In this absorbing biography, Sanghamitra Chakraborty traces the life and career of Soumitra Chatterjee, one of Bengal’s greatest actors
By Shevlin Sebastian
Early in the book, ‘Soumitra Chatterjee and His World’, author Sanghamitra Chakraborty recounts a memory of the actor when he was six years old.
One day, because he was sick, Soumitra could not go to school. His elder brother Sambit returned from school earlier than scheduled. Their mother, Ashalata, asked Sambit the reason why.
Here is how Soumitra remembered that moment:
“Rabindranath Tagore is dead, so our headmaster announced a holiday,” Dada said flatly.
‘When I heard this, I knew Tagore must be a great man. Why else would they announce a holiday? That was my only response then — I hadn’t matured enough to react to the tragedy, but I noticed that my mother’s world was shaken. Ma couldn’t keep standing — she held onto the railing and sat down slowly.’
Ashalata was an ardent admirer of Tagore. Like his mother, later in life, Soumitra worshipped Tagore as a sage, prophet, great artist and social reformer.
An ardent bibliophile, Soumitra read Pather Panchali by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay when he was a teenager. Later, he wrote, ‘I had no idea then that playing the role of the grown-up Apu [protagonist of Pather Panchali] would be the birth of my acting career.’
During his studies at the CMS St. John’s School in Krishnanagar, Soumitra took part in plays and elocution contests. In Class Five, he played the prince in Sleeping Beauty.
‘People in the audience gave away awards to young actors then,’ he wrote. ‘I was thrilled to receive medals at that age. Perhaps an obsession with acting later took hold of me thanks to those medals. Who knows?’
But it was not always an idyllic life. He saw some tragedies first-hand. During the Bengal Famine of 1943, in which 30 lakh people died, Soumitra recalled the unbearable stench of dead bodies piling up on the streets in Krishnanagar.
One day, a starving man took shelter in a courtyard next door. Soumitra used to take rotis from his dinner and give it to him. One night, he could not do so. He wrote, ‘Next morning, I found the man dead — a bag of bones covered in skin heaped in one corner. His misshapen metal bowl had a few morsels of food left in it.’
It would leave a permanent scar on his heart.
As he grew up and got a job at All India Radio, he was always keen to embark on an acting career. His life changed when, one day, while recuperating at home from chicken pox, Satyajit Ray’s assistant Subir Hazra told him the maestro wanted to meet him.
When Soumitra stepped into Ray’s house, the latter said, ‘There you are, please come in. But everything seems fine. I don’t see any marks on your face! Someone was saying you had developed pockmarks. This is nothing. It should be fine.’
The result: Soumitra was cast as the lead in Apur Sansar. Soumitra began preparing and remembered the advice given by theatre guru Sisir Bhaduri. As author Sanghamitra writes, as an actor he had to interrogate the script ‘like a detective’, read carefully between the lines, look for clues to recreate in his mind the unexpressed bits of the story or character and peel away the top layers to unearth what was beneath.
Apur Sansar became a hit and launched the career of Soumitra.
The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote, ‘In the role of Apu, Soumitra Chatterjee is timid, tender, sad, serene, superb. He is the perfect extension of Apu as a man.’
Sanghamitra delves at length into the relationship between Soumitra and Satyajit Ray, which changed the young actor’s life completely.
Ray’s son Sandip spoke about the ‘instant chemistry’ between his father and Soumitra. ‘Even before Baba spoke, Soumitra Kaku knew what he wanted,’ said Sandip. ‘You rarely see this kind of understanding between a director and an actor.’
Sanghamitra dwells at length on one of Ray’s greatest films, Charulata (1964) and the roles played by Soumitra and Madhabi Mukherjee.
In the end, Soumitra and Ray worked in many films together, including Kapurush, Aranyer Din Ratri, and Asani Sanket. ‘The fun in working with him [Ray] was that he gave you immense freedom,’ said Soumitra. ‘And when you took the initiative, he would come up with a suggestion that would take it to the next level.’
The praise was mutual. Once Ray said, ‘Out of my 27 [28] films, he has acted the lead role in 14. This makes it obvious how much I trust him and how highly I regard him as an actor. I know I will depend on him until the last day of my life as an artist.’
Interestingly, in the famous memory card game scene in Aranyer Din Ratri, Ray placed the camera in the middle of the group that sat in a circle on a sheet on a ground in Palamau. The actors included Soumitra Chatterjee, Sharmila Tagore, Kaberi Bose, Subhendu Chatterjee, Samit Bhanja, and Robi Ghosh.
As Sanghamitra writes, ‘Though his close-ups, with the roving camera, paused on each face, Ray superbly captured their mental landscape and the emerging group dynamics.’ Later, Sharmila said that it was so hot the shooting had to be completed within an hour.
This tie-up of Soumitra with Ray lasted from 1959 to 1992, when Ray passed away on April 23, at the age of 70.
What impressed Ray and the crew members was how meticulously Soumitra prepared for each shot.
‘He always arrived on time and came well prepared,’ said Sandip. ‘For example, he would make a note of the number of shirt buttons he had left unbuttoned from the last time [for continuity]. His discipline was remarkable.’ In the end, Chatterjee acted in over 300 films in a 60-year career.
Sanghamitra also focuses on other films. It was interesting to note that in Teen Bhubaner Pare (1969), there was a song called Jibone Ki Pabona in which Soumitra did the twist in an elegant style.
The YouTube video was a pleasure to watch and the catchy tune and the lively singing by Manna Dey felt dynamic and uplifting. It is a song that still sounds good. And there have been many covers of it over the years.
This is an absorbing book. Undoubtedly, a lot of research has been done. Sanghamitra interviewed around 75 people, apart from family members.
What was a blow to the author was the star’s unexpected death because of lung complications from Covid on November 15, 2020, at the age of 85. So Sanghamitra could not talk to the star, but his copious autobiographical writings provided a lot of information.
This book is a valuable addition to the literature of film. For fans of Soumitra, this is a must-read.
Actor Sharmila Tagore wrote in the foreword, ‘Soumitra had his reasons to avoid Bombay, of course, but Indian audiences are the poorer for it.’ So, for film lovers in other parts of India and the world who are not aware of this titan, this book will be a revelation.
A shorter version was published in The Sunday Magazine, New Indian Express, South India and Delhi)
