The Apu Trilogy is a celebrated series of three Indian Bengali-language drama films directed by Satyajit Ray: Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956) and The World of Apu (1959). The trilogy's score was composed by Ravi Shankar.
Adapted from two Bengali novels by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay—Pather Panchali (1929) and Aparajito (1932)—these films are widely regarded as a cornerstone of Indian and world cinema and have been widely acclaimed as masterpieces. Produced on a modest shoestring budget using an amateur cast and crew, the trilogy garnered widespread critical acclaim and won numerous prestigious awards, including three National Film Awards and multiple honours at the Cannes, Berlin and Venice Film Festivals. Notably, Pather Panchali was made with a budget of roughly 150,000, approximately $45,300 at the time.
Plot summaries The three films comprise a "coming of age" narrative in the vein of a bildungsroman; they describe the childhood, education and early maturity of a young Bengali named Apu (Apurba Kumar Roy) in the early part of the 20th century.
Pather Panchali (English, "Song of the Little Road") Apu's early experiences in rural Bengal as the son of a poor but high caste family are presented. Apu's father Harihar, a Brahmin, has difficulty in supporting his family. After the death of Apu's sister, Durga, the family moves to the holy city of Benares.
Aparajito (English, "The Unvanquished") The family's finances are still precarious. After his father dies there, Apu and his mother Sarbajaya come back to a village in Bengal. Despite unrelenting poverty, Apu manages to get formal schooling and turns out to be a brilliant student. He moves to Calcutta to pursue his education. He slowly distanced himself from his rural roots and his mother who was not keeping well at the time. In the process the growing Apu comes into conflict with his mother. Later he is informed that, when his mother dies too, he has to learn to live alone.
Apur Sansar (English, "The World of Apu") Attempting to become a writer, Apu unexpectedly finds himself pressured to marry a girl whose mother rejected her mentally ill bridegroom on the day of their wedding. Their blossoming marriage ends in her death in childbirth, after which the despairing Apu abandons his child, but eventually returns to accept his responsibilities.
Production In 1950, Ray had decided that Pather Panchali, the classic coming of age story (bildungsroman) of Bengali literature, published in 1928 by Bibhutibhusan Bandopadhyay, would be the subject matter for his first film. This semi-autobiographical novel describes the growing up of Apu, a small boy in a Bengal village. He went ahead with the film after meeting Jean Renoir during filming of The River (1951) and after watching the Italian neorealist film Bicycle Thieves (1948) while he was in London. Besides the influence of European cinema and Bengali literature, Ray is also indebted to the Indian theatrical tradition, particularly the rasa theory of classical Sanskrit drama. The complicated doctrine of rasa centers predominantly on feelings experienced not only by the characters but also conveyed in a certain artistic way to the spectator. The duality of rasa representation shows in The Apu Trilogy.
Ray gathered an inexperienced crew, although both his cameraman Subrata Mitra and art director Bansi Chandragupta went on to achieve great acclaim. The cast consisted of mostly amateur artists. Shooting started in late 1952, using Ray's personal savings. He had hoped that once the initial shots had been completed, he would be able to obtain funds to support the project, but such funding was not forthcoming. Pather Panchali was shot over the unusually long period of three years, because shooting was possible only from time to time, when Ray or production manager Anil Chowdhury could arrange further money. With a loan from the West Bengal government, the film was finally completed and released in 1955 to great critical and popular success, sweeping up numerous prizes and having long runs in both India and abroad. During the making of the film, Ray refused funding from sources who demanded a change in script or the supervision of the producer, and he ignored advice from the government (which finally funded the film anyway) to incorporate a happy ending in having Apu's family join a "development project". Even greater help than Renoir's encouragement occurred when Ray showed a sequence to John Huston who was in India scouting locations for The Man Who Would Be King. The sequence is the remarkable vision Apu and his sister have of the train running through the countryside. It was the only sequence Ray had filmed due to his small budget. Huston praised Ray to Monroe Wheeler at the New York Museum of Modern Art, saying that a major talent was on the horizon.
In India, the reaction to the film was enthusiastic; The Times of India wrote that "it is absurd to compare it with any other Indian cinema [...]. Pather Panchali is pure cinema". In the United Kingdom, Lindsay Anderson wrote a glowing review of the film. However, the reaction was not uniformly positive. After watching the film, François Truffaut is reported to have said, "I don't want to see a movie of peasants eating with their hands". Bosley Crowther, then the most influential critic of The New York Times, wrote a mixed review of the film that its distributor Ed Harrison thought would kill off the film when it got released in the United States, but it enjoyed an exceptionally long run.
Ray's international career started in earnest after the success of his next film, Aparajito (The Unvanquished). This film shows the eternal struggle between the ambitions of Apu as a young man and the mother who loves him. Some critics, notably Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak, rank it even higher than the first film. Aparajito won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. The film is also notable for its application of bounce lighting to recreate the effect of daylight on sets with the use of large scale diffusers, pioneered by the cinematographer Subrata Mitra.
Ray had not thought about a trilogy while making Aparajito, and it occurred to him only after being asked about the idea in Venice. The final installation of the series, Apur Sansar (The World of Apu), was made in 1959. A number of critics find this to be the supreme achievement of the trilogy (Robin Wood, Aparna Sen). Ray introduced two of his favourite actors, Soumitra Chatterjee and Sharmila Tagore, in this film. The film finds Apu living in a nondescript Kolkata house in near-poverty. He becomes involved in an unusual marriage with Aparna, the scenes of their life together forming "one of the cinema's classic affirmative depiction of married life", but tragedy ensues. After Apur Sansar was harshly criticised by a Bengali critic, Ray wrote an article defending it—a rare event in Ray's filmmaking career (the other major instance involved the film Charulata, Ray's personal favourite).Ray mentions this in His success had little influence on his personal life in the years to come. Ray continued to live with his mother, uncle and other members of his extended family in a rented house.
Cast and characters Character Film Pather Panchali (1955) Aparajito (1956) The World of Apu (1959) Apurba "Apu" Roy Subir Banerjee Pinaki Sen Gupta (boy) Smaran Ghosal (adolescent) Soumitra Chatterjee Durga Roy Runki Banerjee (child) Uma Dasgupta (teenager) Harihar Roy Kanu Banerjee Sarbajaya Roy Karuna Banerjee Indir Thakrun Chunibala Devi Prasanna Tulsi Chakraborty Bhabataran Ramani Ranjan Sen Nanda Babu Charu Prakash Ghosh Headmaster Subodh Ganguly Aparna Sharmila Tagore Kajal Alok Chakravarty Pulu Swapan Mukherjee Pulu's wife Sefalika Devi Sasinarayan Dhiresh Majumdar The Landlord Dhiren Ghosh
Critical reception This trilogy is considered by critics around the globe to rank among the greatest achievements of Indian film, and it is established as one of the most historically important cinematic debuts. Pather Panchali won at least thirteen international prizes (including Best Human Document at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival), followed by eleven international prizes for Aparajito (including the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival) and numerous other awards for Apur Sansar (including the Sutherland Trophy at the London Film Festival). When Ray made Pather Panchali, he worked with a cast and crew most of whom had never been previously involved in film. Ray himself at the time of directing Pather Panchali had primarily worked in the advertising industry, although he had served as assistant director on Jean Renoir's 1951 film The River. From this foundation, Ray went on to create other highly acclaimed films, like Charulata, Mahanagar, and Aranyer Din Ratri, and his international success energised other Bengal filmmakers like Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak.
This extract from Youth, by South African author J. M. Coetzee, talks of the music in the Apu trilogy, which is based on Indian classical music:
On Rotten Tomatoes, Pather Panchali has a 98% fresh rating based on an aggregate of 82 reviews and in 2009 was included in its list of top 100 foreign films. Aparajito has a 96% fresh rating based on an aggregate of 25 reviews, and Apur Sansar (The World of Apu) has a 97% fresh rating based on an aggregate of 29 reviews. This makes The Apu Trilogy one of the highest-rated film trilogies of all time (97%, 94%, 100%), along with the Toy Story trilogy (100%, 100%, 99%), The Lord of the Rings trilogy (91%, 96%, 93%), the original Star Wars trilogy (94%, 97%, 83%), and the Before trilogy (100%, 95%, 98%).
Film critic Roger Ebert, when including the films in his Great Movies list, wrote about the trilogy:
Theme Andre Robinson, in his book Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, comments that the three films differ in their predominant moods, and he compares the trilogy to the development of an Indian classical raga.
Legacy Sight & Sound, the British Film Institute's film magazine, listed Pather Panchali several times in its Critics' Poll of all-time greatest films, in 1962 (ranked #11), 1982 (ranked #79), 1992 (ranked #6), 2002 (ranked #22), 2012 (ranked #42) and 2022 (ranked #35). The World of Apu appeared in 1982, ranked at #42. In the 1992 edition, both Aparajito and The World of Apu were tied at #127, while The Apu Trilogy was ranked separately at #88. In a combined list of Sight & Sound critics' and directors' poll results in 2002, Pather Panchali was ranked at No. 28, The World of Apu at No. 93 and Aparajito at #160. If the votes are combined, then The Apu Trilogy as a whole would be ranked at No. 14 in 1982, No. 4 in 1992 and No. 14 in 2002. In director's poll of Greatest films of all time by Sight & Sound magazine Pather Panchali ranked 48th in 2012 and 22nd in 2022.