the world of commercial

Hindi films is peopled by thugs, smugglers, dacoits, voyeurs,
murderers, cabaret dancers, sexual perverts, degenerates,
delinquents and rapists, which can hardly be called represent-
ative of Modern India.

It was soon after this debate in 1981 that the Government in
New Delhi informed Ray it could not grant him permission to
make a film about child labour since this did not constitutionally
exist in India. So instead, as a deliberate protest against both the
ban and the minister concerned (whom Ray openly described as
‘a very dangerous, vicious type of person’), he decided to produce
Deliverance/Sadgati – a film about a helpless low-caste labourer
and a ruthless Brahmin priest as bluntly prosaic about grinding
poverty and the human condition as Pather Panchali is poetically
hopeful.
The rapid expansion of the Indian economy since the mid-
1990s, and the consequent spurt in affluence and self-confidence
of India’s middle classes – if scarcely of India’s labouring poor –
have almost eliminated the earlier official objections to showing
Indian poverty in films seen abroad. In 2009, the film Slumdog
Millionaire (British-made, but based on a novel by an Indian),
which revels luridly in the desperate slum poverty of Bombay,
won massive audiences outside India along with a fistful of
Oscars. There was much rejoicing within India, comparatively

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