Page 71 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

58 The Apu Trilogy

rushes to some of his friends, one of whom told him: ‘This is
India’s first adult film.’
The Keymer’s managers, in particular J. B. R. Nicholson, per-
mitted Ray, who was the jewel in their crown, to take time off
to shoot his film as he saw fit. On occasions this leave was even
paid. The manager of the Bombay branch, Robert Hardcastle,
recalled visiting Calcutta on business some time in 1953–54 and
seeing Ray’s sketches at the insistence of the Calcutta manager.
He was very struck by ‘their power and atmosphere’. Shooting
was at that time suspended and Ray told Hardcastle that one of
his main anxieties was that his elderly actress would die.
The gap in the shooting lasted almost a year. In the early
months of 1954 two sources of help appeared, one foreign, the
other indigenous. Monroe Wheeler of New York’s Museum of
Modern Art turned up in Calcutta in February in pursuit of
materials for an exhibition of Indian textiles and ornaments. He
got to hear of the film and visited Ray at his office. The stills
he saw there thrilled him. ‘He felt it was very high quality light-
ing, composition, faces, textures and so on,’ said Ray. ‘That gave
him the notion it would be a film worth showing at his festi-
val.’ Together, they paid a visit to Tagore’s Shantiniketan, which
has a strong craft tradition that interested Wheeler. He came to
know Ray quite well, and ‘I think he got the impression I would
come up with something exciting. “Do you think you could let
us have this film for our exhibition?” he asked. “That’s a year
from now.” ’ – May 1955. Ray could hardly believe his ears.
The second source was the Government of West Bengal,
whose chief minister was then an energetic figure from a Brahmo
family, Dr B. C. Roy, who had earlier been Mahatma Gandhi’s
physician and friend. Roy had helped Uday Shankar fund his
pioneering film Kalpana in 1948. Ray’s mother had a woman
friend with influence over Roy. Though very dubious about
film-making as a way of life, she had never doubted her son’s
artistic talent, and was distressed by the dashing of his hopes
in 1953; so she arranged for her friend to see the edited footage.

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