Page 45 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

32 The Apu Trilogy

with life; and as Harihar returns to the village, terribly overdue
but happy because he is bearing gifts for his wife and children, a
despairing Sarbajaya can think only of Durga, the child who has
left them forever during her husband’s long absence from home
in search of employment.
Major changes made to the novel by Ray all have their ration-
ale and do not diminish it. Indir’s death, for instance, takes place
well into the film (over half-way through) when we have got to
know her well, and also out in the open so that the two children
stumble across her corpse and appreciate the meaning of Death;
in the novel she dies early on at a village shrine in someone’s
house, and only adults are present. Nor, in the novel, do either
of the children ever catch sight of a railway train (probably the
most famous scene in the film) until Apu, alone, boards a train
after leaving the village – though they do attempt to. Nor is
Durga’s death the direct consequence of getting drenched in the
monsoon; the cause of her fever in the novel is left mysterious.
Finally, there is the ending of the film: Ray felt, as have all oth-
ers who have abridged or translated the novel, that the departure
from the village for Benares formed a natural break.
The only valid criticism of Ray’s approach might lie in the
film’s attenuated sense of the village of Nishchindipur as a
whole. In the novel we learn more about Harihar’s ancestors and
Nishchindipur’s history and geography; there is, for instance,
a ruined indigo factory with a child’s gravestone still visible
belonging to the son of a long-departed British planter’s family.
And we thereby gain a deeper feeling of Harihar’s roots there,
which in turn strengthens our understanding of his reluctance to
leave his house after disaster befalls him and his family.
Ray’s principal challenge in turning Pather Panchali into a
film was, ironically enough, to dispel his personal ignorance of
village life. Unlike Tagore, and many other Bengali writers such
as Banerji, the city-dweller Ray had very little first-hand knowl-
edge of the village apart from what he had seen in the villages
around Shantiniketan while sketching and painting as an art

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