Page 55 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

42 The Apu Trilogy

the job he had earlier promised and which Apu had rejected as
too routine – ‘because any direct statement like “OK, I agree
to marry your cousin” would have sounded terrible,’ said Ray.
‘A western viewer ignorant of orthodox Hindu customs must
find the episode highly bizarre’, he further commented. ‘But
since Apu himself finds it so, and since his action is prompted
by compassion, the viewer accepts it on moral grounds, though
given no opportunity to weigh the pros and cons of a seemingly
irrational practice.’ That this is true is chiefly because Ray, with
his Brahmo family background and its rejection of orthodox
Hinduism, could not accept Banerji’s version of Apu’s marriage
and therefore ‘reformed’ it. In the novel, Apu sleeps upstairs and
is woken by Pulu in the middle of the night with the news about
the mad bridegroom; quickly he falls in with Pulu’s rescue plan:
‘Very well, just tell me what I have to do’ – which really would
have left a western viewer bemused.
Banerji and his novels were Hindu to the core – ‘Harihar Ray
was a Brahmin’ is the opening sentence of Pather Panchali –
unlike his interpreter Ray and his films. In adapting the two
novels Pather Panchali and Aparajito to make the Apu Trilogy,
Ray contrived to retain the Hindu details and atmosphere
familiar to Bengali and Indian viewers, while emphasising a
strong and simple theme about a boy’s struggle to become a
man, to which anyone can relate, anywhere in the world. Ray’s
Apu, unlike Banerji’s original creation, is truly ‘an inhabitant of
the universe’, not a country cousin.

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