write a paragraph each on shooting at notugran and shooting at boral village
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Eighty-two year old Krishnapada Dutta holds filmmaker Satyajit Ray responsible for making him neglect his studies as a young boy in school. “I was a good student. Then Ray started shooting Pather Panchali, his first film, in our village, Boral, in 1952-53 and I started bunking school to watch them shoot. Of course, I did badly in my exams,” he says in all good humour, and without any trace of guilt or remorse.
In 1992, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences awarded Ray an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement. His oeuvre of films includes more than 30 titles made over a career spanning nearly four decades. But for many, Pather Panchali remains the most iconic Ray film. It was his first and introduced a new era in Indian filmmaking. Sixty-three years after its release, it is also the only Indian film to feature on a list of 100 best foreign language films of the 21st century released by the BBC recently. That Pather Panchali would be a groundbreaking film was clear in Ray’s mind even before he had started shooting. As he writes in the memoir ‘My Years With Apu’ – a book published after his death, which documents in detail the making of Pather Panchali and its sequels, Aparajito and Apur Sansar – “I knew that Pather Panchali would have a very different look from the usual Bengali films, so I decided to draw fairly elaborate sketches which would normally describe the film in sequence like a storyboard.”
And Boral, a small town in West Bengal, shares a special bond with Ray for having given him the fictional village of Nischindipur [where Pather Panchali is based] from where he started his cinematic journey.
The Song Of The Road
As with most things for Pather Panchali – be it selecting actors or finding producers for the film – Ray, with no previous experience of film making, depended on word of mouth and recommendations from friends and family members to zero down on the location for the film. During the initial phase of prepping for the film, he took a few shots at Gopalnagar, where Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, the author who had written the novel on which the film is based, used to teach and on which he had loosely set his story. Finally, as he writes in ‘My years…’, “The village that we selected for the film was recommended to us by one of the founder members of the film society [the Calcutta Film Society]—Manoj Mazumdar. It was only four miles from the city limits and this meant that we could make daily trips…”.

The Ray connection surfaces the minute one hits the Boral main road. Over the years, what was once a village just on the outskirts of Kolkata, has in many ways become a part of the greater city. Multi-storeyed buildings and shops line the road, as automobiles rush past, coating the leaves of the shrubs with a thick layer of red dust that hides the green underneath.
“ Boral was a big village with a school, and some of it had acquired the look of a small town and didn’t suit our purpose,” writes Ray in ‘My Years…’, but adds ‘But then the mango trees, the jungle of bamboos, open fields, ponds with water lilies in them and old thatched mud houses were exactly right for us’.
One gets a glimpse of Boral’s rural roots as one travels away from the main road. There are traces of its rustic past in the immediate vicinity of the house that had served as the residence of Harihar and his family – wife Sarbajaya, their two children Apu and Durga and an old cousin, Indir Thakrun – the protagonists of Pather Panchali. “When Ray was shooting the film, there were no pucca roads here. The house where he shot was abandoned, the family lived in Kolkata. As kids, we would play there,” recalls Dutta, as he points out the house. Across the road, adjacent to an old temple, is the ground where Apu and Durga were filmed watching the bioscope.
Around the house remains a patch of untended, neglected greenery. The pond where Apu, after his sister Durga’s death, is shown throwing away a necklace that she had once been accused of stealing, also remains, though it seems to have shrunk in size somewhat. The house itself looks drab, but can hardly be compared to the ramshackle structure shown in the film that had seemed to tremble to its core under the fury of a storm, as Durga lay dying in bed.
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A glimpse of the house in Boral where much of
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