This piece is part of a series on the films of Satyajit Ray and the novels of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Two great artists, they describe the tensions and ambiguities, the catastrophes and triumphs of an India under rapid modernisation. It is the 1950s and 60s, and this ancient civilisation suffers a culture shock, as it seeks to adapt to alien ways of life.
To watch and read Ray and Jhabvala is to add clarity to a question I often ask myself: what happened to Britain in the 1960s? Find good answers to this question, and we may understand our present dilemma; soften the shockwaves still reverberating from that earthquake of a decade.
Pather Panchali. When gifts work against you. The intelligent and talented depend most on their environment for success. Requiring a rich, highly educated audience, that both understands the work and pays the bills, they are lost without it. It is why, when the palaces and courts are no more, the scholars and artists of court and palace, losing status and work, become outcasts and beggars.
Why does it go wrong? Why does this father fail? We are never told, although clues are scattered across the picture, like a thief’s footprints at the scene of his crime. I hear echoes of Micawber’s ‘something to always turn up’; a phrase that opens the door into this man’s soul: Harihar cannot organise the world to meet his needs and talents. Lacking the skills to shape his own fate he must rely on fate itself to hand out the goods, but fate has turned against him. It why he has made a great friend of Mr Future, who is always ready to promise wealth and fame. Alas, these promises are but promissory notes: a cheque without a bank account, a money bag with more holes than bag. Don’t look to Harihar for riches! When the family leaves the ancestral village, we know Mistress Fortune will run off in the opposite direction. To read the scriptures at Benares as likely to make a profit as doing the accounts for local landowners. Life to be the same sad slog.
Some crucial quality is missing.
What makes his character so impractical? The obvious reply: the brahmin caste once left all the practical stuff to servants. But these are beyond Harihar’s financial reach; while he has not adapted to his poor condition; failing to acquired a sufficient work ethic, practical skills, or a talent for the rupee. Once he lived off the community, today he is dependent on the rich landowners, who are stingy with their returns; a priest who saves the soul or an artist providing divine entertainment may be worthy of riches, but it’s pennies for servants doing menial tasks, a few coins to itinerant entertainers. Gone with the wealth is the aura of the Brahmin; though the distance remains. An outcast no longer a ruler.
The house and its compound though sizeable is falling down and at film’s end is a ruin. No money to repair it, Harihar is helpless with his hands. We watch the rubble of a noble heritage. Years before he’d have inhabited a very different world. We are given glimpses…. Nearby is an enormous mansion, with a large courtyard and ornamental arch, which houses many families; I assume it belonged to our hero’s ancestors. No more. Once upon a time the richest he is now the poorest in the neighbourhood. A man at the end of a priestly line. It is to reach the bottom of a centuries long slide down the social scale. Bump! Once they threw away largesse like rubbish, now they crawl around looking for beans and bread.
That’s the sociology.
I take my magnifying glass to individuals. Most Brahmins survive even though impoverished. Many poor families have enough to enjoy a fruitful life. While Ravi Shankar has no need of a palace for his sitar, he plays all over this film. Only Sarbajaya and her children nearly starve in Pather Panchali. Why? Harihar is useless. Even with those rare skills of reading and writing; invaluable in a society of illiterates. There must dozens, hundreds, thousands of jobs he can do. Why not a teacher? But a shopkeeper, an accountant….
Harihar is a dreamer.
The electricity pylons and the train that punctuates the film tell us a story. When his wife asks him what he did in the city for eight years - Sarbajaya waited that long for this marriage - Harihar has no answer. I suspect he was intoxicated with the metropolitan life, its cafe talk, the all-night debating sessions, the lectures, the readings; a man under the influence, of new ideas and the dynamism of British rule, increasing after independence. I imagine his attitude: no longer to be a scholar embedded in the old social matrix but a freelance writer playing the literary market. Simple! Just swap jobs. Poor Harihar. Our hero is an innocent. One needs different skills to prosper amongst the penmen of business; and these denied to a privileged Brahmin. Poor Harihar! Easily shuffled off the stage by those hard, cynical types, whose words are masks and lies. To lose yourself to this life, to fall into its bohemia, is to make a self vulnerable; as he fails to accumulate a dowry in cash and nous. To play the writer, when everyone around you is working literature’s cash register…foolish foolish man! Disappearing for months at end, is this hero really earning the dough? I guess the eternal student. More interested in spinning fantasies that working money’s treadmill. A shower of rupees? Harihar’s tap is always dry: he can’t connect it to the supply. While the city keeps up its siren call. It bewitches and seduces. In cities we can dream the biggest dreams…why a clerk when you can be a famous writer, one of the immortals? Dreams. Oh yes this man can dream alright.
The first time we see him I know he’s different from the rest. There is something in his face and body, in his gestures, those words, that reveal a cultivated man. A Brahmin. Harihar calls himself a scholar. Then gives the game away: I am writer, he tells Sarbajaya, and my writing will make us rich. Having met not a few of these characters, I know the type. The dream of writing, with its fantasies of fame and wealth, that egoistical round of success, replaces the actual practice of artistic creation, a sacrifice of the self to an art and a tradition. Oh he dabbles, but writing a few pages here and there is not the same as the discipline of an artist, whose days are unbearable without the work. Our chap’s an amateur. The arts leisure not a vocation and its struggle. Even the travelling players, who enthral Apu, are superior to this dilettante; they tell us that caste is no longer a sign of talent and moral rigour.
What can he offer his people? Cultivated above the level of the villagers - which may now cause resentment - Harihar is below the quality of both city intellectuals and the theatre troupes who travel through the countryside; while the vast majority do not need his writing skills. Once a member of the ruling caste, now he is a misfit in his own village, the ancestral space. He has lost his function; while he lacks the flexibility to acquire the city’s metamorphic behaviours; the Brahmin caste embedding traits that’ll take at least a generation to excise. Stuck with a rigid mentality, this hero can talk ideas, but will never act them out. Ideals not praxis. Lacking the plasticity to cast off caste, he is left behind by a rapidly changing India. The less baggage you have the quicker you get around….
Even his greatest skill - writing - suggests a leisure activity of the old Brahmins. It is not a discipline you work at, but the cultivated patina of a ruling elite, who decorate their lives with the arts and scholarship. ‘My writing will make money’, he says, but this is both delusion and his way of appeasing a wife, who cooks and raises two children on nothing. In truth, writing is play. He is not consumed by it, like an artist his art. Such lackadaisical attitudes seep into his relations with his children, who don’t receive the full benefit of his intellectual heritage (though given the surface flexibility required of modern world, this may be a social blessing). For sure Harihar teaches his son to write (an ancestral obligation). But it is left to the Aunt to sing and tell stories…. Even the essentials are soft-pedalled. Little wonder that his relations with his family are weak. He does not involve himself enough with his wife and the children, thinning out these relationships. Detached. Aloof. Flighty. Distant from the hardships he produces Harihar is blind to his faults and limitations; so can’t change patterns of behaviour that design failure not success. He lives inside his dreams, like a superannuated pasha in his tumbledown palace.
For all his good cheer and charm there is something sterile about this man. No wonder, therefore, that when the family move to Benares, and jettison the excess baggage, it is his writings that are left behind. The worms have eaten it, he says to his cronies. Of course! I suspect they were of little quality; these worms kindly allies gobbling up his shame. This father floats along on the Ganges of a life, never having to row, unfurl the sail, command the tiller…there has been no need to discipline the self to survive. Somebody will look after him. Others to do the work.
His wife, although she has her own Brahminic dreams, somehow keeps the family alive. But living on the edge, Sarbajaya is powerless when food runs out and a monsoon wrecks the compound. To rely on a man with no inherited wealth and who cannot put his brains and his culture to practical use, is an exhausting destiny. It is to watch her life become a ruin. Then she has to listen to his nonsense, as he justifies this social wreckage: the tree had to fall on the wall while he was away. It is the film’s one irony: would the wall still be standing if he’d been at home? Of course he doesn’t rebuild it. Such frivolity is a heavy toll on Sarbajaya. An educated woman, brought up to be an adornment of a successful Brahmin, she was not made for this harsh life. She cannot even discipline her daughter. The rigid codes of caste are cracking open. A tradition and its culture is fading away. Durga will not conform to her mother’s wishes, and there is nobody else in the compound to enforce them. A civilised existence is returning to the wilderness. Apu too appears destined for the wild. An entire way of life is collapsing into dust.
Alone with the children, alienated from the village women, Sarbajaya suffers badly. Then Durga takes ill and dies. Sarbajaya exists in a catatonic state until Harihar returns, oblivious of this tragedy. A cathartic scene follows, which reconciles the married couple and shakes up their attitudes. Broken by Durga’s death, Harihar decides he much change the family’s place of residence. He has to try something new. The city to save them. Though they go to Benares not Calcutta or Bombay. Back to the old ways.
No longer the dream of being a Tagore. He is now a sort of religious clerk; a reader of scriptures for the illiterate at their rituals. A Tagore requires wealth, an innate talent, one educated to the highest standards in the best of the old and new, East and West. It also needs leisure, and money for books, plays, music. Add the best salons where the sophisticates meet. A poor Brahmin from the backwoods belong to such a set? Only a genius…none of the signs suggest Harihar is anything special. A hanger-on at most. To end up reciting scriptures in Benares is, I suspect, the level of the chap. Little more than a clerk, whose scribblings are those of an educated but not a sophisticated man; no scholar, no artist this.
I believe his aunt - reduced by age to an ancient crone - is more aesthetic than our hero. A brahmin family is slipping down into decrepitude.
Durga shows the signs of a caste overripe and rotting. Spoilt by her aunt, she too lacks the work ethic, and has to be constantly goaded into domestic taskery. Even now, approaching marrying age, she cannot cook. Like father like daughter, but lacking his inherited skills. Durga has the carefree ways of a rich man’s offspring; it is why she endures poverty with ease. Though she is also resentful and envious, which plays against her vitality, beauty and charm. Making friends easily she upsets the local women, stealing fruit from an orchard that once belonged to her family (Harihar sold it to pay a relative’s debts: those old customs out of place in the new monetarised economy). With such a careless father, and living on the borderlands of survival, the chances of bad things happening are high.
Durga is accused of stealing a child’s beads.
The Schloss picks up Karl Marx and blames it on bad economics. I suspect Sarbajaya believes in the gods’ revenge: Durga would have lived if she’d allowed Auntie to die in the ancestral home. And me, what do I think? Neither explanation is sufficient, for neither accounts for the character of Harihar, a man more likely to lose money than gain it. Pather Panchali describes a paradoxical problem of caste: it is often the high-born who suffer the most when social conditions change, making their caste, their training, their culture, irrelevant and counterproductive. What were once high-status and useful talents are now useless or a handicap; while that fine-tuned but inflexible lifestyle - the higher a social position the more hemmed in by custom and taboo - is unable to adapt to changed circumstances. Be practical! Harihar tries, but his way of being-in-the-world works against him. What once would have made him a success now ensures his demise. Fate in modern dress.
As they’re packing up to leave, a neighbour visits and gives Sarbajaya a basket of mangoes for the journey. ‘I should have been more tolerant’, she says. Then continues: ‘living in the same place all the time makes you mean’. Not quite true, as another neighbour had helped Sarbajaya through the worst of times. But there is truth in what she says. If life turns against you, staying in the same place can make you selfish and narrow, as you withdraw from others and obsessively contrast your vast failure with others’ comparative success. There is luck in leaving: it may save Apu from his sister’s fate.
Apu retains his innocence almost to the last. It is only at the very end, when helping to pack, that he has an eureka moment: in a long-forgotten bowl he finds those stolen beads. Durga was a thief! A moment of epiphany. After which he commits his first adult act: he runs to the pond and throws these beads into the water: nobody must know about his sister’s crime. A sign that he will escape the holy innocence of his father, and become a proper adult, maintaining the family in Brahmin respectability? I wait for the next film in the trilogy….
Review: Pather Panchali
Restacked.