Page 41 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

28 The Apu Trilogy

first film is a close adaptation of four-fifths of the novel Pather
Panchali. The second film is based, less closely, on the final fifth
of the novel Pather Panchali combined with just over a third of
the novel Aparajito. The third film – the name of which, Apur
Sansar, was given by Ray – is loosely based on some key incidents
in Aparajito selected by him mainly from the middle portion of
the novel, modified and extended by his own inventive powers.
Indeed, Ray did not have in mind three films when he started
Pather Panchali in 1950. Only after this film’s success at the box-
office did he decide to tackle a sequel; and only after a substan-
tial hiatus following the release of Aparajito, which lost money at
the box-office, was he persuaded by public demand to consider
the possibility of finding a third film in Banerji’s second novel.
By the time he began writing his script of Pather Panchali,
the novel had become a popular classic in Bengali, assisted by
the publication of the abridged edition with Ray’s illustrations
in the mid-1940s. But when it first started to appear as a serial
in a Calcutta journal in 1928, the publisher imposed a condi-
tion that the serial could be discontinued if it proved unpopular
with readers; both its style and its author were then unknown.
However, the story of Apu and Durga rapidly established itself
in the imaginations and hearts of Bengali readers; the novel
appeared in book form in late 1929, became a school text in its
abridged edition, and has never gone out of print. In a respected
survey of Bengali literature by the poet and critic Buddhadeva
Bose, written in 1948, Pather Panchali is described as ‘one of
the few completely satisfying Bengali novels. ... For it is a book
of great beauty, the beauty of childhood and old age, of fur-
rows and flowers, of distances, and of innocence.’ Aparajito, by
contrast, published in 1932, pleased Bose (and the Bengali pub-
lic) somewhat less: ‘The boy-hero Apu grows up and comes to
Calcutta where he is as much lost as his author. Love and death,
poverty and suffering are all there, but the magic is gone and the
glory departed; instead of being an inhabitant of the universe,
Apu now is merely a country cousin.’ Although Banerji wrote

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