Rushdie, Ray, and Ideas of India

The Satanic Verses reading proceeds feverishly apace, I'm sure, but given that we won't be able to afford any time on Tuesday night to return to Pather Panchali and given that there may be some comments you may still be inclined to offer, I figured we at least need another empty jar added here with this posting; fill it up, if you see fit. The most basic question to ask, of course, is wonder through what contexts we can talk about this film productively in a course on Salman Rushdie? How is Ray entering our conversation on "nation as narration"? The film (and its two sequels) are based on a 1928 novel, as I mentioned, but given that Ray's career as a filmmaker began during the heady years of nation-building under Nehru, it seems we're invited to consider this film in some of the same contexts through which we framed Midnight's Children. Do we get any sense for what Ray's vision of national identity is based on this film? Does he have an identifiable politics, based on this film? If not, does that mean his work (at least in this film) borders on a kind of irresponsible aesthetiticism, that he might be someone who is unwittingly catering to a Western desire to gaze at Indian poverty and see India placed within a familiar narrative of abjection (Rushdie rehearses that argument briefly in his essay on Ray in Imaginary Homelands, via the comments of that Bombay actress, Nargis)?

Imagine, though, being forced map out a conversation between Pather Panchali and Midnight's Children: how would you do it? What openings would you provide to begin such a conversation? And given that it's a film of undeniable visual (as well as narrative power), what images & moments are still lingering (and perhaps expanding) in your thoughts? I found myself transfixed by the old (ancient!) auntie, Indir, for example, and wondering if we might nearly talk about her in some of the ways we talked about Tai the Boatman in Rushdie's novel. She seems to stand in for a kind of rupture, for something very significant (the oral tradition? a rural ideal being threatened by modernity and the lure of the urban?) that is dying (and it's so interesting, too, to think about the composition of her death scene: her body is discovered by Durga and Apu in a bamboo grove that is teeming with life). Certainly we sense that is a film about the collision of worlds, of the old and the new, and this is probably nowhere more apparent than in the train scene, which could be the single most famous sequence in Ray's entire body of work. Those electricity pylons in the paddy fields, the eerily singing wires, the approaching steam engine, that black smear of smoke in the sky -- that last detail, for whatever reason, made me think back to "the cloud of the disaster" (80) that links the Muslim mob and the Ravana gang (and portends the advent of communalism) in Midnight's Children. Anyway, how do you all respond to this train scene (or others)?