Pather Panchali Ray thus had to borrow money to shoot enough footage to persuade prospective producers to finance the whole film. To raise funds, he continued to work as a graphic designer, pawned his life insurance policy and sold his collection of gramophone records. Production manager Anil Chowdhury convinced Ray's wife, Bijoya, to pawn her jewels. Ray still ran out of money partway through filming, which had to be suspended for nearly a year. Thereafter shooting was done only in intermittent bursts. Ray later admitted that the delays had made him tense and that three miracles saved the film: "One, Apu's voice
Pather Panchali shot on location with an amateur cast. The international success of Akira Kurosawa's "Rashomon" (1950) and Bimal Roy's 1953 film "Do Bigha Zamin" (which was shot partly on location and was about a peasant family) led Ray to believe that "Pather Panchali" would find an international audience. Ray also had more indigenous influences, such as Bengali literature and the native Indian theatrical tradition, particularly the "rasa" theory of classical Sanskrit drama. Darius Cooper describes the complicated doctrine of "rasa" as " predominantly on feelings experienced not only by the characters but also conveyed in a certain artistic way to the