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Soumitra Chatterjee. The name itself evokes a million emotions for Bengalis and film-lovers. The man himself is a bundle of contradictions; from Apur Sansar to Bela Seshe, from Kony to Atanka: he is associated with the best of Bengali cinema, but also some of the worst. Cinephiles the world over know his name, and yet he remains largely unknown in his own country beyond the borders of West Bengal. He is familiar to people primarily as a thespian with a wide-ranging film career, and yet he was also a proficient and prolific theatre actor and director, writer, editor, poet, and later in his life, artist.
To write the story of such a man is not an easy task, and yet biographer Sanghamitra Chakraborty in Soumitra Chatterjee and His World makes it feel as though it is. The book flows from section to section – ten in all, with a foreword by Sharmila Tagore – fluidly; the depth of research is remarkable and the prose by turns journalistic and personal, at times zooming in on Chatterjee’s own life and personality, his likes and dislikes, his works and hobbies, and then zooming out to capture a panoramic view of life in 20th and 21st century India.
A multitude of histories
This, perhaps, is the most impressive achievement of Chakraborty’s writing: that it is not merely the story of Soumitra Chatterjee, but also of a multitude of other topics. To contextualise Chatterjee’s rise, one needs to understand the crucible in which he was created: him the actor, him the poet, him the artist, and him the man. The book examines this creation along two interconnected tracks – firstly, through the influence of his surroundings: his childhood home, his city, his state, and his nation; and secondly, through the influence of people: namely, his family, his idol Rabindranath Tagore, and his mentors, auteur Satyajit Ray and theatre great Sisir Kumar Bhaduri. Woven throughout these is the story of how he connected with his contemporaries: his friends during his college days at the University of Calcutta and Coffee House (famed student hang-out in north Calcutta), where he connected with many peers who would go on to become luminaries in their field; and then his co-artists in Tollywood (the Bengali film industry) and theatre. The backdrop to these interpersonal relations is a multitude of histories: that of the city of Calcutta; of the Bengali bhadrolok class that arose out of the cultural and political situation of colonial Bengal; and of Bengali film and theatre.
It sounds like a simple enough formula, but it is, in reality, an enormous act of balance and delicateness. Chakraborty deftly juggles and interlaces these multiple narratives to create a complex portrait of a man known to millions yet unknown to many more. Parts of the book feel slightly repetitive, but perhaps that is inevitable when writing about something as vastly complex and rich as a lifetime. The book succeeds in holding up a picture of Bengal and Bengaliness through the ages; it never once gets stuck in its hero’s prime, taking the reader instead on a journey through the rise and fall and rebirth of India’s one-time colonial capital, just as it does for Chatterjee himself. Written lucidly and in a nuanced fashion, one could argue that Chakraborty’s clear-eyed view of Indian cultural and political trends is where she displays her writing and analytical abilities to the fullest.
Any biography of Soumitra Chatterjee is bound to focus extensively on his relationship with Satyajit Ray, and so does this book. Ray’s connection with Chatterjee is extensive: they shared a similar love of Tagore, similar liberal politics born of similar backgrounds, and a similar ethos for work on screen and off it. The book looks at all of these aspects and goes beyond them, to look at the relationship not only between colleagues but between two human beings, so larger-than-life and yet vulnerable at the same time. Another somewhat unexpected focus of the book is the relationship between Bengali film superstars Uttam Kumar and Chatterjee and the close bond the two developed that remained hidden behind public perceptions of competitiveness.
There has been an interesting trend recently of focusing on Ray’s last years, in which he has been portrayed as a lonely genius, an island among ordinary men and women; not only were many of his beloved contemporaries gone in his final days, but so was his health and, allegedly, his faith in humanity. An as-yet-unreleased work on Ray suggests that he was appalled at the turn that the world had taken in his final years, and that he shared his film Agantuk’s protagonist’s horror at the violence and intolerance he perceived. It also connects this horror to Tagore’s last days, in which the poet shared a similar disillusionment at the state of the world.
In Chakraborty’s book, these sentiments are echoed in Chatterjee’s last days: his distress at rising sectarian intolerance in India, and his inability to converse with people on the same cerebral level he preferred. It is an interesting phenomenon – and one worth examining further. Is this really what occurred with these men – cutting a lonely figure that stands apart from the crowd by dint of their exceptional qualities? Or is this how we imagine or even prefer our male geniuses to be: a little more like gods than they are like men?
Among other men
It would be a fine thing to read a biography of a beloved figure, any figure, but especially those of men, that does not deify or idolise them, and that does not attempt to exonerate them from their faults in a post-mortem capacity – that allows the shadows to dominate as much as the light. This is by no means a suggestion to focus on sordid details about anyone’s private life, but an invitation to look deeper and further and treat the subject even-handedly, as simply human, as remarkable as they may have been.
There are glimpses of this in the book – parts where Chakraborty, for example, uses Chatterjee’s own words in which he describes himself as “weak” enough to make self-serving choices that hurt his wife Deepa, or when he was briefly irascible with the owner of a theatre where he was rehearsing for a play. But the book is also effusive in its praise for every aspect of his personality and his work, such that it overshadows such moments.
All of this, however, does not take away from the achievements of Soumitra Chatterjee and His World as a biography of the beloved actor. In it, Chakraborty effectively establishes the case that Chatterjee was, perhaps, one of the last remaining people who embodied the essence of the “Bengal Renaissance,” with its ethos of progressive politics and its curiosity about the world. For lovers of films, Ray, and Chatterjee, it is a necessary read – although I must say that I’m a little miffed that it does not mention one of my absolute favourite of the films he acted in, and the one that really introduced me to the Chatterjee I would come to know as contemporaneous: Patalghar, as the eccentric scientist Aghor Sen. But most importantly, it does extremely successfully what I think most biographies set out to do: honour and memorialise an extraordinary life, extraordinarily lived.
Soumitra Chatterjee and His World, Sanghamitra Chakraborty, Penguin Random House India.
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