Page 185 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

172 The Apu Trilogy

never be able to make a film for the masses. His attitude to cin-
ema is different. In our country nobody, not even Ray, has tried
to bridge the gulf between art and entertainment.’
Although it is true that the all-India television series Satyajit
Ray Presents (directed by Ray’s son Sandip Ray in the 1980s,
from scripts by his father) subsequently helped to make Ray’s
work better known in India outside Bengal, he remained essen-
tially ‘only a name’ there – by his own admission. Apart from
Bangalore, which turned out a good audience for Ray because
of its high proportion of professional residents, his films were
generally shown in India’s major cities in Bengali only – at most,
with English subtitles – and at special screenings, usually on
Sunday mornings. They were never released nationwide and,
apart from Kapurush/The Coward, were not dubbed into Hindi.
(Subtitles would not have helped since many Hindi-speakers
were illiterate.)
In Bengal, Ray sat on the ‘Olympian heights’, as he once iron-
ically put it – at least by comparison with Bombay. The release
of a new film by Ray in Calcutta had long been an event – ever
since the furore around Pather Panchali in 1955 – which triggered
a torrent of reviews and comments in the Bengali and English-
language press. While Calcutta’s intellectuals – self-styled and
otherwise – liked to view a Satyajit Ray film ‘with a Satyajit Ray
mind’ (to quote Ray’s actress relative Ruma Guha Thakurta),
other people would pass whispered remarks in the auditorium
about his more daring challenges to middle-class convention.
Sometimes he lost his audience with his cinematic sophistication
– as in Kanchenjungha, Days and Nights in the Forest and Branches
of the Tree/Sakha Prasakha; occasionally he offended them – as
with Apu’s harsh treatment of his mother in Aparajito; but usu-
ally he strongly engaged them in the best traditions of popular
art. As he once said, ‘Popular taste has produced Greek Drama,
Shakespeare, The Magic Flute, Chaplin and the Western. ... I do
not know of a single film-maker who has been dismayed by a
wide acceptance of his work.’

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