Deconstructing the reverential status of Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, which transformed a nuanced novel into poverty porn for Western consumption. The film’s legendary status is not a result of artistic merit, but rather a combination of the White Man's approval and elite political patronage.
EARLIER LAST WEEK, a cultural philistine on X (formerly Twitter) drew an impossible parallel between Pather Panchali and Dhurandhar as is the wont of all such philistines. Clearly, his intent was to denounce Dhurandhar as a propaganda movie and to tout Pather Panchali as some kind of eternal classic or whatever. The only commonality between the two movies is the fact that they are...movies. The comparison is as ludicrous as comparing Satya Harishchandra with Gunda.
I watched Pather Panchali more than two decades ago and was immediately repelled by its snail-like pace. Watching it till the end is worse than getting stuck in the Silk Board traffic jam. Its cinematography and other technical aspects might appeal to aficionados of such things but no amount of technical finesse can save a drab screenplay.
Pather Panchali is not Satyajit Ray's original creation - it is an adaptation of Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay's novel of the same name. While the novel is imbued with nuance and genuine literary merit, Satyajit Ray has subtly transformed it into what is today known as poverty porn.
The film's success and acclaim owes mainly to two factors:
The then West Bengal Chief Minister and Nawab Nehru's personal patronage.
The White Man's approval in the global movie circuit, which the West still dominates.
Ever since, a tornado of urban legends and fantastic myths about Pather Panchali and Satyajit Ray was let loose upon an unsuspecting Indian public. People were fed with exaggerated stories of the extraordinary hardships that Satyajit Ray underwent for making the movie, his persistence, his sheer dedication to cinema, etc.
The myth-making was indeed enormously successful. Till this day, Pather Panchali must be spoken about only in reverential tones if it is spoken about at all. This attitude reminds us of Sita Ram Goel's chapter titled, Islam Imposes Emergency upon India in his classic, Perversion of India’s Political Parlance.
This deification of Pather Panchali also serves to obfuscate and bury the stringent opprobrium it received from the West. A few samples should suffice:
Francois Truffaut, an influential figure of the French New Wave cinema was unsparing: "I don't want to see a movie of peasants eating with their hands." A racist remark, no doubt, but his fundamental point is more about Satyajit Ray peddling triple-X poverty on celluloid.
This is from Bosley Crowther's review in the New York Times: "any picture as loose in structure or as listless in tempo as this one is would barely pass as a 'rough cut' with the editors in Hollywood."
Here's Peter Quint writing in The Harvard Crimson: "By the middle, the film takes on the appearance of the collage... and the focus of the story... seems to exist in the mind of the boy [Apu]… Many of the fragmented episodes are...also distracting and contributes to the film's great weakness: its general diffuseness, its inability to command sustained attention. For Pather Panchali, remarkable as it may be, is something of a chore to sit through... One can see the beauty of the camera work... but one can stare in dull amazement for only so long...Critics of great note and little restraint have called Pather Panchali "great art..." Those who wish to be entertained, however, should be warned that Pather Panchali, while often beautiful, may require more patience than they are willing to muster."
Oh! And none other than Nargis Dutt condemned Pather Panchali for "exporting poverty."
Pather Panchali landed its much-coveted moment under the spotlight when it was screened at The Museum of Modern Art's (MoMA) Textiles and Ornamental Arts of India exhibition (April 11–September 25, 1955) in New York. That was also the venue of the debut Sarod performance of Ali Akbar Khan on US soil; so also of Bharatanatyam danseuse Shanta Rao. Ever since, Pather Panchali received a slew of gushing reviews in the Western media.
And now, we get to the real story.
IN 1946, A BRAND-NEW elite cultural venue had opened in Mumbai. This was the former residence of Bhulabai Desai, renamed after his death as the Bhulabhai Desai Memorial Institute. It soon became a thriving hub for all hues of artists - M.F. Hussain, V.S. Gaitonde, Akbar Padamsee, Krishen Khanna, Ebrahim Alkazi, Shobha Gurtu, Sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, Alyque Padamsee, Kusum Haider, Satyadev Dubey, Shyam Benegal, Girish Karnad... over time, it was hijacked by the cultural louts of the Left belonging to the IPTA, IPWA, etc.
On a Sunday in 1956, Pather Panchali was screened at this venue. Its high-profile attendees included a daughter-in-law of the infamous Thapar clan, which was a loyal servant of the British. Post independence, their loyalty had shifted to the Nehru dynasty. She was married to Romesh Thapar, the brother of Romila Thapar. Romesh was himself a fiery and die-hard Communist. Here's her eyewitness report of the Pather Panchali screening:
...on a Sunday morning, I went to see a film made by an unknown director by the name of Satyajit Ray. The film was called Pather Panchali and Satyajit had made it without any real financial assistance, on a shoe-string budget. It had been his dream while he worked in an ad agency and sketched each frame in detail waiting for his opportunity. A hundred stories were circulating about him, how he pawned his books, how he wrote all his own music, and the dialogue, and finally succeeded in completing the film with the help of the then Chief Minister of Bengal, B.C. Roy, whose mistress was known to Satyajit's mother, and she pressed him to release the money. B.C. Roy tried hard to find a suitable source and on being told that the title was Pather Panchali which means 'Song of the Road', he sanctioned the money out of the road-building budget!
Let's spell out the obvious: Pather Panchali would've never been made but for the help of Satyajit Ray's mother who kept company with a Congress Chief Minister's concubine whose grip over her lover was absolute. It made him raid taxpayer money to illegally fund a movie that romanticised India's poverty. By today's standards, B.C. Roy's plunder seems rather pathetic but that is the very nature of all evil precedents - they start small and inocuous.
If there's a crime behind every fortune, there are many bedroom secrets behind making "cult classics."
And I still stand by my verdict: Pather Panchali is a poor excuse for a movie.
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