Satyajit Ray’s ‘Pather Panchali’ and the song of the infrastructure

That was true of the title ‘Pather Panchali’ which meant ‘the song of the road’, but the film was certainly not about roads the way PWD would think about them. It was a clever bureaucratic workaround that categorised a masterly work of art as merely a film promoting roads, but it also foreshadowed the other misreadings to come.

The movie that defied categories

The movie Ray curated from a novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay with sculpted close-ups and painterly mise-en-scene had nothing of what went as filmmaking in India of those times. It was not the formulaic song-and-dance melodrama, the reigning style made popular by the Raj Kapoor-Nargis movies. Nor was it a movie with a megaphone, a sarkari movie that would preach the pieties of then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s gigantic nation-building project. Nor was it a Marxist morality play that must blame the rich for the state of the poor, if not also exact revenge for it.

Dileep Kumar’s ‘Naya Daur’ was a heady cocktail of this genre mixed with a brash distillation of Gandhian idealism. The man-versus-machine movie showed a bus as a capitalist contraption that must be defeated by a horse cart. For decades to come, the horse cart kept winning the race against the bus in the minds of people as well as policymakers as socialist regimes curbed private enterprise and capital in innovative ways.

The poverty and the richness of imagination

‘Pather Panchali’ was the story of a penurious priest and scholar, who travels for months beating the dusty roads to find work and money; his wife, who is pounded by poverty and struggles to run the house; his unwanted elder sister, bent and shrivelled with age; and two curious kids who explore the bucolic world of their village. Harihar keeps hoping to make money from his literary writings. He needs to get the broken roof repaired and pay off debt. They often have little to eat. Amid all this misery, the kids, Apu and Durga, live in their own world of discovery and delight. Unrelenting hardship, deaths and ruin drive Harihar out of his ancestral village and put him on a long road to Kashi. Roads and journeys symbolise Harihar’s search for a better life. With ‘Pather Panchali’, Ray set the cat among the pigeons of Indian cinema, a rather infelicitous way of putting it but that’s how it was. The clipped neorealism of the film that eschewed the usual sermons or solutions baffled many who could draw only one conclusion: the movie was poverty for poverty’s sake, showing the bad side of India to westerns who wanted to see just that. Ray was accused of what later came to be known as orientalism, portraying oriental people in art and scholarship as poor, lazy, immoral and superstitious who attract western attention for being exotic. The bureaucracy was reluctant to send it as India’s entry to the Cannes Film Festival until Nehru intervened and the film went on to win a special award at the Cannes. Nargis later accused Ray of peddling India’s poverty to the West to win awards.

Dams, electricity, trains and roads

When Nargis, who had become an MP, was asked in an interview how else Ray should show India in his films, she said he should show dams in his films. Nehru had called dams, along with steel plants he built, the temples of modern India. Ray, though a friend of Nehru, had refused to bow at these temples which had caught public imagination when ‘Pather Panchali’ was released in 1955. India was embarking on its second Five-Year Plan that promised rapid industrialisation. It was a big step forward for India’s economy after decades of economic distress. However, the gigantism of the Nehruvian economics could do little to help India’s poor for whom food and clothes were the immediate concerns.

Nehru’s industrial vision made a brief shimmer in ‘Pather Panchali’, which turned out to be its most memorable scene. The kids stumble across a pylon in a field they have strayed into and look at it in amazement. Just then they hear the whistle of the train and rush through a surreal landscape of tall grass with white flowers and watch the train roll by in wonder.

Nehru’s miracles of electricity and trains were distant wonders for villagers, unable to touch their lives in any substantial way. When mainstream films were singing about these monuments of independent India’s economy, ‘Pather Panchali’ depicted them as an ethereal vision of some alien beasts and not hugely transformative apparatus as they later proved to be.

As with all intricate pieces of art, ‘Pather Panchali’ told many stories and continues to speak to us even seven decades later. If the film was an allegory of India trying to find its destiny — in travels of Harihar and wanderings of Apu and Durga as well as Nehru’s economics — today’s numerous highways and trains tell of an India rushing ahead to embrace that destiny, the aim to become an advanced economy. The song of the road did not die down; it became the song of the infrastructure, a full-throated celebration of roads and trains. Gati Shakti, the national master plan for multi-modal connectivity, might sound like the title of a Ray film while also reminding many of Nehru’s own mega plans to fast-track India. In fact, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pitch for a self-reliant India echoes a similar Nehruvian dream.

Collapsing houses, scarce food and torn clothes of ‘Pather Panchali’ no longer define much of India’s poor. The infrastructure push that links cities, small towns and villages is likely to moderate the long journeys of the migrants as it helps spread development across the country. Skilling India’s large number of youths and providing them jobs remain big challenges. Is India going to hit a happy ending that ‘Pather Panchali’ avoided? Like Ray’s film that shunned easy judgments and a neat plot, the India story too is no song-and-dance melodrama; it is steeped in its own gritty neorealism