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Review: Pather Panchali (1955)

It was in 1980 that Nargis Dutt, a renowned Hindi actress and member of Indian Parliament, accused filmmaker Satyajit Ray of “exporting poverty”. At the time, Ray was one of the few Indian filmmakers to gain significant attention with Western audiences, and Dutt argued that his focus on the plight of India’s poverty-stricken people ignored the reality of what many perceived to be a new, wealthy and evolving India. Her arguments were the result of a broader sense of middle-class anxiety about India’s international image that continues to this day, and may go part of the way to explaining why Satyajit Ray’s films were not always received as warmly at home as they were abroad. But the film for which Ray is most lauded both within India and around the world is still his directorial debut, Pather Panchali (1955), released 60 years ago, on August 26.

Set within the confines of a rural Bengali village, Pather Panchali is loosely structured around the story of a small family attempting to make ends meet in an environment of extreme scarcity. The family patriarch, Harihar Roy (Kanu Banerjee), is forced to leave the village in search of other opportunities for employment, leaving behind his wife (Karuna Banerjee), his daughter, Durga (Uma Dasgupta) and his son, Apu (Subir Banerjee). In Harihar’s absence, the family’s situation becomes all the more dire, and when Durga becomes ill they are no longer able to outrun the looming threat of tragedy.

But to simply provide an account of the film’s narrative would do Satyajit Ray’s masterpiece a disservice. What makes Pather Panchali so powerful is Ray’s ability to absorb the viewer with a sense of realism that permeates every moment of screen time. Ray’s gaze allows us ample time to sit amongst the daily motions of village life – the sights and sounds, and the mundane trials, tribulations and occasional joys of existence. He provides us with characters of genuine depth and humanity, none of whom can be considered either unredeemable or perfect. And ultimately, Ray confronts us with brutal and quiet images of a mother attempting to keep her ailing daughter warm on a gusty night, unable to fight back the forces of nature as cold winds permeate the inadequate and hole-ridden shack in which they are forced to reside.

Ray provides us with an understanding of the incredible fortitude of human beings in the face of life’s banal brutality. When tragedy does strike this family, it is not with the sudden melodramatic impact of a lightning bolt that we have come to expect from most narrative cinema, but with a kind of definitive calm that encapsulates the staggering resilience of human beings forced to endure more than their fair share.

Pather Panchali received significant accolades from around the world upon it’s release, and Satyajit Ray went on to direct two sequels covering the later events of Apu’s life: Aparajito (1957) and The World of Apu (1959).