Page 44 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

Apu in Fiction and Film 31

extraordinary indifference to the fate of his infant son, which
underlies the second half of The World of Apu.
Pather Panchali is a novel with a plethora of characters in it:
Ray counted more than 300 of them, of whom 30 appear in his
film, such as the comical village schoolmaster and the fat itiner-
ant sweetseller. But the main ones, as in the film, are the grow-
ing boy Apu, his elder sister Durga, their mother Sarbajaya and
father Harihar Ray, a Brahmin priest, and Harihar’s elderly dis-
tant relative Indir. There is also an extended prologue about the
ancestry of the Ray family, one of whom was a brutal robber who
committed murders; the shadow of his deeds is thought to have
fallen on succeeding generations, including Harihar. The sad
history of Indir Thakrun, who is about 75 when the main story
begins, is also described. She is very soon dead, treated with
extreme callousness by Sarbajaya, who cannot bear to share with
her what meagre food she can scrape together; Durga’s affec-
tion for the old woman cannot save her. The bulk of the novel
is about the small family’s struggle to survive in their ances-
tral home in the village. Durga dies of a fever, and the house
decays beyond repair. Eventually Harihar decides to pull up his
roots and leave. He, his wife and Apu depart for Benares where
their life continues; Ray incorporated this section into Pather
Panchali’s sequel, Aparajito.
His adaptation involved drastic compression, elision and omis-
sion of scenes in the novel, as well as occasional additions. Out of
a seemingly random sequence of significant and trivial episodes,
Ray had to extract a simple theme, while preserving the loitering
impression created by the original. ‘The script had to retain some
of the rambling quality of the novel,’ commented Ray, ‘because
that in itself contained a clue to the feel of authenticity: life in
a poor Bengali village does ramble.’ Much of the power of the
film lies in this calculated enriching of an elemental situation by
contrasts: as Durga delights her hungry old ‘auntie’ with a stolen
fruit, her mother Sarbajaya ticks her off for taking it; as Indir
Thakrun goes off to die in the forest, Apu and Durga bubble

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