Page 40 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

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Apu in Fiction and Film:

Adapting the Novels Pather

Panchali and Aparajito

The majority of Satyajit Ray’s 30 or so feature films were based –
sometimes closely, often loosely – on published short stories,
novellas and novels. The Apu Trilogy is no exception. However,
for all its strong narrative thread, the trilogy looks so essentially
cinematic that its literary origin is often underappreciated or
even forgotten. For example, the critic Robin Wood, in his sig-
nificant study of the Apu Trilogy published in 1972, makes only
a single glancing reference to the existence of a literary original
and does not once mention its author Bibhutibhusan Banerji*.
Yet, Ray himself was always happy to acknowledge his profound
debt to Banerji’s writings, especially in regard to Pather Panchali,
in which most of the film’s dialogue comes from the novel.
The three films in the trilogy – Pather Panchali/The Song of
the Little Road (1955), Aparajito/The Unvanquished (1956) and
Apur Sansar/The World of Apu (1959) – are based on two nov-
els by Banerji: Pather Panchali and its sequel Aparajito. The

* Banerji is an anglicised spelling of Bandopadhyay, the more accurate Bengali
spelling of the name often used today.

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