Satyajit Ray | অপুর সংসার (Apur Sansar) (The World of Apu) / 1959

pan and echo

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bibhuitbhusan Bandopadhaya and Satyajit Ray (screenplay), Satyajit Ray (director) অপুর সংসার (Apur Sansar) (The World of Apu) / 1959

 

The third film in Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, The World of Apu, is perhaps the most memorable—not particularly because of its cinematic originality as for the strange twists of its story and the memorable acting of Soumitra Chatterjee as Apu, Sharmila Tagore as his wife, Aparna, and their small son, Kajal, performed by S. Aloke Chakravarty.

   If Aparjito showed a world which had swallowed up Apu, cutting him off from the traditions and simple joys of his childhood, the Calcutta of this third film has, so to speak, spit him out with little hope for his future. Unable to finish his university education, Apu is able to eke out the barest of wages through writing, odd-jobs, and tutoring. Much like the central character of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, the would-be writer, Apu has little to eat and is daily threatened by his landlord of being cast into the streets.

     A chance encounter with his school friend Palu at least provides him with an opportunity to eat while boasting of his potential possibilities (we have already seen him rejected for the most menial of jobs) and his hopes of finishing his “great” novel. As Palu argues, however, despite the self-depravation of Apu’s life, he lives in a mental fog, a kind of creative stupor that disallows him to experience the daily realities of life of which he might write. Just to help his friend escape the city for a short while, Palu invites him to travel for a few days with him to East Bengal where he is attending a relative’s wedding.

     If life in the city, despite the squalor, grinds on without notable change, life in the country is filled with exceptional characters and happenings. Even as he is introduced to the family, the mother of the bride-to-be senses something special about Apu, and repeatedly wonders whether or not they haven’t previously met. As the bride, Aparna, prepares for the wedding, the bridegroom and his party arrive (while under a nearby tree Ray presents us with the dreamer, the pan-like Apu, asleep with his flute); but when the retinue stops, the bridegroom refuses to leave his conveyance, evidently “panicked” by the marriage, recognizably if temporarily gone mad. The family also panics (it is useful to understand the root of that word as a derivation of Pan’s effects), and in fear that Aparna will be cursed if she is not married to someone that day, Palu is sent to ask Apu if he will wed the girl. Apu’s reaction is understandable, wondering if the whole family has not gone mad. How can they ask him such a thing in modern times? East Bengal, quite obviously, is still steeped in curses, blessings, and magical events. And, ultimately, Apu—more on a whim one supposes than from any rational act—decides to replace the mad bridegroom and marry Palu’s relative.

     The beautiful scene after the wedding in which Aparna sits placidly and obediently upon the wedding bed, while Apu circles in despair on account of his actions, represents Ray’s slow, methodical directorial techniques at their best. How can he explain to Aparna the horrible thing he has done? She has grown up in a large and wealthy home in the country, while he, now a child of the city, has no income with which to support her and to sustain the pattern of life to which she has been accustomed. Her insistence that she will remain with him, despite the poverty they face, far better represents a modern wedding compact than any romantic presentation.

      As they travel to the city and together sneak up the stairs to his near-hovel of a room, the audience despairs as much as the bride for her future. Her tears are ours. The symbol of escape and adventure of the first two films, the train (which now runs by Apu’s very doorstep), is transformed in The World of Apu into a howling machine of torture for the young girl, belching out, like the factories it passes, a constant cloud of toxic smoke.

     Despite their and our fears, however, Apu and Aparna are nearly a perfect couple, both romantic innocents who seem destined for one another; she, like Echo (in some myths Pan and Echo were married before she was destroyed) ready to learn his language (in this case, English) and repeat it. Becoming pregnant, she is encouraged by relatives and Apu to return home, he to follow.

      The beautiful scenes in which Ray represents their deep love for one another—scenes which present Apu’s attempts to read a letter sent to him from Aparna during a day of working and traveling through the streets, ending in the middle of the train tracks—comes suddenly to a tragic end with the appearance of a relative reporting that the child has come too soon. Pan’s beautiful Echo has been torn apart. Apu’s reaction—he strikes the bearer of the news—presages his later inability to separate truth from circumstance: he will hold his own child responsible for his wife’s death.

      In despair, Apu leaves the city, traveling first into the woods (Pan’s native home) and gradually into the center of the country where he finds a job deep within the bowels of the earth, a mine. Now that he has finally had an experience, he realizes the meaninglessness of his fiction, as he drops the pages into the natural landscape, returning the paper and ink into the world from which it emanated.

     Returning to India after a trip abroad, Apu’s old friend Palu visits the East Bengal home of Aparna, where the child, Kajal, remains. The uncle reports that Apu has abandoned the boy without even seeing him. Palu searches out Apu, insisting that he return with him, that he rescue the increasingly troubled offspring. But this time, it appears, Apu will not accept the invitation. He refuses the responsibility, attempting to explain to Palu how the boy is inextricably linked in his mind with his beloved Aparna’s death. But as Palu leaves, we recognize that Apu must return; as a child who has lost his own family, Apu necessarily recognizes the fear and loneliness facing his own.

       His reunion with Kajal, however, is not at all what he might expect; filled with anger, the boy will not accept him as his own father, and refuses to have anything to do with him. With understandable rage, the boy rejects over and over Apu’s conciliatory acts. Witnessing one of these rejections, the uncle is about to strike the child with his cane in punishment, when Apu—just as Kajal had previously predicted to a neighbor—rushes forward to stop the brutal act.

        As Apu leaves, the boy follows like a shadow, stopping when Apu stops, turning to look back just as the father turns to look back at the boy. Having heard that Apu is returning to Calcutta, he asks if he will take him to his father. Apu readily agrees. Suddenly the child is torn between obedience to his uncle or escaping with the stranger. Kajal’s eventual choice to escape parallels Apu’s own childhood choice; and as Apu hoists him to his shoulders, he clearly accepts the responsibility of raising his son, accepts all the responsibilities of life. He has finally completed his flight, unafraid of facing his return, wherever that my lead him.

 

Los Angeles, November 25, 2006

All three essays reprinted from Green Integer Blog (October 2009).