The most important film India has made was paid for out of a road budget, by a government that was not entirely sure what it was buying
When the West Bengal government finally put money into Pather Panchali, the payment went through the books against roads.
The accounts differ on how. One version has officials taking it for a documentary about rural improvement, which the title, Song of the Little Road, does nothing to discourage. Another has the Chief Minister, B.C. Roy, unable to find any head of expenditure that covered making a film, hearing what the title meant, and sanctioning it from the road building budget.
20160922 124414451 iOS (1).jpg Related to article: Filed Under Roads · Source: Wikimedia Commons · Unstable.atom · CC BY-SA 4.0
Either way the most important film India has ever made was bought by the state under a line item for roads, which may be the most Indian fact about it.
Satyajit Ray metro station 2020.jpg Related to article: Filed Under Roads · Source: Wikimedia Commons · ArnabSaha · CC BY-SA 4.0
Satyajit Ray was a commercial artist at D.J. Keymer, a British advertising agency in Calcutta, and designed book jackets for Signet Press on the side. His film education was watching films. He saw De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves in London in 1950 and spent a weekend with Jean Renoir when Renoir came to Calcutta looking for locations.
What he did have was the habit of a designer. He drew the film before he shot it, shot by shot, in the notebooks he kept for the purpose, so that the one thing nobody on that set lacked was a picture of what they were making.
Subrata Mitra, who shot it and went on to become one of the great cinematographers, had never operated a movie camera. The cast were not screen tested. Apu was found by Ray’s wife Bijoya, playing on a neighbour’s roof.
With Satyajit Ray.jpg Related to article: Filed Under Roads · Source: Wikimedia Commons · Jayanta24G · CC BY-SA 4.0
He still had the day job, so the film was made on the days he was not at the agency.
Every time the money ran out, which was often, production simply stopped. He sold his books and his collection of gramophone records, borrowed against his life insurance, took loans from friends, and Bijoya pawned her jewellery. The shoot dragged across nearly three years in stops and starts.
Satyajit Ray’s House.jpg Related to article: Filed Under Roads · Source: Wikimedia Commons · Shivangshi Mitra · CC BY-SA 4.0
Ray later said the film survived on three pieces of luck, and the first was that “Apu’s voice did not break.” The girl playing Durga did not visibly grow up either, and the very old woman playing Indir Thakrun stayed alive long enough to finish. One actor did die during a gap in production, and Ray had to work around the absence.
What the state bought
The film premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in May 1955 and opened in Calcutta that August.
The production company credit reads Government of West Bengal. At Cannes the following year it took the prize for Best Human Document, and it became the first Indian film that the rest of the world watched properly.
The state had bought it for something in the region of sixty thousand dollars. By 1980 it had made a profit of about seven hundred thousand on the deal, which is an unusually good return for a clerical error.
The argument about it
Not everybody at home was pleased, and the objection started early and has never really stopped.
The charge was that Ray had found an international audience by showing it Indian poverty, and that the India on offer at Cannes was a selective one. Nargis made the case in the Rajya Sabha, saying Pather Panchali was not a correct image of the country and asking for a modern India on screen instead.
It is worth noting who was making it, too. Ray was an English-educated Calcutta professional filming a village he had not grown up in.
The defence is that the film is about a specific family in a specific village, taken from a Bengali novel, and was made for Bengali audiences who recognised their own courtyards in it. Both positions have been held by serious people for seventy years.
The Academy gave him an honorary award that year and could not wait for him to come and get it.
He was in hospital in Calcutta, seriously ill, and the statuette was brought to him there in March. He recorded his acceptance from the bed. He died a few weeks later, at seventy.
He had made about thirty films by then, written the screenplays, composed most of the music, designed the posters and drawn the shots in notebooks before shooting them. All of it started with a first-time director, a first-time cameraman and a government accounting entry for road improvement.
