Bengal’s Leading Man

PROLIFIC SUBJECTS are both a boon and bane for biographers. The abundance of their output gives chroniclers a vast reservoir of material they can put to good use, but a plethora of stories can also sometimes be hard to confine within the borders of a tale the writer wants to tell. Soumitra Chatterjee exemplifies this paradox. During a six-decade-long career, he acted in over 300 films. Beyond cinema, he was a published poet and essayist. He once even edited a literary magazine, Ekkhon. He wrote plays, several of which he directed and acted in. Toward the end of his life, he also exhibited his drawings and paintings. Any biography would perhaps find it hard to do justice to the actor’s many talents, but Sanghamitra Chakraborty’s thoroughly researched Soumitra Chatterjee and His World paints a holistic picture, which provides a perfectly calculated sum of his multifarious parts.

Sharmila Tagore ends her moving foreword to this biography by saying, “He was and will be my Apu—always.” Many of the actor’s fans will undoubtedly echo his co-star’s sentiment. Apur Sansar, Satyajit Ray’s 1959 film, introduced audiences to Chatterjee, and in time, this powerhouse of acting talent would go on to live up to the promise of his stunning debut. Even in the face of hunger and penury, Chatterjee’s Apu was indomitable and sincere. Chakraborty tells us how Chatterjee immersed himself in Apu’s character— he kept a journal in which he imagined how Apu would spend his time between the scripted scenes, “a sort of biography of Apu in the form of a diary.”

Chatterjee was always ready to put in the hard yards, and this diligence was part of the reason Ray cast him in 14 of his 28 full-length films. Chatterjee was to Ray what Toshiro Mifune was to Akira Kurosawa, and what Robert De Niro was to Martin Scorsese. Though Chatterjee’s love for Ray was unwavering, he later resented the assumption that he was the filmmaker’s “puppet”. Chakraborty reminds us of the body of work Chatterjee had created beyond Ray. She recounts performances that were memorable, but also details the compulsions that led Chatterjee to act in films that were plain embarrassing.

In telling Chatterjee’s story, Chakraborty also handholds us through the history of Bengal, a state where the actor did almost all his work. She explains how events such as the 1943 Bengal famine, Partition and the Naxal movement compounded Chatterjee’s traumas that were painful and private. His diary entries prove to be a rich repository that gives Chakraborty access to his inner life, but her interviews with his friends, family, and colleagues further help us situate the actor both at home and in the world. While details of his professional life show how Chatterjee was unfailingly principled, the turbulence in his personal life forces us to see him as fallible and all the more human. Explaining why he’d never written an autobiography, Chatterjee said, “If one writes an autobiography, one must be ready to be truthful. But in this country, we don’t have a tradition for speaking the truth.” Thankfully, this biography does what he could not.

BengalbookscinemaSanghamitra ChakrabortySatyajit RaySoumitra Chatterjee