"Fight, Koni, fight...that's my most memorable dialogue," declares Soumitra Chatterjee, pumping a fist into the air. You stare in disbelief. Not anything from Apur Sansar, or a line fromCharulata, innocent and yet meaningful, or even a penetrating Feluda witticism from Sonar Kella? Not anything Satyajit Ray is said to have written keeping him in mind? But then perhaps no other dialogue than this simple line from one of Soumitra's more obscure films—Koni, in which he plays a swimming coach training a small-town girl from a poor family to survive in the devious world of sports—holds more significance for him at the moment.
The veteran Bengali actor of nearly 300 films and Satyajit Ray's alter ego was detected with cancer last year. After some tests recently, the doctors have accepted defeat. We meet him on a wet morning in his Calcutta home; he is sitting in the living room lined with books, looking out the window into the distance. "Though we know we will die one day, the fact that when that moment will arrive is unknown to us gives us a false sense of permanence. So when you are given a certain timeframe to live, it immediately makes you aware of your transience," he says. But Chatterjee, 74, is clear how he wants to live the days he has left. "Not by trying to evade death," he says, "but by making the most of every living moment."
Ray and Soumitra on the sets of Ashani Sanket. (Photograph by Mona Chowdhuri)
And Soumitra is true to his word. For one of India's finest actors, who has got into the skin of numerous characters for the greater part of his life (he was 23 when he debuted as the protagonist Apu in Ray's Apur Sansar in 1959), it has now clearly become imperative to reveal his own self to others. In the past one year, he has produced two plays—Tritiyo Onko...Otoeband Atma Katha (The Third Act...Therefore and Autobiography). Though they are adaptations of other plays, both have strong elements from his life. In the first, three different characters portray three different aspects of a man who has been told that he will die soon. The second delineates the complexity of the protagonist's relationships with women, particularly his inability to deal with a situation in which a young woman falls in love with him while doing documentary research on his life. Soumitra, who faced a similar situation, admits that "it's the events in my life which have left an indelible impression in me which are finding their way into the theatre I create."
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Suman is more nuanced (he was vocal in the Nandigram agitation, and insists he doesn't belong to any political party) but expresses discomfort with the possibility that there could be "attempts to put a political brand on even a veteran actor like Chatterjee". The Trinamool government says nothing of that sort is the case. They say King Lear was delayed because the Minerva Repertoire Theatre, which always stages Lear, is being refurbished, and it will take some time. Also, government sources say Lear productions are expensive and with the cut-back on funds for plays, it will have to wait till the sanctions come through.
Soumitra in Ray's Charulata and (right) Apur Sansar
A veteran of a career that's seen varied riches, Soumitra is unfazed. Wrapped up in the challenges of theatre at present, he has works with Mrinal Sen and Asit Sen to look back on, as also a successful commercial side. And, of course, Ray. Soumitra has acted in 15 of the 34 Ray films—they had a symbiotic relationship. Soumitra says originally Ray had not planned on doing an Apu trilogy but decided on it to accommodate him. "I was introduced to Ray while he was making Aparajito (the sequel to the masterpiece Pather Panchali). Ray said I was too mature to play the adolescent Apu in the second part. Later he told me he wrote Apur Sansarwith me in mind." This association continued till the end; his last film with Ray was Shakha Proshakha in 1990.
Of his many commercial hits, he says it was Ray who first encouraged him to try popular films. He confesses that he did have apprehensions about acting in out-and-out commercial cinema, but Ray used to tell him, "If you want to be great, nothing should be too small for you"—words still valued by someone who has rekindled his love for the stage.
A couple of years ago, when Outlook did a feature where celebrities were requested to go behind the camera and take snapshots illustrating what life means to them, Soumitra Chatterjee chose to take a picture of the Ganga at Calcutta's Babu Ghat because it reminded him of how the "eternal flow of life represented by the river was always juxtaposed with images of transience—the floating boat which becomes a speck in the horizon, or the traffic moving across the bridge over the river." Transience doesn't perturb him. He is not afraid of dying, he says, but is afraid of pain. With disease stalking him, what worries him most now is losing his dignity when the end comes. His daughter Poulomi, an actress and dancer, says: "Bapi is deeply spiritual—not religious—and he believes the spirit is indomitable. He will not let fatigue stop him." That is why, after such a long journey, he remembers Koni the most.
AUTHORS: DOLA MITRA
PEOPLE: SOUMITRA CHATTERJEE
TAGS: MOVIES | THEATRE
SECTION: ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Translate JUL 30, 2011 08:19 PM 1 | "Soumitra's more obscure films—Koni" Well, not to bengali viewers. Its one of best comercial movie done by him. |
JUL 30, 2011 11:59 PM 2 | What an actor! |
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