![]() ![]() One can hear two melody lines intermingled in this piece. “The result is this dhun ”-a north Indian folk melody played in a light classical style-“I played as a dedication to him. “In the last couple of days, my heart has been heavy with sorrow, of having lost a friend and such a great, creative genius of our time,” he wrote three days after the news reached him. In 1992, hearing of the death of Ray on 23 April, Shankar immediately recorded a new composition, “Farewell, My Friend”, in honour of him. It is as if, already, four years before finishing Pather Panchali, the budding director had visualised the lyrical, hopeful sequence in the film of the breaking of the monsoon (though ironically raga Todi is played in that film by Shankar in the scene following Durga’s death, not before the breaking of the monsoon). Clearly, Ray intended that his filmed tribute to Shankar should suggest some essential unity behind the different Indian art forms. These dwell on nature-drifting clouds, falling leaves, rippling water, lotus flowers flapping, later on trees shaking in a storm-but also include a Rajput miniature painting of the female raga (ragini) Tori (such paintings often depict the Indian musical modes), showing a lady with deer near a lotus pond, as well as decorative details from Indian relief sculpture. Intercut between shots of him and his instrument at various distances and angles, and the hands of his accompanist playing the tabla, are other, non-musical images. Shankar is seen with his sitar playing raga Todi, a morning raga, at first slowly in the introductory phase known as alap, then gradually speeding up he is still playing as the film ends. Accompanying the atmospheric wash images are laconic shooting notes-“truck forward”, “pan away”, “dissolve to” and so on-that give some notion, however incomplete, of what was in Ray’s mind. Although the documentary was never made, the sketches were published in 2005 in my book Satyajit Ray: A Vision of Cinema. In 1951, while trying to raise interest in his adaptation of the novel Pather Panchali, Ray made a series of striking sketches for a documentary film about Shankar: a sort of storyboard covering 31 pages of a drawing book, like the one he created in 1952 for Pather Panchali. By the 1950s, he was regarded as one of the subcontinent’s leading classical instrumentalists-both by fellow musicians and music connoisseurs, including Ray. The young Ravi Shankar, who composed most of the music for the Apu Trilogy-a Bengali born in Benares in 1920, the very year in which Satyajit Ray’s Apu arrives in the city-first came to prominence in India during the 1940s. ![]()
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