Soumitra Chatterjee
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A brief biography
Kunal Ray, November 16, 2020: The Indian Express
What can one write about Soumitra Chatterjee? Saying that he was unconventional would be a cliché. He was Satyajit Ray’s favourite actor. His onscreen debut, Apur Sansar (1959), is a landmark in Indian cinema. This information is available at a click.
The Soumitra Chatterjee I remember extends beyond Ray’s films and his screen acting, even if there is no disregarding the fact that Ray’s films played an instrumental part in bringing the actor both national and international acclaim. Alongside Ray, he worked with a range of filmmakers such as Tapan Sinha, Tarun Majumdar, Ajoy Kar and Dinen Gupta. These are important films not just in his oeuvre but in the history of popular as well as arthouse Bengali cinema. This helped Chatterjee to straddle both worlds and find success in both the streams. Chatterjee himself never favoured these distinctions, as his filmography reveals. His conviction is best reflected in the characters that he memorialised on screen while charting a different path from his contemporaries, especially the superstar of Bengali cinema, Uttam Kumar. In an interview, Chatterjee also mentions that he constantly thought about his onscreen portrayals, often wondering about the job of the actor and worrying about some of his portrayals, which were contrary to his personal beliefs and ideology.
While Uttam Kumar was the matinee idol of Bengali cinema, Chatterjee remained the bhadralok actor whose interests ranged beyond acting such as writing, theatre, music and painting. Chatterjee epitomises an erudite actor — perhaps, a Balraj Sahni would come close to his literary and scholastic achievements. Chatterjee wrote around a dozen volumes of poetry, several prose collections, plays and translations. In the introduction to his collected plays, Chatterjee confessed that life without theatre was unimaginable. He was involved with every aspect of stage theatre. Bengali theatre legend Sisir Kumar Bhaduri was a major influence. He continued writing, directing and acting in plays even at the peak of his film career. He was unhappy with the state of contemporary Bengali theatre in 1950s and ’60s, which made him explore playwrights from far and wide. These resulted in several landmark productions such as Rajkumar (1982), inspired by the writings of several French and German playwrights, amongst others. The plays he wrote and directed reflected contemporary social concerns. This also went in tandem with his belief in left-wing politics.
A voracious reader, Chatterjee read Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Romain Rolland, Joseph Conrad amongst several others with equal interest. Upon the insistence of legendary Bengali poet and close friend, Shakti Chattopadhyay, he agreed to publish his first book of poems. While preparing to play Apu, he even wrote a fictional biography of the character. For Charulata (1964), he learnt a special calligraphic handwriting. Chatterjee also founded and co-edited Ekshan, a pioneering journal of culture that published Satyajit Ray’s screenplays for the first time. Few Indian actors can rival such a literary graph.
Chatterjee ejected the aura of the star. He would regularly receive phone calls at his residence, greet visitors, step out to receive his mail and accept guests dressed in a lungi. Beyond the acting floor, he lived a regular life.
His acting life is rather interesting for multiple reasons. He played a negative role in Tapan Sinha’s Jhinder Bondi (1961), right after Apur Sansar, Devi, Khudito Pashan and Teen Kanya. This was a risky decision for a young actor. His depiction of a much troubled father worried for the safety of his daughter in Sinha’s Atonko (1984) is unforgettable. He played Debu Pandit in Tarun Majumdar’s screen adaptation of Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s Ganadevata (1978), where his character fights for social justice. In Koni (1984), he plays a swimming coach to a poor girl from the slums of Kolkata. Chatterjee’s acting career is characterised by a diversity of roles that very few of his contemporaries could demonstrate. This diversity was the handiwork of several filmmakers alongside Ray. Ray’s films are, however, more well-known owing to his stature in Indian film history discourse and worldwide. Chatterjee’s work further extends to films made by Aparna Sen, Goutam Ghose, Rituparno Ghosh, amongst others. He continued to work with the younger lot of filmmakers in Bengal today. One of the biggest hits in contemporary Bengali cinema, Belasheshe (2015), featured Chatterjee in a leading role. In 2013, an exhibition of his doodles, sketches and watercolours revealed another side to his creativity. In the second half of his career, he also emerged as a popular elocutionist. While acting claimed a lion’s share of his time, his engagement with other arts demonstrated the same commitment. In the demise of Chatterjee, we have lost a great thespian, but he should also be remembered as an actor who chose to live a full life beyond the screen.
Career
An overview
Priyanka Dasgupta, November 16, 2020: The Times of India
Thespian Soumitra Chatterjee forged a fecund collaboration with master director Satyajit Ray. Their alliance spanned 14 films — Apur Sansar, Charulata and Ashani Sanket, to name just three — and drew favourable comparisons with two outstanding creative partnerships in world cinema: Akira Kurosawa/Toshiro Mifune in Japanese and Federico Fellini/Marcello Mastroianni in Italian. For millions of kids and young adults, Chatterjee’s name was also synonymous with Ray’s Feluda, the razor-sharp detective he brought alive on celluloid. The versatile actor’s work straddled a cache of genres and spanned over six decades. Co-star Sharmila Tagore once described him as a “banyan tree” that grew and continued to reinvent. His “Samapti” co-star Aparna Sen called him “forever contemporary”. Director Buddhadeb Dasgupta could compare him only to the great Balraj Sahni.
Chatterjee got introduced to acting at an early age, taking part in children’s plays at his ancestral home. His parents would use aluminium foil from cigarette packets to make his crown when he played the prince. He would often end up getting on-the-spot prizes from neighbours! This recognition, Chatterjee would recall, first stirred the actor in him. There were roadblocks, though. He faced rejection during a screen test for a devotional film and concluded that he wasn’t photogenic! Few know that he worked as a radio announcer and an LIC agent. Thankfully, he managed to get only one client in a year!
Had he managed to get more, Indian cinema would have lost out on some stellar performances — from the Charminar-smoking Feluda in “Sonar Kella” and “Joi Baba Felunath” to the grim taxi driver Narsingh in “Abhijan” or the effervescent Amal in “Charulata”. Chatterjee himself would choose “Apur Sansar” as his favourite Ray film since it reflected “the wisdom of innocence”.
His dramatic range was remarkable, as showcased in Tapan Sinha’s “Khudita Pasan” or in “Jhinder Bondi”, where he was cast as the swashbuckling horse-riding villain. In Asit Sen’s films, Chatterjee played “the kind of heroes that middle class Bengalis related to”. Then there were classics like “Teen Bhubaner Pare”, “Baksho Bodol” and “Akash Kusum”, among others. “I feel that since I did these kinds of roles, people started taking my name in the same breath as Uttam Kumar. It’s because of this that Bengalis even tried to create a sort of Mohun Bagan-East Bengal kind of rivalry between us,” Chatterjee had said.
Like good wine, Chatterjee kept getting headier with age. Just when he was shifting to character roles, Saroj Dey’s sports drama “Kony” happened in the 80s. The film’s catchphrase, “Fight-Koni-Fight”, motivated generations of moviebuffs. Tapan Sinha’s “Wheel Chair (1994)”, Goutam Ghose’s “Dekha (2001)” and Atanu Ghosh’s “Mayurakshi (2017)” – he kept offering something fresh in every decade. But despite a rich body of work, top awards eluded Chatterjee. His only National Award for Best Actor came with Podokkhep (2008), nearly five decades after his 1959 debut.
What added to his charisma was his serious pursuit of theatre, love for literature, interest in arts and politics, and his undying love for Tagore and Bengali. Under no circumstances did he want to give up all these pursuits and shift to Mumbai to act in Hindi films. He feared that doing so would need him to give up “the rhythm” of his life – something he didn’t wish to.
Theatre gave him satisfaction. That’s where he could create “a complete artistic substance” with an admirable body of work adapting non-Bengali plays into the local context. A disciple of the legendary Sisir Bhaduri, his work on stage included “Rajkumar”, “Naamjiban”, “Neelkantha” and “Raja Lear”, among others. Such was his commitment and professionalism that while acting in the autobiographical “Tritiyo Anko, Otoeb,” Chatterjee continued performing on stage even after receiving the news of his mother’s demise.
Towards the end, a degree of stoicism was reflected in his work. Perhaps, it came from his philosophy about death not being “an assassin but a friend” who comes to relieve one from pain. Soumitra Chatterjee has left behind a treasure trove rich enough to be a true representative of Bengali culture.
A critical appreciation
Sharmistha Gooptu, November 16, 2020: The Times of India
Soumitra Chatterjee is one of the very few great stars of regional cinema of all time who had reached a pinnacle of stardom, and still stayed away from that mecca of Indian stardom, the Bombay film industry. On the face of it, it would seem to be the language factor, as his mentor Satyajit Ray had noted on being asked about his preference for not working in Hindi (except two films). But even more than that, it was a question of preferences and beliefs, a belief in a system of creative values that might not have been best served by this more ostensible bifurcation between art and commerce that ruled the contemporary perspective.
Bombay was recognised as the commercial hub of a pan-Indian cinema, Calcutta as the heart of the art film movement. While a star like Sharmila Tagore straddled these separate industries with equal ease, it was a Soumitra Chatterjee, who, through his entire oeuvre actually debunked this whole dichotomy of art versus commerce. In his entire career, he played roles of remarkable versatility and in his persona brought art and commerce closer to each other, at a time when they were spoken of as very distinct things. In that he was closer to his guru Satyajit Ray than is usually recognised, for Ray, through his life’s work, had himself breached these barriers of art and commerce.
The Ray-Chatterjee complex (which included directors like Ajoy Kar and Tapan Sinha), and Chatterjee’s persona as a star may justifiably stand as a precursor of the contemporary Indi film movement, which showcases smaller towns, the nuances of the local, and addresses more niche audiences. And wherein stars do not court a larger than life flair and flamboyant traits that mark a quintessential stardom, but rather have the ability to put flesh and blood into their characters and make the biggest stars of those very same entities. A case in point would be Chatterjee’s portrayal of Ray’s detective Prodosh Mitter.
Soumitra Chatterjee first appeared in Satyajit Ray’s Apur Sansar (1959), the last part of The Apu Trilogy where he played the adult Apu of the novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. His filmography of the 1960s, in which decade he rose to stardom, displays his consistent straddling of the realms of more elite and popular strands of the Bengali cinema, working in the very same studios to produce different kinds of cinema, which perhaps were not always so very different after all.
In the 60s, he made his mark with films as different as Tapan Sinha’s Jhinder Bandi, an adaptation of The Prisoner of Zenda, where he played the villain Mayurbahan, and Ray’s Charulata, a film based on Tagore’s work and which revealed his uncanny resemblance with the young Rabindranath himself. Saat Pake Bandha opposite the formidable Suchitra Sen gave him a foothold in the mainstream industry and was also a film that garnered larger acclaim. Then, towards the end of the decade, he immortalised the angst of the 60s generation of Bengali youth in his portrayal of the unemployed and streetsmart Montu in Teen Bhubaner Pare.
Later he made a cult figure of Ray’s fictional detective Prodosh Mitter or Feluda, portraying Felu Mitter in Ray’s two blockbusters featuring the detective. By Chatterjee’s own admission, the Feluda persona made him a cult figure overnight even though he was already a top star. While purists have downgraded Ray’s Feluda films as being a lesser thing of the master’s oeuvre, where he created something that was more popular than intellectual, it marked a footprint for the longer term, impacting a future generation of filmmakers and viewers.
The Feluda films or Soumitra Chatterjee’s larger oeuvre stood for a complexity, vibrancy, diversity and optimism that is rare. In his films he addressed political issues in a popular vein, or portrayed intense characters, the likes of Ray’s Apu, who sometimes showed greyness, but also remarkable resilience and humanity. It closed the gaps between entertainment that was intended to be pure leisure and escape from reality, and an entertainment that was intended to be more cerebral. Like the niche films of today’s OTT bazaar.
Soumitra Chatterjee was a Left leaning artist, who never concealed his political views. And while he was a star through and through, he never gave up his commitment of making a statement through his films, though that statement may have been as varied as the fight of the coach leading an underprivileged female athlete to victory or a crippled doctor working with a paralysed victim of sexual assault. Artists of the ilk of a Soumitra Chatterjee undertook their brand of activism and intellectualism through their work in the film industry, through their own shaping of their screen portrayals, through what kind of work they chose to do, and what other kinds of work they may have chosen to forego. Their legacy is visible in a present generation of filmmakers who speak their convictions and call for change through the kinds of niche films that they are now choosing to make, which have transformed our entertainment values like never before.
BBC’s tribute
Chatterjee was perhaps best-known for his work with Ray, one of the world's most influential directors and maker of the much-feted Apu Trilogy. The series followed the life of a man who grew up in a Bengali village. The films garnered critical acclaim, winning many awards worldwide, and put Indian cinema on the global map. The third movie of the trilogy, Apur Sansar, which released in 1959, was also Chatterjee's debut film. He would go on to star as the lead actor in 14 of Ray's films.
Pauline Kael, one of America's most influential and respected film critics, called Chatterjee Ray's "one-man stock company" who moved "so differently in the different roles he plays that he is almost unrecognisable”.
Chatterjee was awarded the Dada Saheb Phalke Award, the highest honour in Indian cinema, in 2012 and in 2018, he was given France's highest award, the Legion of Honour.
He began acting when he was in school, where he starred in several plays. He was in college when a friend introduced him to Ray - it was a chance meeting, but it eventually led to Chatterjee's film debut. "I didn't know what to do when Mr Ray first asked me. I didn't know what was the real difference between stage and screen acting. I was afraid I'd overact," he told Marie Seton, film critic and biographer, in an interview.
Chatterjee's roles in more than a dozen films made by the auteur spanned a wide range.
He played a Sherlock Holmes-like detective in Sonar Kella, an effete bridegroom in Devi, a hot-tempered north Indian taxi driver in Abhijan, a city slicker in Aranyer Din Ratri, and a mild-mannered village priest in Ashani Sanket. He also played what Seton called a "thinly veiled portrait" of Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore in Charulata, one of Ray's most admired films. "His chief asset was the natural sensitivity of his appearance," Seton wrote of the actor.
Ray mentored his favourite actor, lending him books on cinema and often taking him to watch Sunday morning shows of Hollywood films in Kolkata. "The entire exercise he did with a purpose, it was not as if he was taking me out on Sundays for entertainment," Chatterjee once said.
Ray, who died in 1992, had said that Chatterjee was an intelligent actor and "given bad material, he turns out a bad performance". "Not a day passed when I do not think of Ray or discuss him or miss him. He is a constant presence in my life, if not for anything else but for the inspiration I derive when I think about him," Chatterjee told an interviewer.
Chatterjee also played the romantic lead in popular Bengali films, but his appeal, say critics, was more limited than the reigning star, Uttam Kumar.
Over the years, Chatterjee worked with leading directors like Tapan Sinha, Mrinal Sen, Asit Sen, Ajoy Kar, Rituparno Ghosh and Aparna Sen. In 1988, he worked with John Hurt and Hugh Grant in The Bengali Night, a film set in Kolkata.
Adoor Gopalakrishnan, one of India's greatest filmmakers, said that on screen, Chatterjee "became the quintessential Bengali - intellectually inclined, of middle-class orientation, sensitive and likeable”.
Outside films, Chatterjee was tirelessly creative: he edited a literary magazine, published more than 30 books of essays and poetry; acted, directed and wrote an equal number of plays; and painted. One of his most successful plays, Ghatak Bidey, a comedy, ran for 500 nights. Chatterjee acted in a commercially successful Bengali adaption of King Lear, which many believe was one of his finest performances on stage.
For all his popularity, Chatterjee stayed away from Bollywood, preferring to act in Bengali language films.
"Soumitra is the finest actor in the land today, but totally unheard of outside Bengal. It's a loss for India, Bollywood and I guess, a bit for Soumitra," Pritish Nandy, poet, journalist and filmmaker, said of the actor in 2012.
Amitava Nag, author of a biography of the actor, says Chatterjee was "the thinking man's hero. He was an intellectual and a poet". Nag once asked Chatterjee whether he felt burdened by the obligation to entertain.
"Very seldom. This is my job," he said.
Ray’s Belmondo
Priyanka Dasgupta, November 16, 2020: The Times of India
From: Priyanka Dasgupta, November 16, 2020: The Times of India
The camera slowly zooms in on a letter — it’s a recommendation that says Apu is a “sensitive, conscientious and diligent” person. It then pans to Apu’s face: a young man with sharp features and a beatific smile that lights up a black-and-white frame. This was Satyajit Ray’s introduction of the debutant Soumitra Chatterjee in Apur Sansar.
He was the hero everyone wanted to adore — a sensitive, intelligent young man with the spirit of a wanderer who yearns to discover a compassionate world, gets bruised repeatedly and loses his way when he reproaches his son for having caused his wife’s death. What he never forsakes is the purity of his soul.
Chatterjee had told Ray’s biographer Marie Seton in Portrait of a Director that he found “half of himself” in Apu. The cinematic masterpiece wasn’t just a teaser for love and loss in matrimony. Chatterjee had said “plenty of young men” who watched his debut opposite Sharmila Tagore came to him and said they would like to get married. His conviction breathed life into this shot and achingly poignant tale. Apur Sansar influenced the thought process of generations and redefined Indian cinema. It also changed the trajectory of Chatterjee’s own life. “Playing Apu gave me a chance to grow into “Ray’s favourite actor”. That epithet itself is something any actor would covet,” Chatterjee said.
One day, Chatterjee had gone to watch the shooting of the Chhabi Biswas starrer Jalsaghar. As he was about to leave, Ray said: “Let me introduce you to Chhabi Biswas. You haven’t met him, have you?” He said: “Chhabida, this is Soumitra Chattopadhyay. He is playing Apu in my next film, Apur Sansar.” That was how Chatterjee learnt he had bagged the role that would define him. After reading the screenplay, Chatterjee tried to innovate with the time-lapse portions, which is the gap between shots. Adopting the Stanislavskian method, he would imagine what Apu would do and write that down. Sometimes, he would include autobiographical elements. This was his way of getting under the skin of Apu’s character.
The result showed when Apur Sansar released on May 1, 1959. It went on to win the National Award for best feature film that year. As per Seton, Chatterjee felt his portrayal of Apu to be the “image of the contemporary Indian man in the process of becoming modern”.
Feluda
Prithvijit Mitra, November 16, 2020: The Times of India
Years after “Sonar Kella” — the first Feluda adventure filmed by Satyajit Ray — was released, Soumitra Chatterjee recalled a conversation between him and the master filmmaker which gave him a peek into the director’s mind.
In the course of that interaction, which had taken place on a train during a journey to shoot outdoor, Chatterjee realised that Ray had created Feluda with some of his own traits — no-nonsense, suave and intuitive with a razorsharp mind. It was therefore, a huge responsibility to portray Feluda on screen, Chatterjee had said, since it was akin to playing Ray himself.
If Feluda gave Bengali readers a home-grown Sherlock Holmes, it was Chatterjee who brought him alive on screen. Chatterjee looked as convincing outwitting criminals with his “magajastra” (brainpower) as he did when he pulled out his colt revolver to fire at them. Like Feluda, Soumitra could switch from being intelligent to aggressive.
The change in demeanour was marvellously portrayed by Chatterjee in numerous scenes but it was perhaps most evident in a particular sequence in “Joy Baba Felunath”, says Ujjal Chakraborty, a Ray scholar.
In the scene where Feluda, with Topshe and Lalmohan babu, visits Maganlal Meghraj’s house in Benaras, Chatterjee begins on a polite note but at the end of an unpleasant exchange, he acts sternly with his adversary and vows revenge. “Even as he talks tough, Chatterjee’s body language and dialogue delivery never cross the limits of decency. That’s how Ray had conceived Feluda — an intellectual, middle-class sleuth who could be tough without getting physical or offensive,” Chakraborty says.
For Bengalis growing up in the 70s and 80s, Chatterjee remains Feluda. “Sonar Kella was released in 1974, a decade after the first Feluda story was written. By then, an entire generation had got used to the sketches which portrayed a leaner Feluda with a bonier face. Chatterjee had a more round face but his hooked nose, arched eyebrows and the subtle creases on his face gave him a thinking, intellectual look. It reflected his thoughtful, poetic nature that had made Ray cast him in the role,” Chakraborty said.
If Feluda gave Bengali readers a home-grown Sherlock Holmes, it was Soumitra Chatterjee who brought him alive on screen. For Bengalis growing up in the 70s and 80s, Chatterjee remains Feluda
