Page 61 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

48 The Apu Trilogy

to measure his progress by, and to have three assistants hiding
in the kash on either side who would call the boy at prearranged
moments. Ray’s perception of the way that De Sica handled the
father in Bicycle Thieves (rather than the boy) helped to give him
the confidence to direct his child actor as a puppet too.
In his first film Ray confessed he felt ‘safer with non-actors’,
but it would be wrong to assume, as many have done, that all
the actors in Pather Panchali had no prior experience. When Ray
attended a seminar in the United States in 1958, organised by
Robert Flaherty’s widow who greatly admired Pather Panchali,
he had to use a lot of persuasion to convince her he had been
right to use non-villagers in the film – unlike Flaherty’s docu-
mentaries on pre-industrial cultures such as Nanook of the North.
In fact, of the major characters, Indir, Harihar, the two women
neighbours and the grocer–schoolmaster, were all played by pro-
fessionals, while Karuna Banerji (Sarbajaya) and Uma Das Gupta
(Durga) had had experience on the stage; only the smaller roles –
such as the old men who visit Harihar at the end of the film to
persuade him to stay in the village – were played by the villagers
of Boral.
To find Apu, Ray had advertised in newspapers asking five- to
seven-year-old boys to come and see him. Hundreds turned up –
even a girl, whose parents had had a salon cut her hair and pow-
der her shoulders – but the choice eventually fell on a boy whom
Ray’s wife spotted playing on the roof next to the flat they were
now renting in south Calcutta. The girl who would play Durga
was discovered by a friend of Ray who knew the headmistress of
a girls’ school in Calcutta. When Uma Das Gupta met Ray she
thought she was auditioning for a stage play. She put on a pearl
necklace of which she was proud. ‘The first remark Manikda
[Ray] made was that I would have to take it off.’ Karuna Banerji
(the mother in real life of Runki Banerji, the young Durga in the
early part of the film) was suggested for the part of Sarbajaya by
her husband Subrata, a friend of Ray and his colleague in adver-
tising at Keymer’s. Karuna was not enthusiastic and wrote to

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