Page 94 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

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Working with Ravi Shankar:

The Music of the Apu Trilogy

The young Ravi Shankar, who composed most of the music for
the Apu Trilogy – a Bengali born in Benares in 1920, the very
year in which Satyajit Ray’s Apu arrives in the city – first came
to prominence in India during the 1940s. By the 1950s, he was
regarded as one of the subcontinent’s leading classical instru-
mentalists – both by fellow musicians and music connoisseurs,
including Ray. In 1951, while trying to raise interest in his adap-
tation of the novel Pather Panchali, Ray made a series of strik-
ing sketches for a documentary film about Shankar: a sort of
story-board covering 31 pages of a drawing book, like the one he
created in 1952 for Pather Panchali. Although the documentary
was never made, the sketches were published in 2005 in my book
Satyajit Ray: A Vision of Cinema. Accompanying the atmospheric
wash images are laconic shooting notes – ‘truck forward’, ‘pan
away’, ‘dissolve to’ and so on – that give some notion, however
incomplete, of what was in Ray’s mind.
Shankar is seen with his sitar playing raga Todi, a morning
raga, at first slowly in the introductory phase known as alap,
then gradually speeding up; he is still playing as the film ends.
Intercut between shots of him and his instrument at various

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