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Home > Retrospective > Indian Cinema Retrospectives > 60 Years of Pather Panchali and SomeQuestions on Indian Cinema
Satyajit Ray’s iconic Pather Panchali was released 60 years ago on August 26th inKolkata. The film went on to transform the future and fortunes of Indian cinema,once and for all. The Society for the Preservation of Satyajit Ray Archives
commemorated this event on 30th August 2015 with a seminar at Kala Mandir,Kolkata on the topic: “Indian Cinema: What Is National and What Is Regional”.
The speakers included actress Sharmila Tagore, actress/director Aparna Sen, actressNandita Das, director Dibakar Banerjee, director Sujoy Ghosh, director Shoojit Sircar,director Suman Mukhopadhyay and former Times of India editor Dileep Padgaonkarand the engaging proceedings moderated by actor Dhritiman Chaterji.
It was a jampacked gathering on a Sunday morning – the temperatures have beenmellow with possibilities of drizzles from an overcast cloud cover. The stage was set.Dhritiman Chatterji, as eloquent as ever, started off by calling the ‘original’ Apu onstage – Subir Banerjee stayed in the audience though amidst ruptures and a standing
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September 1, 2015 | By Amitava Nag
60 Years of Pather Panchali and Some Questions onIndian Cinema
The Society for the Preservation of Satyajit Ray Archives commemorated 60 yearsof Pather Panchali with a seminar. A report on the starstudded event,
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ovation from the audience as well as the speakers.
Sharmila, Aparna and Dileep were the only three on stage who were born whenPather Panchali was released. The seminar took off with their personal reminisces asSharmila recollected, ‘I was barely nine years old when the film got released. I canremember that we went to see it in the theatres and I got a new frock even! Iremember the thunderstorm and the scene were Durga got beaten up – these had leftan indelible mark on my young mind at that time.
Last year, the Academy of motion pictures celebrated the Apu Trilogy and screenedthem for the first time. I was there in LA and I can see that the young generationreacted to the films in the same way as they may have six decades back. PatherPanchali is the first film which compelled the world to take a note of Indian cinemaand Ray has continued to dominate our culture – I don’t remember any year wheresomething or the other has not been discussed about him or his films.’
For Aparna, being the daughter of erudite film scholar Chidananda Dasgupta whoalso happened to be a friend of Ray and cofounder of the Calcutta Film Society (in1947) along with Ray and a few others, ‘we were literally waiting for Pather Panchali.Actually at that time in school the prevalent trend was to watch SuchitraUttam films.But baba always would tell us that Manik (Satyajit Ray) is making Pather Panchali,wait for that to get released in 1955. If I come to think of the film it has so muchdetails, yet the details don’t come into the way of appreciating the film. There is somuch Bengal in the film and yet it is so universal’. Dileep Padgaonkar confessed thathe had seen the film much later but had actually read a review of it in 1956 by famousjournalist Sham Lal in Times of India where the latter had decisively said that Indiancinema with Pather Panchali has been divided clearly as the prePather Panchali eraand the one post it. Of the younger brigade Dibakar Banerjee recollected his firstbrush with Pather Panchali through the Signet Press publication Aam Aantir Bhenpubased on the original novel by Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay. Dibakar added ‘thesketches of the book were done by Ray and it was much before the film was made.But you can make out from those sketches that he was preparing himself for the filmwith minutest details and visuals.’
As the focus of the discussion moved from a tribute of Ray to a more polemical onedue to the topic in consideration, director Sujoy Ghosh reasoned ‘in India we don’thave the culture of watching films made in other languages with subtitles’ – whichwas supported by most of the other speakers in the course of the discussion. Ghosh’sshort film Ahalya which had crossed few lakhs within a few hours of its release onYouTube added ‘no one ever told me that they have watched a Bengali film. They
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most welcome. There isnot a single seriouspublication on cinema inour country. We areoccasionally lamentingabout nothing newhappening in Indiancinema. The absence ofany serious debate oreven appreciation ofgood efforts has beenresponsible for thissituation. I hope you willbe able to fill up at least aportion of the big gap.Wishing Silhouette well.
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were only interested in the content. I am now convinced that there are numerousavenues, several windows to make our films literally cross over to the audience whoare untapped. May be the internet is the one which we need to focus on even more inthe future’.
Sujit Sircar reminisced how he slept off in the hall when his father took him forciblyto watch Pather Panchali in a mofussil town he was brought up but later the filmstayed on with him after repeated viewings when he grew up and has almost becomea Bible by now. Seconding Sujoy about the language of a film being representative ofthe mood of it he mentioned that his boxoffice hit Piku was essentially a Bengali filmmade in Hindi and the biggest business it made was in North India! The seminarliterally took off from here as the questions between National v/s Regional cinemasstemmed from the longstanding debate of Hindi cinema vs vernacular cinema. Sujitwas quick to add that unlike most of the other countries having only one officiallanguage, in India it is indeed difficult, ‘however in Maharashtra there are halls whereat least one show has to be that of Marathi cinema per day. This is how the regionalcinema can survive the onslaught of Hindi cinema.’ Nandita Das who acted in diversefilms in as many as nine languages pitched in – ‘unfortunately we don’t have a cultureof reading subtitles in cinema. Now a big portion of the audience is still illiterate. Andmay be for them cinema is probably the only form of entertainment. But even withinthe educated class there is no practice of watching Indian cinema with subtitles. Wemay be watching foreign films but we don’t do the same with our own films. Theaudience need to be more open.’
Suman Mukherjee who is primarily a theatre activist and also a filmmaker drewparallels with National School of Drama where the productions happen to be alwaysin Hindi and underlines that the problem is with economics where the independentvoices get continually throttled. ‘Take the Calcutta book fair for instance. The littlemagazine enclave used to have a very prominent and eminent presence in it. Butnowadays if you visit the book fair you will find that the little magazines have beencornered and pushed to the margins. Take the example of Court. It won a nationalaward and is a marvelous film. But in Kolkata it ran for only two weeks with oneshow per day in only one theatre! In parallel Masaan is still doing business. It alldepends how the film is marketed. If the distribution is not there, the film can’t beseen by a wider audience.’ The house accepted that there are binaries in the form ofthe mainstream vs the marginal and that is prevalent in all the other forms of art aswell.
At this juncture Dibakar picked up a very interesting thread and questioned how theregional cinema is looked into and publicized within the same region or is it thatregional cinema is mostly looked upon as a poorer cousin of Bollywood films? Heexplained, ‘we have debated about how regional films made in one region can bemade popular in other region through proper distribution and with subtitles. But weneed to also check how the regional film fares in the same region? The other day Ihappened to check an English language paper from Kolkata and I couldn’t find anyreview of a Bengali film but there were of English ones and Hindi ones.’ Aparna Sentook this further to the rural/urban divide of the Bengali cinema where the urbanpopulace prefer to watch films in multiplexes, films which have a different destiny inthe villages.
As the seminar drifted away to several relevant and pertinent topics Dibakar againsways it back to Ray citing the master’s works – ‘in this dilemma of regional cinemavs hindi cinema we can look at Ray. Apart from one or two cases he had always stuckto his own language and his own region and the people of that region. He didn’t try tohomogenize and yet he remained so universal. I feel the regional cinema has muchbigger chance of creating human documents that move people than the homogenizedBollywood mainstream cinema. In our try to tell everything to everyone we probablycan actually say very little and that too to very few people.’
As the seminar got wrapped up Suman emphasized that the tradition of Bengaliculture is in fusion, which started off with Rabindranath Tagore and also in Ray.
original and uniqueperspectives on cinema, butalso as a frame of referencefor students of film studiesand for filmmakers across theEnglishspeaking literatti nowand in the future.. Here iswishing Silhouette a long,healthy and productive life forthe sake of cinema loverseverywhere.”
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Probably Bengali cinema and the culture practitioners have moved away from thisand it is high time to go back to these basics.
The house though divided in opinion and scattered with too many ideas agreed thatbudget doesn’t necessarily mean a good film. It is primarily the director and theassociated partners who need to pursue their dreams and play to their strengths. Thedistribution and the media coverages are as important but there are new avenues thatget opened up consistently and with proper planning the hurdles can be overcomewith at least moderate degrees of success.
The seminar was followed by a rare documentary on Ray. Titled Satyajit Ray, thiswas part of ‘The Creative Person’ series of the National Educational Television andRadio Center. The documentary directed by James Beveridge was shot in the mid60sand had live footage of Ray on the sets of Chiriyakhana and planning for his nextfilms. It captured Ray’s vision of film making and also some of the notable actorscommenting about their association with Ray and his style of handling actors. In all,this was a fitting finale to listen to Ray himself as to why he never moved out of hisregion to make films in other languages and of other people.
More to read
Salaam Cinema – An Extraordinary TributeBollywood In Posters: 25YearLong Journey With Film MemorabiliaThe Idea of ApuMy Journey to India – in the Cave of My Heart
Whether you are new or veteran, you are important. Please contribute withyour articles on cinema, we are looking forward for an association. Send yourwritings to amitava@silhouettemagazine.com
About Author
Amitava Nag (21 Posts)
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Amitava Nag edits cinema magazine Silhouette (www.silhouettemagazine.com) and writes extensively on cinema. He also writes poemsand short fictions in English and Bengali, his topics mostly veering onthe subalterns. Amitava works in a software company to earn his dailyrice and dreams of making his own film one day.
Silhouette Magazine publishes articles, reviews, critiques and interviews and othercinemarelated works, artworks, photographs and other publishable materialcontributed by writers and critics as a friendly gesture. The opinions shared by thewriters and critics are their personal opinion and does not reflect the opinion of
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Tags: 60 years of Pather Panchali, Aparna Sen, Dhritiman Chatterji, NanditaDas, Pather Panchali, seminar on Pather Panchali, Shoojit Sircar, Society for thePreservation of Satyajit Ray Archives
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