That’s all I have,” the newspaper agent in our neighbourhood in Kolkata said, gesturing at his table. It was mid-morning and all that was left were some Hindi newspapers and business dailies. Every single Bengali and English daily was gone.
“Soumitra Chatterjee,” the vendor said by way of explanation.
Chatterjee had died the day before. The emptiness of the newspaper agent’s table represented in its own way the void he had left but was also a marker of his enduring relevance till the end.
Never old
Soumitra Chatterjee has been eulogised as the last of the Renaissance Bengalis, an actor and a gentleman, both gentle and genteel, a legend in his own time. He accomplished much in his rich career of six decades but now I realise one of his incredible achievements was that he did not turn into the boring old uncle repeating yet another “When I was with Manik-da aka Satyajit Ray” anecdote. Although he lately acted in his share of forgettable films as the upright senior citizen suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, he did not become a bewigged caricature of himself. In a city always prone to nostalgia he escaped being pickled in it.
His last gift to us was a masterclass in how to age gracefully. The writer Mahasweta Devi once wrote, “ Soumitra buro hoyni, boyesh hoyechhe (Soumitra has not grown old, he has just grown in years)”. The actress Sabitri Chatterjee, someone Soumitra admired, said, “It gives me great courage to just know that he is there, that at his age he is still acting, reading poetry, writing, doing theatre, still working on his own terms.”
At a time when he should have been picking up lifetime achievement awards and resting on his laurels, he apparently left behind 10 films ready for release.
It could not have been easy for a man whose looks made admirers swoon to accept ageing. Even now I cannot look at a picture of
Shashi Kapoor, Felicity Kendal, Madhur Jaffrey and Soumitra Chatterjee strolling together at the 1965 Berlinale without a pang. It seems like a paean to something ineffable, a syzygy of serendipitous beauty that would just waft away like the smoke from Chatterjee’s once ever-present cigarette. But Chatterjee allowed himself to age onscreen, even joking in an interview, “This industry has no other old actor who can replace me. You need old men.”
Just himself
Chatterjee with his Ray pedigree and love for Rabindranath Tagore, could have easily become fossilised in Bengal’s reverence for its hallowed past. He had been interviewed so many times he could have sleepwalked through his answers about how he met Ray, the rivalry with Uttam Kumar, the comparisons between early Ray and late Ray.
Some of the more woke criticise him for being the opium of the Bengali middle class who, they feel, worshipped him not just because he was classy but because he embodied their class superiority fantasies, with refined diction to boot.
But Soumitra Chatterjee was not Apu or even Felu-da. Those were just parts he played. If he had to bear the burden of being Exhibit A of the vanishing species, Bhadralokus Bengalus, that was more our doing than his. He was just himself. As his great friend, the late actor Rabi Ghosh, wrote, “Soumitra is a poet/ writer, he speaks beautifully, he can shoot the breeze beautifully, he even drinks beautifully, in measured moderation.”
He was very aware of his own worth but also of its limits. He remembered producers baulked at his idea of a film adaptation of Tiktiki (adapted from Anthony Shaffer’s play, Sleuth ) starring him and Uttam Kumar because they thought a film without a
heroine would flop in the mofussil areas. “These were producers for whom Uttam-da and I had given multiple hits,” he said with a shrug. But somehow he retained a sense of playfulness, rather than rancour. Once he was asked if he had to go away forever what two works of literature he would carry with him.
He chose Tagore’s Gitabitan and the Mahabharata . But later he said he had changed his mind. The Gitabitan remained because he could not imagine being without Tagore but instead of the Mahabharata he picked Sukumar Ray’s nonsense verse classic, Abol Tabol . That was Soumitra Chatterjee, always evolving, always curious, that rare raconteur more interested in the story than in the sound of his own voice.
Infinite variety
It’s a measure of how indelible his roles were that their impact has crossed generations. In a tribute to Chatterjee, the Bengali poet Srijato said he was surprised at how the fervent social media pleas during Chatterjee’s illness referred to his characters, not to the man himself. Apu, stay unvanquished. Fight, Khit-da, fight. Felu-da, solve this case. At first he was nonplussed but then he realised that these characters were as iconic as Chatterjee himself, they had given solace and strength to many people at many times. “And the threads that hold these kites aloft all end in Soumitra Chatterjee’s hand,” wrote Srijato.
At least those roles will remain. Just the other day I chanced upon a clip of Charulata and sighed as his Amal sank into that reclining chair with insouciant ease while Charu embroidered away on the bed. We can watch that clip whenever we miss the actor Soumitra Chatterjee.
But not everything can be preserved like that. A couple of days after his death I walked into the living room where yet another Chatterjee interview was playing on the television. As I was about to leave the room, something he said stopped me. I stood there listening to him. Before I knew it, 10 minutes had passed and I was still waiting to hear what else he had to stay.
After 60 years in the limelight, age had not withered him, nor custom staled his infinite variety. That’s what made him truly special, not classic or classist, simply a class apart.
The writer is the author of Don’t Let Him Know.
