Soumitra Chatterjee was bigger than the films he acted in. He was a poet, playwright, author

That Soumitra Chatterjee was our greatest living actor is unquestionable. What is also unquestionable is that very few of us have ever watched him on screen. He lived in Kolkata, as far away as possible from mainstream cinema, and worked only in Bengali films even though he won countless international awards. No, not the kind of awards we give away in Bollywood, televised to millions. Bengali cinema, being regional, very little of his work saw mainstream cultural acceptance. We only heard of him when he won an award somewhere across the globe. Or a book appeared on him, in some foreign language. We knew he was there when international critics raved about him. And of course we heard of him in the context of Satyajit Ray, who discovered him and put our cinema on the world map. 

We heard of Soumitra also when he went to hospital last month. And now, we hear of him having passed away two days ago, at 85, from Covid complications. 

Truth be said, Soumitra was bigger than the films he acted in. He was a poet, playwright, author. He even edited, I recall, a little magazine called Ekkhon for which Ray designed the occasional cover. He was, in that sense, a typical bhadralok, the proud upholder of a great tradition he learnt from the doyens of Bengali theatre, Sisir Bhaduri and Ahindra Chowdhury. The eclectic Renaissance man Bengal always adored. 

When I was editing a book recently, of interviews with thirty great Indians, I persuaded Khalid (Mohammed) to go and meet him in Kolkata. I thought it would be interesting to see a mainstream critic profile the thoughts of one of regional cinema’s greatest, a man who debuted in the third film of the Apu trilogy and then stayed on to make 13 more films with Ray during the next three decades, from a Tagore classic to one of Bengal’s favourite characters, Feluda - the fictional detective created by Ray himself. 

There were many more roles Soumitra played in an impossible lifetime. From the stylish, handsome, well-bred villain Mayurvahan in Tapan Sinha’s Jhinder Bondi, a take on Rupert of Hentzau from The Prisoner of Zenda, to a petty thief sheltered by a prostitute in Tarun Majumdar’s Sansar Simantey to a doctor who calls out a temple whose ‘holy’ water causes a jaundice epidemic in Ganashatru, an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. There were hundreds of roles, each more exacting than the other, in the 210 films he did. 

It all began with Apur Sansar. Ray started the Apu trilogy with Pather Panchali, on a budget of Rs 70,000 given by the West Bengal government, its producer. Those were the early fifties when a newly independent India was ready to try anything. When Ray, who worked for an ad agency, approached the government with the script of Bibhuti Bhushan Bandyopadhyay’s classic, they promptly agreed and, rumour has it, sanctioned the money from their road construction budget since ‘Pather Panchali’ translates into ‘The Song of the Road’.