‘Soumitra Chatterjee, who played Amal in Satyajit Ray’s legendary film Charulata , once recalled how Ray’s sense of beauty was more about the flutter of a searching mind than about large eyes and a chiselled face.
The lonely wife
He probably looked for those imperfections while casting the female lead for Mahanagar in 1963, arguably one of the best woman-centric movies made in India. Madhabi Mukherjee, then an upcoming actor, was chosen. She went on to immortalise Charulata, Rabindranath Tagore’s iconic lonely wife from his novella Nastanirh . Probably her persona, one that slowly unwraps to leave a lingering feel of subtle charm, is what caught the master’s eye when he watched her in Mrinal Sen’s Baishey Shravan .
Madhabi, who was in Thiruvananthapuram to attend the 22nd International Film Festival of Kerala where she was honoured, is 76, but the naivety and subtle rebellion towards circumstances as were seen in Charulata is intact in her.
Soumitra Chatterjee and Madhabi Mukherjee in Charulata.
The character has, by and large, become her identity. But Madhabi feels she was like Aarthy from Mahanagar , the woman from a middle-class home who steps out to earn for her family.
“For Aarthy, her home was her world before she ventured out. But the process transforms her into someone for whom the world outside becomes her home. It wasn’t tough to understand Aarthy for a woman of my generation, whose views were sure home-bound yet, strong with streaks of empathy. In fact, it was not tough to understand any of the characters I played because they reflected the ethos of the period,” says Madhabi.
That is the reason why she doesn’t feel Charulata is in any way special for her than Aarthy or Sita of Ritwik Ghatak’s Subarnarekha . Neither is Supriya of Dibaratrir Kabya , for which she won the National Award in 1970.
“To me, my characters are like my children,” she says, remembering her work in Tapan Sinha’s Aandher Periye in which she plays a woman who has trouble with her eyesight. The character had immense potential to make a point but wasn’t received well. There are several such characters lost to time that are close to her.
Different perspectives
Along with Ray she holds Ghatak and all the other filmmakers she worked with in high esteem. “Remember the ‘swing’ scene in the garden from Charulata ? There was a similar scene in Subarnarekha too. The scenes showed the difference in the approach of Ray and Ghatak. For Ray, the movement of the swing symbolised the sheer happiness of living while for Ghatak, it was more about life’s realities. Ray used to tell me to feel myself in what he has written and Ghatak shaped me into the character he wanted me to play.”
Madhabi Mukherjee
Like the characters she played who symbolise an era when Indians were waking up to a world of free spirit, Madhabi is a reminder of a time in Indian cinema when creativity was unfettered yet reflected the true depth of tradition. An era, the fading away of which, she keenly watches.
“I never accepted films from any other languages (Offers came her way, like Raj Kapoor’s Mera Nam Joker . The part was later played by Simi Garewal) because Bengali gave me so much. That culture is dying, and so is the cinema here,” she says. Even Kolkata’s cultural landscape has changed. “Many theatres too have been pulled down. We bring so much of other cultures home that ours is snuffed out. We become, as they say, na ghar ka na ghat ka . This reflects in the creative output too,” Madhabi observes, depicting a mind that has observed the flow of events with the astute detachment she claims to have approached her roles with.
But she didn’t just watch when the famed Star theatre in Kolkata caught fire. After all, she had begun her acting career at eight as a theatre artiste. She entered politics for that and even fought against Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee in the 2001 Assembly elections on a Trinamool ticket. “But politics isn’t for me,” she says though there are social causes on which she speaks on.
Madhabi is wife of actor Nirmal Kumar, a mother of two and a grandmother. She also works in television serials now. “I believe what Swami Vivekananda said – whatever you do, do it with care.” Beyond that, this woman, who was born Madhuri and renamed Madhabi by Mrinal Sen, is still searching. For she is beyond the roles she has played.
