There’s no doubt western critics loved the trilogy—but to what extent did they comprehend its contents and contexts? Based on two classic novels by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, the films were Bengali to the core, and often harshly realistic in portraying social change, economic malaise and individual growth. Although set in the 1930s, they were tinged, as Indian critics have rightly pointed out, with the optimistic modernism of Nehru’s India. How much of this was appreciated by viewers who knew little about India and Bengal?

A brief look at a handful of responses from the US and Britain reveals interesting patterns.

***

“Although the story (of the entire trilogy) takes place under British rule, it could have taken place at any time. It is thus faithful to the Indian sense of time, which is actually a sense of timelessness.”

—Max Lerner, New York Post, July 1961

“We are concerned here (Aparajito) with the poor—there have been fiercer but never more penetrating insights into poverty than in these pictures...even the cats that mew in the narrow alleys are skinny.”

—Paul V. Beckly, NY Herald Tribune, April 1959

“Pather Panchali is sprawling and shapeless, lacking in either dramatic values or narrative drive. But Mr Ray was not trying to tell an ordinary story. In a sense, his film is a
documentary, but with none of the rigors that the word so often implies. It could be used to engender sympathy and understanding of the Indian peasant.”

—Arthur Knight, Saturday Review, September 1958

“Ray seems to be speaking for the thinking, troubled Indian intellectual. Winding up (in Apur Sansar) on the side of traditions, he seems to be finding values from the past, strength in the roots of time.”

—Richard L. COE, Washington Post, October 1961

“Pather Panchali is an intense, almost microscopic study of life and death in an Indian family, it stays always in one place with the earth and the watery rice and the groveling poverty... Its ceaseless misery gives it an emotional monotony....”

—Paul V. Beckly, NY Herald Tribune, September 1958

“Like many pictures from unusual sources, it (Pather Panchali) has been overpraised merely because it exists. However...it is rewarding if taken as a dramatised documentary....”

—Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic, September 1958

“Pather Panchali is perhaps the finest piece of filmed folklore since Flaherty’s Nanook of the North.”

—Time, October 1958

***

The world premiere of Pather Panchali at the Museum of Modern Art and, later, its commercial release in New York were brought about by the sincere efforts of three senior figures at MOMA and film distributor Edward Harrison (see ‘Park Av. Panchali’, Outlook, December 8, 2008). Intriguingly, they all regarded Pather Panchali as a documentary of the kind made by Robert Flaherty. Flaherty’s most famous work was Nanook of the North (1922), a portrait of Inuit (Eskimo) life in the Canadian Arctic. His style bore passing similarities with Pather Panchali but Flaherty’s films had no literary roots and all the roles were played by the “natives” themselves. And unlike the largely modernist Ray, Flaherty was a romantic searching for the indomitable essence of “primitive” man.

The storyboard for Pather Panchali sketched by Ray

Ray knew little about rural life and, as he acknowledged many times, the realistic details in Pather Panchali came from the novel. Although Pather Panchali had no stars, the major roles were all played by people from Calcutta. Despite the director providing an explicit note about the literary basis of his film for the MOMA premiere, Pather Panchali was assumed to be an Indian Nanook. Reviewers emphasised the documentary aspects of the film, especially its depiction of poverty (see box). Flaherty’s widow Frances and her associates, who had initially lauded Pather Panchali as a perfect exemplar Flahertyesque cinema, lost interest in Ray’s work once they learnt—from the director himself—that the characters had not been played by the actual residents of the village. Only a handful of Ray’s later films (Aparajito, Jalsaghar, Kanchenjungha) were screened at the annual Flaherty seminars. Even Apur Sansar was never shown.

A scene from the Pather Panchali

Reviewers did not lose interest in the trilogy but in assessing Aparajito and Apur Sansar, they resorted increasingly to simplistic stereotypes and preconceptions about India and Indians. Praising Ray for his portrayal of “the stages of a man’s development”, columnist Max Lerner worried in the New York Post that such analyses might be misrepresenting “the spirit of India”. “Growth and development,” he explained, “are in reality western ideas, not Oriental”. Time discovered “the profoundly Asiatic quality of the moviemaker’s genius” in Aparajito: “He suffers passionately with his characters, and yet all the while remains curiously calm and almost indifferent.”

This tendency was expressed even more strongly in Britain. Filmmaker Lindsay Anderson declared the ultimate message of Pather Panchali was “mystical: ‘Everything that lives is holy’.” The Daily Telegraph critic Patrick Gibbs opined that the film was a “beautifully composed study in resignation, an attitude little esteemed in the West but essential if you live East of Suez and are poor.” In the Financial Times, David Watt found Ray’s “detachment” to be “disturbing and very eastern”. (Ironically, these very qualities of Ray’s work were often interpreted in India as signs of his westernised personality!)

Aparajito, the second part of the trilogy

Aparajito’s depiction of the gulf between Apu and his mother was misinterpreted quite piquantly by some British critics. Isabel Quigly wrote in Spectator that it seemed “crueller than it would in a western context because the formality of Indian family relationships forbids the expressions of affection we find normal”. “Awed and charmed” by Apur Sansar, Quigly noted nonetheless that Indian “ideals of beauty are disturbingly different from ours and make one dissatisfied”. Despite noticing that Apur Sansar alluded to themes such as industrialisation or class relationships, Raymond Durgnat insisted Ray’s work was ultimately rooted in “a tradition which unlike ours retains its awareness of life’s cyclical sprawl”.

This kind of “us-versus-them” approach was not the whole story. In the Financial Times, David Robinson summed up Apur Sansar in terms nobody could complain about: “Through its attention to the particular—to these Bengali lives—Ray’s film reaches always to essential and universal human traits.” Several American critics also made similar points. Trouble was, few reviewers could do equal justice to the particular and universal. As Ray’s later films dealt in greater and greater depth with Indian history and culture, his western critics (with some honourable exceptions like Philip French or Ray’s biographers Marie Seton and Andrew Robinson) simply did not try to engage with the specifically Indian elements. They simply waxed eloquent on Ray’s universality.

That tendency is far from dead. In April ’09, on the eve of a Ray retrospective in Manhattan, veteran critic Terrence Rafferty pronounced in the New York Times that even though one needed considerable knowledge of “the history and politics of the subcontinent” to appreciate the films fully, viewers should not worry. “Ray has nuances to burn: you can miss quite a few and still feel as if you know his people intimately.” It is, no doubt, a good thing that Ray’s Indianness is no longer explained with ethnocentric stereotypes. Is it much of an advance, though, to strip away his Indian identity and regard him only as a purveyor of universalist “nuances”?

(The author is a professor of history at Birkbeck College, London.)