Page 7 - THE CHANGING WORLD OF RAY
P. 7
ing as a carrier of internal the boy to a man, along with
and external changes, both the historical transition from
on the personal level of his an agricultural and religious
characters, as well as, in state, supported by a feudal
Bengali society. In Pather economy, to the new demo-
Panchali’s train sequence cratic India.
(see Table 1 with ‘Train Se-
quence’ in Appendix) the ap- As Ganguly pointed,
pearance of the train antic- the trilogy generally reflects
ipates Apu’s move from the positively on Nehru’s mod-
countryside to the big city, ernization project, which be-
gan following the In-
dian Independence in
1947. Ray’s ‘emphasis
on English, science,
and geography is a
vindication of the val-
ues of Bengali Renais-
sance, which are also
the values of Nehru’s
modern India’ (2000:
24). The latter was
‘characterized by an
and his transformation from ethos of citizenly solidarity
a curious child to a respon- with the poor, middle-class
sible father. Apu’s upbring- Indians were cast as the
ing is contextualized within agents and overseers of in-
the changing mise-en scene dustrialization and devel-
of the film, from village life opmental schemes for rural
of absolute poverty to the communities, and also as the
crowded apartments of the guardians of the normative
new Calcutta. In a parallel morality that preserved the
manner, Ray portrays the social fabric of the modern-
internal transformation of izing nation’ (McGuire 2011:
