Page 42 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

Apu in Fiction and Film 29

about 50 published works in all, his first book, Pather Panchali,
remains by far his best-known work, both in Bengal and abroad,
after it was published in English and French in the late 1960s as
a direct consequence of the success of Ray’s film.
The novel was based, to a great extent, on Banerji’s own dis-
tressingly impecunious early life. He was born in 1894 in a vil-
lage north of Calcutta. Like Apu’s father, Bibhutibhusan’s father
was a lowly Brahmin priest, an expositor of Hindu mythology,
a story-teller, who also had a good voice for singing traditional
songs. His mother was an unremarkable village girl. The family
lived in extreme poverty, as a consequence of the father’s imprac-
ticality. Although it included no daughter like Durga in the novel,
Bibhutibhusan had a female cousin, a bit older than him, who
fits the character Durga, judging from the diary Banerji kept,
which also mentions an old aunt who lived with the family –
the model for Indir Thakrun, the ancient dependant relative of
Pather Panchali. Both the father and the mother died in poverty,
and the ‘sister’ was taken by a crocodile (a not-uncommon fate
for village children living beside the rivers of Bengal a century
ago, which befalls a child in the prologue to the novel).
Somehow, Banerji managed to matriculate from a local school
and obtain a degree at Ripon College in Calcutta, again like his
hero Apu. Whilst still at college, he married, but lost his young
wife a year later in the great influenza epidemic of 1918. Like
Apu (who loses his young wife in childbirth), Bibhutibhusan
was devastated by the loss; although he had several subsequent
romantic attachments, he did not marry again until his mid-
forties and had his only child, a son, when he was in his fifties.
Meanwhile he became a teacher, living at first in a squalid bazaar
near the railway station of a village outside Calcutta, until mov-
ing back to the city around 1924. Yet he never felt settled in
the metropolis: Banerji (like Tagore, but unlike Ray) always
tended to regard Calcutta as an insular place that alienated him
from both nature and humanity, and preferred to travel all over
India – a wanderlust also seen in Apu.

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