Bengali First: The Fierce Commitments of Soumitra Chatterjee
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Near the end of the late Bengali actor Soumitra Chatterjee’s six-decade career in cinema, journalists liked to ask him one question quite frequently: Why did he never enter Bollywood?
Depending on your vantage point, this query is either reasonable or ridiculous. Imagining Chatterjee anywhere other than Bengali-language cinema might sound impossible to many filmgoers, especially those of us with Bengali roots. The thought exercise may seem doubly absurd when you consider how the quiet tenor of the films he got his start in feels so discordant with the ostentatious leanings of Bollywood. Art-house Bengali features gave Chatterjee global renown, beginning with the title role in the director Apur Sansar (1959), the final installment of Satyajit Ray’s widely feted Apu Trilogy. A transition to the deceptively greener pastures of Hindi-language movies, with their promises of greater money and national exposure, may have seemed logical for a performer as gifted as Chatterjee was. Offers reportedly even came for him as early as the 1970s.
But he never succumbed to Bollywood’s temptation. Why would he leave what was then known as Calcutta, the urban headquarters of West Bengal’s cinema, for the glitter of Bombay? His attachment to Bengal, the land of his blood, was too fierce. “I am a Bengali first and then anything else,” he reasoned to the newspaper the Hindu in 2012.
So he never left, a gesture that seems both bold and righteous from today’s remove. He was firm in his fealty to the Bengali people, his people. In choosing to stay, Chatterjee, who died in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in November at eighty-five due to complications from COVID-19, left a deep impression upon Bengali cinema, art, culture. Obituaries have rightly noted that he made a whopping fourteen films with Ray, their bond so tight that Pauline Kael once referred to Chatterjee as the director’s “one-man stock company.” These roles flaunted the actor’s versatility: a sensitive poet in Charulata (1964), a Brahmin doctor and teacher living through the Bengal Famine of 1943 in Distant Thunder (1973), a sly revolutionary in The Home and the World (1984).
Long before the names of Mrinal Sen or Ritwik Ghatak would land on global cinephile’s radars, Ray was Bengali cinema’s most prominent export. By extension, Chatterjee became the face of an entire region’s cinema to audiences across the world. That very fact may seem at odds with the reality that Chatterjee’s filmography, focused in West Bengal, was so local in its orientation. This is the great paradox of Chatterjee’s career, though. He gained plenty of international admirers and the enduring affection of fans in his home state of West Bengal, but the rest of India was slower on the uptake.
In any case, Chatterjee was far more than Ray’s poster boy. Chatterjee appeared in hundreds of films in the Bengali language with directors other than Ray, which is to say that he was a vital presence in a side of Bengali cinema that usually goes unseen by global audiences. His talents stretched beyond acting, too. He was a prolific essayist, magazine publisher, painter, playwright, poet—a polymath, in a word. Chatterjee’s creative inclinations earned him the reputation for being what the director Suman Ghosh called a “renaissance man,” while the critic Amitava Nag, writing in the book Beyond Apu: 20 Favourite Film Roles of Soumitra Chatterjee (2016), referred to him as the “thinking man’s hero.”
These sobriquets might seem strewn with all sorts of class implications, and it’s true that, to many Bengali viewers, Chatterjee embodied a decidedly middle-class ideal of the erudite Bengali man, an archetype he nevertheless imbued with decency and truth. He came to personify what Bengalis call the bhadralok—quite literally, the gentleman. This quality distinguished him from his slightly older rival and occasional costar Uttam Kumar, whose public image cut across class lines and translated to wider commercial appeal (fittingly, Kumar dabbled in Bollywood). Each actor had his own place in Bengali cinema, though; there was room for them both to excel.
Besides, Chatterjee, who studied Bengali literature in college, was often careful to eschew any smug displays of intellectual Bengali superiority, an exclusionary and stereotypical tendency that some middle- and upper-class West Bengalis can exhibit in their worst moments. “I have an advantage over my fellow actors in the way I have a command over the Bengali language,” he’d once say. “This is not pride, but satisfaction.” Pride and satisfaction, arrogance and fulfillment: Chatterjee understood the distinction.
Apur Sansar may be largely responsible for stamping Chatterjee with the mark of the genteel, well-read Bengali man. In the film, he plays an aspiring writer in Calcutta who stumbles into a marriage with a friend’s cousin, Aparna (Sharmila Tagore). Though he isn’t quite prepared for the commitment, he accepts the task and discovers bliss within the relationship, even though catastrophe awaits him. Just twenty-four when he shot the film, Chatterjee cycles through each stage in Apu’s maturation like quicksilver: the ambition of a desperate artist, the uncertainty of his life as a newlywed, the hollowness of losing his wife to childbirth. As Apu navigates the doldrums of grief, he disavows his young son. Even when his character’s selfishness seems indefensible, though, Chatterjee makes Apu’s emotions so accessible that he never loses the audience’s compassion for his character’s plight.
The film is likely most people’s entry point into Chatterjee’s filmography, and the performance no doubt provides ample evidence of how fully-formed the actor’s talents were in his first movie. But as a child in my Bengali-speaking home in New Jersey, oceans away from West Bengal, I would associate Chatterjee with an entirely different role: He was an intrepid private investigator named Prodosh Mitter, nicknamed Feluda. Feluda was the subject of a series of thrilling mystery novellas penned by Ray and geared toward children. The director made two film adaptations of these texts starring Chatterjee as Feluda, The Golden Fortress (1974) and The Elephant God (1979). Like their origin texts, these entertaining films are tonally disparate from Ray’s more heralded works targeted toward adults.
I devoured these Feluda books with enthusiasm as a nine-year-old kid, but Feluda himself seemed like a mythic abstraction in my head. On-screen, Feluda became a more complex creature than my childhood mind could ever envision. Chatterjee gave this fantasy flesh. The Elephant God centers around Feluda attempting to crack the case of a valuable statue of a deity that’s gone missing, and the film distills Chatterjee’s magnetism into a few hours. Look to the scene when Feluda first learns of the case at hand. Chatterjee takes a straightforward, clinical line of questioning—where’s this statue from, what’s that person’s name—and manages to give it motion and moral urgency, revealing what animates Feluda in his quest for justice. He is curious in one moment, reflective the next; Chatterjee allows his viewer to see each thought turning over in Feluda’s head.
The performance teems with rich details, too. In a later scene, Feluda gets a mid-meal call from a potentially crucial source. He rushes to the phone and listens intently to what the man on the other end of the line is saying, but Chatterjee stops every few seconds to lick his fingers clean of any food between words. These quirks—gestures that seem so unstudied, belying the deliberate choices Chatterjee made as a performer—are meticulous in their peculiarity, bringing a folk hero down to human scale. Such was the sorcery of Chatterjee’s partnership with Ray: Ray’s writing was brilliant on its own, but Chatterjee interpreted it with a kind of imagination that words can’t capture. Even a child’s mind has limits compared to the movies.
He’d cast a similar spell in Saroj Dey’s Koni (1984) as a swimming trainer who mentors a young girl named Koni who lives in a slum (Sriparna Banerjee). Here, Chatterjee infuses a stock character from sports dramas—a strict, loving coach—with sincere, principled conviction. “Fight, Koni, fight!” is a slogan he routinely mutters to his mentee. In Chatterjee’s hands, that cheer transcends its surface-level triteness and becomes a genuinely moving plea: to surmount the hardships life offers you, no matter how trying the battles might be. Chatterjee was rarely one to appeal to easy pathos; in his finest works, he earned audience sympathy without begging for it.
