Page 180 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

Apu in the East and West 167

Indian villager less of a peasant than Harihar would be hard to
imagine. ‘Harihar Ray was a Brahmin’ is the first line of the novel
Pather Panchali in its English translation, as we know; and in
the film Ray makes the character’s Brahmin identity abundantly
obvious – for a start, priests must be Brahmins in Hinduism –
whilst also showing his love of manuscripts and writing, which
he shares with his son Apu. Although some western critics have
fallen into the same trap as Rushdie, instinctively assuming that
only peasants could live in the village poverty shown in Pather
Panchali, this is no explanation for a writer who prides himself
on his Indian origin. It seems that only Rushdie’s citified, angli-
cised education in cosmopolitan Bombay, far away from India’s
villages and from Bengal, can explain such an error, which
remained uncorrected in Rushdie’s later collection of his essays,
Imaginary Homelands.
Rushdie’s misunderstanding suggests that Crowther’s incom-
prehension of Pather Panchali articulated in the New York Times
in 1958 is still widespread, despite the film’s avowed status as a
classic. For instance, when it was revived in London in August
2005, on the 50th anniversary of its first release, Pather Panchali
received a brief review from James Christopher, the chief film
critic of the London Times. Although The Times had a tradi-
tion of intelligently reviewing and discussing Ray’s work that
went back to the 1950s, notably under its former chief film critic
David Robinson, its 2005 review was arrogant and inane. Judge
for yourself:

Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy follows the life of a poor village
boy from slum to city. Th e fi rst fi lm, Pather Panchali (1955),
was a blast from the heart, and the first reel to make a seri-

ous impression in the West with its blistering portrait of a
Brahmin family in the grip of poverty.
Not a lot happens in their sweltering Bengalese hamlet. Th e
father, with potty dreams of becoming a playwright, slopes

off to distant towns to earn his fortune. His stony wife is left

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