Page 188 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

Apu in the East and West 175

Fellini, Ford, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Ozu, Renoir, Welles and
maybe a few other directors like Scorsese (no other Indians).
The Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul, a great and many-faceted
twentieth-century writer, said truly of Ray (and Kurosawa):
‘They are not, like the Americans, looking for a property. They
are doing on film what the old novelists of the nineteenth cen-
tury did. They are describing their societies, their cultures, in
the modern medium. Their work hangs together; it’s about their
view of the world, being given in different ways at different
times.’
But this begs a question: how much will the twenty-first
century care about the society and culture Ray’s films describe?
Indian culture in the broad sense will surely continue to be
important, like the cultures of America, Europe, Russia, the
Arab world, China and Japan – but Ray’s films have always
had a strained relationship with the India beyond Bengal, and
a non-existent one with the world of Bollywood. A few of the
leading Indian film-makers outside Bengal do acknowledge a
debt to Ray; but it seems heartfelt only in the case of Adoor
Gopalakrishnan.
What of the specifically Bengali culture to which Ray repeat-
edly said he really belonged? Here it is difficult to be sanguine.
The widespread indifference of many American and European
reviewers to Ray’s films, particularly the later films, stems, ulti-
mately, from western indifference to Bengali culture. This did
not matter so much with the lyrical Pather Panchali but impinged
somewhat on Aparajito, more on The World of Apu, and became
an obstacle to wide appreciation of the films Ray made from the
mid-1960s onwards. Generally speaking, the more Ray’s charac-
ters talked about Bengali culture, the less interested in them for-
eign critics were. (For example, the Financial Times critic Nigel
Andrews on Ray’s brilliant final film, The Stranger: ‘Like all
Ray’s late films, it features characters stuck as if by superglue to
the ancestral armchairs. Occasionally, stiffly, they rise to walk
about the room. And always they talk.’)

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