A word about Sharmila Tagore’s Foreword. It is warm, genuine, heartfelt. Much like the biography.
Ratnottama Sengupta
Gaachh (1997), by Catherine Berger of France, had documented only the stage life of Soumitra Chatterjee. Abhijaan (2021), by actor Parambrata Chatterjee, didn’t excite cineastes who adored the Bengali icon honoured with a Dadasaheb Phalke for cinema; Sangeet Natak award for theatre; the Lotus award of Padma Bhushan; the French Order des Arts et des Lettres… “Will you give us his biopic on stage?” I’d asked Poulami Chatterjee in November, when she directed Janmantar, which he wrote in 1993 but wasn’t staged before. Again in January, when she staged Chandanpurer Chor, his light hearted transcreation of Jean Anouilh’s Carnival of Thieves.
“I don’t favour a biopic, it cannot capture every facet of Bapi’s versatile and inventive personality,” she believes. “But a stage production will be more limiting.” Because? Soumitra Chatterjee (1935-2020) wasn’t merely a film star. He was a poet, essayist, editor, theatre-person, and painter.
Sanghamitra Chakraborty embarked on the daunting task of encompassing the multifarious shades and nuances of an extraordinary life. And she has done justice to the magnificence of the talent toasted in Cannes, Berlin, Tokyo and Moscow for a filmography that went beyond Ray. Soumitra Chatterjee and his World (Penguin Random House, 2025) is indeed a definitive biography that steers readers to the land and clime where he was born; through the influences that shaped him; and his myriad loves: for books, plays, acting, Tagore, friends, family, films, and Ray.
Exhaustive? Yes. Tiresome? Never. Because the narrative is reinforced with stories culled from his diaries, family lores, his daughter and mother too. She traces young Soumitra’s ‘grooming’ into a natural actor to an amusing incident: A client of his lawyer grandfather left a briefcase with considerable money with the child. He went to his neighbours and said he’s leaving for a far-off destination with the money. When they tried to dissuade him, he smiled knowing he’d ‘convinced’ them with his ‘lie’ — the first step in acting.
Again, during the Bengal Famine, eight-year-old ‘Pulu’ stole rotis off their dinner to feed a starving man from the districts who eventually became one of the three-million skeletons who paved Calcutta of 1943. Soumitra could, then, slip under the skin of Gangacharan (Ashani Sanket,1973), aided by observations he’d jot down years before the camera rolled.
So was he an intuitive or cerebral actor? Constantly compared with charismatic Uttam Kumar, Ray himself had defined his Nayak as “intuitive” and his Apu as “cerebral”. But Soumitra refuted this, “No actor can be one or the other.” He himself combined both in his art to become a thief, zamindar, blind poet, swimming coach, divorced husband, or roadside Romeo.
Understatement was his forte. Less was always more for his artless portrayals. If critics read this being a ‘non-actor’, he responded with sketches as diverse as Sandeep (Ghare Bairey, 1984) and Narsingh (Abhijan, 1962). Only a master of the craft could dive deep into the complexities of their villainy.
A word about Sharmila Tagore’s Foreword. It is warm, genuine, heartfelt. Much like the biography.
Ratnottama Sengupta is a film journalist, festival curator and author. She is a recipient of the National Film Award.
Soumitra Chatterjee and His World
Sanghamitra Chakraborty
Penguin Vintage
pp. 512; Rs 799
