Page 23 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

10 The Apu Trilogy

Europeans and Parsees. The number of Bengalis seriously inter-
ested in western classical music in Calcutta at this time could
be counted on the fingers of two hands – even Tagore was not
(though his favourite niece was).
School, which he attended from the age of nine to fifteen,
meant comparatively little to Satyajit, though he was never
unhappy or unpopular there. And the same was true of his college
education at the best institution in Calcutta, Presidency College.
As he put it in a lecture, ‘My life, my work’, given in 1982, when
he had turned 60: ‘Erudition is something which I singularly
lack. As a student, I was only a little better than average, and in
all honesty, I cannot say that what I learnt in school and college
has stood me in good stead in the years that followed. ... My best
and keenest memories of college consist largely of the quirks and
idiosyncrasies of certain professors’ – as is obvious from Ray’s
quizzical portrayal of Apu’s college professors in Aparajito, the
second film of the Apu Trilogy.
It was his time at Shantiniketan, Tagore’s university in a poor
rural district about a hundred miles from Calcutta, where Satyajit
was a student of fine arts from 1940 to 1942, which was the part
of his formal education that would have a genuine influence on
the future course of his life. Without his Shantiniketan experi-
ence, Pather Panchali would not have been possible, he later real-
ised. No one could explain this better than Ray himself, in his
Calcutta lecture:

My relationship with Shantiniketan was an ambivalent one.
As one born and bred in Calcutta, I loved to mingle with
the crowd in Chowringhee [the city’s most famous thor-
oughfare], to hunt for bargains in the teeming profusion of
second-hand books on the pavements of College Street, to
explore the grimy depths of the Chor Bazaar for symphonies
at throwaway prices, to relax in the coolness of a cinema, and
lose myself in the make-believe world of Hollywood. All this
I missed in Shantiniketan, which was a world apart. It was

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