Page 91 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

78 The Apu Trilogy

In The World of Apu, both the acting and the sets reached a
consummate pitch of perfection, not to speak of the effortless
editing and exquisitely appropriate music by Ravi Shankar. By
1958, not only did Ray have the experience of making four films
(Pather Panchali and Aparajito, of course, and also Paras Pathar
and The Music Room/Jalsaghar, made in 1957–58), he also felt
free to depart strongly from Banerji’s novel, as explained earlier,
which liberated his imagination.
The third film introduced two actors who were to become
regulars for Ray. When Soumitra Chatterji, then in his mid-
twenties, came to play Apu, having initially approached Ray for
the adolescent role in Aparajito and been found too old, he iden-
tified with almost every aspect of Apu’s character, like most of
his friends in Calcutta. ‘We were to a great extent Apus of our
time,’ he said later. Sharmila Tagore, who plays Aparna, was
only fourteen and still at school. (She is related to the painters
Abanindranath and Gaganendranath Tagore, the more ortho-
dox branch of the Tagore family.) She had no acting experi-
ence, but she was already a dancer. Ray met Sharmila for the
first time – after failing to find Aparna through a newspaper
advertisement that attracted over 1,000 replies – when her par-
ents brought her to him and his wife in a frock. ‘We made her
wear a sari, did her hair differently, and put the sari over her
head to suggest a married woman’, he said. ‘I took a photograph
of her and she looked exactly like Aparna.’ Though she learnt
very quickly, her performance was ‘heavily directed’. Ray liter-
ally talked her through each shot: ‘Now turn your head, now
look this way, now look that way, now look down, now come
with your lines, pause pause here, and now come with your
lines again,’ he recalled. As Sharmila herself happily admitted
long after she had become a star in Bombay cinema, ‘Manikda
[Ray] is a tremendous actor.’ The boy chosen to play Apu and
Aparna’s son Kajal, Alok Chakravarti, was only four and a
half years old, yet looked ideal for the role. ‘I thought I could
hardly expect him to give a good performance,’ wrote Ray in his

9/16/2010 9:08:17 PM
Robinson_Ch03.indd 78 9/16/2010 9:08:17 PM
Robinson_Ch03.indd 78