Page 62 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

An Epic in Production 49

Ray saying so, suggesting another actress. Although she had
acted a good deal in the Indian People’s Theatre Association
(IPTA) – the federation of groups formed throughout India
in the early 1940s to which creative people of all kinds were
drawn – she was fairly conventional in her view of cinema acting
as unsuitable for respectable women. Family pressure persuaded
her otherwise. As Sarbajaya, Karuna never felt any difficulty in
identifying herself with a village housewife living in poverty.
Although her life had been spent in cities (like Ray himself), she
had been born in a large family in East Bengal and, like the Ray
family of Sukumar’s generation, she used to return to her ances-
tral village at festival time when she was growing up.
But of all Ray’s casting in Pather Panchali, his most inspired
choices must be Tulsi Chakravarti as the grocer–schoolmaster, and
Chunibala Devi as Indir, the film’s ‘most outstanding perform-
ance’ in Ray’s view and that of many others (including myself).
Chakravarti, at the time Ray cast him, was very well known in
Bengal for a kind of broad comic acting that Ray did not much
care for. He had run away from home when he was fifteen or
sixteen and joined a circus party where he became a trapeze art-
ist. Later, after acting in silent films, he joined the payroll of
New Theatres (where Ray’s uncle Nitin Bose was a director) and
played bit-parts like landlords, moneylenders and grocers. Ray
had felt a marvellous expressiveness in his face and sensed that he
was being wasted. He was delighted when Chakravarti agreed to
play in Pather Panchali; ‘I was a nobody at that time – in the film
business anyway,’ Ray said. At the end of the first day’s shooting,
Chakravarti told him, ‘I’ve never had so much interesting busi-
ness.’ A few years later, not long before his death, he gave one of
the best performances ever delivered in a Ray film, as the humble
clerk who finds the philosopher’s stone and is transformed over-
night into a nouveau riche in The Philosopher’s Stone/Paras Pathar.
The early shots of Pather Panchali had already been taken
before Ray located an old woman capable of playing Indir; it sur-
prised him to the end of his life to think that he could have been

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