Pather Panchali: The Recurring Song of Life
This Timeless Indian Classic Tells The Story of Us All
Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali was a movie constitutive for independent Indian cinema. Independent in every way. It was made by an Indian director for the Indian audience, showing the new, emerging wave of intellectual and socially sensitive cinema. I would argue that India has never left that challenging path. The amount of important, socially engaged movies, commenting on the reality of everyday life astounds me every year with some of the directors, producers, and actors freely moving between mainstream and off-cinema (just to mention Rajkummar Rao, Radha Chadha, or most recently, Konkona Sen Sharma).
But Satyajit Ray was one of the pioneers, creating a new language, tailored for the era of hope and awe, creation and becoming — represented by the little boy Apu, learning about the world and filling it with his agency, extending its boundaries cautiously and courageously, day by day.
The movie did not allude to politics, to independence, but it drew from a very important feature of Indian narrative — the ability to combine the poetic, the lyrical with the realistic, with the everyday. On the esthetic level, Roy’s perspective recalls the deep love and tenderness for the landscape of Bengal, so skillfully expressed by…
