Thirteen winters ago, on 24th January 2011, I attended the The Dover Lane Music Conference for the last time, along with my parents. That was a significant phase of my life as I was on the cusp of starting my professional career and was about to bid adieu to Calcutta and move out into the big bad world. It was also the time when I had newly joined this social network called Facebook. As I look back into my Facebook timeline today and parse through the uploaded photos, I stumble across the fact that my Facebook post from that period actually carried the memories of the magical night including a snippet alluding to Ustaad Rashid Khan who was one of the four performing artists.
The night started with danseuse Yamini Reddy performing to Raaga Nata Bhairavi. Born to the legendary Kuchipudi exponents, Padma Bhushans Raja and Radha Reddy, Yamini has got dance in inheritance from her parents and she lived up to her genes with her beguiling mudras. Then came Kaushiki Chakraborty, daughter of Pandit Ajoy Chakraborty , who enthralled the audience with her rendition of bandish in Raaga Pahari and Raaga Kaunsi Kanhra. Next up was Amaan Ali Bangash who mesmerised us with Sarod recital of a bandish composed by his father Ustaad Amjad Ali Khan. He had his mother Subhalakshmi Khan in the front row as audience.
There is a saying in Bengali .. “ওস্তাদের মার শেষ রাতে” and the unforgettable Musical Soiree was rounded off with Ustaad Ustad Rashid Khan coming up with powerhouse performances of Raaga Lalit and Raaga Ahir Bhairav as the night slowly gave way to dawn.
Rashid Khan was always a maverick and a musical genius in equal measures. But then he was destined for greatness. After all, he carried the flattering endorsement of Pandit Bhimsen Joshi and Ustaad Amjad Ali Khan called him a “Prodigy” !! For listeners, it was Rashid’s ability to stir profound exclamations – of love, devotion and reverence – that set him apart. Hearing him sing was a beautiful surprise, as he would switch between the lyrical and soft, before suddenly bursting into an intricate taan – the technique of improvising with rapid melodic passages. His voice had a honey-like warmth that grabbed listeners the instant he sang the first note. He could sing the slow tempo alaap with the meditative quality of an Ustaad Amir Khan and move seamlessly into a fast-tempoed tarana or a romantic thumri like ‘Yaad Piya Ki Aaye’. Inside the sanctum sanctorum of Indian Classical Music, Rashid Khan was the “prince of modernism” who showed complete respect to classical forms but didn’t hesitate to “blur the distinctions between mainstream genres”.
On that fateful day , as the sun broke out , his exquisite exposition of Raag Ahir Bhairav – usually sung as the first Prahr of the morning – didn’t leave me for days. In fact it stayed with me and continues to reverberate in my subconscious and has strangely become an abiding memory of Calcutta winters that I will carry till my last breath.
‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter’.
~ John Keats
We mourn the passing of Ustaad Rashid Khan, one of the greatest vocalists of Hindustani classical music, may be we mourn the passing of his legacy of perfection as well
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is one of classical music’s most famous openings. It begins with a distinctive four-note “short-short-short-long” motif. But what do the starting notes signify? Is it a thunderclap – or fate, knocking at the door? Perhaps “Oppenheimer-the movie” mirrors this dilemma and oscillates between the two.
It has been 10 days since Christopher Nolan’s latest creation “Oppenheimer” released in the theatres and 9 days (yes, I am counting) since I had the good fortune of experiencing it on the big screen and I have been contemplating about the director’s vision ever since , having made the exception of booking the ticket two weeks in advance for the first time in my life. What I initially thought would be a review of a 3-hour long biopic has instead in my mind turned into a more complex deliberation on the vortex of power vis-à-vis science. In three words, I describe this latest cinematic masterpiece as a “Triumph of Intellect”.
At the very beginning of the movie, two sequences play out which essentially lay bare the tone and tenor of what is to come ahead. And it is only much later while brooding about the movie that I realized the immense significance of these two sequences. Nolan is a wizard of reverse storytelling (remember Memento) and with Oppenheimer, the director plays with the timelines from the very first shot of the movie as Nolan surreptitiously interplays the ART of CINEMA with THEORETICAL PHYSICS. Along one timeline — in colour, with opening text reading “FISSION” — runs the story of Oppenheimer (an incredible Cillian Murphy), spanning his youthful forays into theoretical physics at European universities, through his years at Berkeley, his dabbling in left-wing politics, his affair with Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) and eventual marriage to Kitty (Emily Blunt), and his appointment by Gen. Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) to run the ultra-secretive Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. Through timeline jumps, we start to fill out a picture of what would happen to him after — in particular, an older Oppenheimer being investigated by a government commission regarding his ties to communists. Meanwhile, in a second track, we are witnessing — for reasons that do not become obvious for a while — an agitated Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), who is trying to get approved by the Senate as commerce secretary and isn’t quite sure why he’s meeting with resistance. This section is in black and white, and labeled “FUSION.”
Those labels are worth keeping in mind, because when at Los Alamos the Hungarian physicist Edward Teller (Benny Safdie) describes his idea for a hydrogen bomb — and someone later describes it as not a weapon of mass destruction, but a weapon of mass genocide — we suddenly learn the difference between fission and fusion. Fission, which splits the nucleus of an atom into two lighter nuclei, unleashes enormous power, capable of leveling Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But fusion, which combines two light nuclei into one, unleashes far more energy and can level, in a sense, the world.
OPPENHEIMER would have been a daunting subject for any filmmaker. A public intellectual with a flair for the dramatic, he directed the top-secret lab at Los Alamos, New Mexico, taking the atomic bomb from theoretical possibility to terrifying reality in an impossibly short timeline. Later he emerged as a kind of philosopher king of the postwar nuclear era, publicly opposing the development of the hydrogen bomb and becoming a symbol both of America’s technological and scientific might and of its conscience. That stance made Oppenheimer a target in the McCarthy era, spurring his enemies to paint him as a Communist sympathizer. He was stripped of his security clearance during a 1954 hearing convened by the Atomic Energy Commission. He lived the rest of his life diminished, and died at 62 in 1967, in Princeton, New Jersey. A life of triumph and tragedy, in equal measures, similar to PROMETHEUS in Greek mythology, who is best known for defying the Olympian gods by stealing fire from them and giving it to humanity in the form of technology, knowledge, and more generally, civilization, someone who represented human striving (particularly the quest for scientific knowledge) and the risk of overreaching or unintended consequences, embodying the lone genius whose efforts to improve human existence could also result in tragedy.
About a minute into Oppenheimer, it becomes obvious why Christopher Nolan wanted to tackle the project. His subject, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” was a theoretical physicist, a man who obsessed over the building blocks of the universe. He flings crystal goblets into corners to observe how they shatter and flirts with women by telling the scientific reasons his own matter won’t just pass through theirs. He dreams of particles and stars and fire; he becomes transfixed by water smacking the surface of puddles. Stoic in his decisions , a polyglot poet who lives in the contradictions, Oppenheimer is a man who delights in paradoxes; at his first encounter with a bewildered Berkeley pupil, he demands to know how light can be both a wave and a particle, and then proceeds, with gusto, to explain.
Nolan seems engaged in a long-running investigation of theoretical physics. He discerns some link between the cold material fabric of the universe — things like time, space, matter, death, eternity — and the more metaphysical meanings of human existence: love, identity, memory, and grief. Often, he weaves together emotion and science, then pulls some threads from ancient myth through the fabric to remind us these are eternal questions. From Memento to Inception, Interstellar to Dunkirk, The Prestige to Tenet, Nolan’s movies leverage Cinema as a Science (images, sound, time, chemicals on celluloid) to confront the tangible with the intangible. The man’s brain is a marvel. His craving for perfection led him to ditch CGI and use traditional graphics to recreate the visualization of atomic behavior and extreme beauty and terror of the trinity test.
Oppenheimer did not regret what he did at Los Alamos; he understood that you cannot stop curious human beings from discovering the physical world around them. Sadly, Oppenheimer’s life story is relevant to our current political predicaments. Oppenheimer was destroyed by a political movement characterized by rank know-nothing, anti-intellectual, xenophobic demagogues. His downfall reminds one of the “Fall of ICARUS” : a Greek parable on human aspiration. Daedalus and his son, Icarus, were imprisoned on the island of Crete. Daedalus created wings to fly away. Icarus, ambitiously, flew too near the sun. The wax holding his wings together melted and he plunged into the sea and drowned. The Oppenheimer case sent a warning to all scientists not to stand up in the political arena as public intellectuals. Cut to present day, we stand on the cusp of another technological revolution in which artificial intelligence will transform how we live and work, and yet we are not yet having the kind of informed civil discourse with its innovators that could help us to make wise policy decisions on its regulation.
The greatest scientific minds in the world are public intellectuals who respond to a higher calling that transcends the paradigms of nations and geo-politics. Oppenheimer belonged to that category, a man of science who was in equal measures a polyglot, a philosopher and a theoretical physicist. You can see this in the repetition of the line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” which Oppenheimer reportedly quoted after the test bomb, nicknamed Trinity, successfully detonated in the desert and showed the scientists and politicians of what it was capable. The moment, at least for Oppenheimer, is a visceral punch, an acknowledgment that with this great invention comes the ability to destroy humankind. Something has been unleashed (a chain reaction) that cannot be pushed back into the bottle.
The movie has not entirely figured him out, and history has not either, but there is no doubt he’s a figure of towering importance. In Oppenheimer, Nolan focuses his lens on power — the kind that split atoms produce, the kind that countries wield, the kind that men crave. Nolan’s Oppenheimer barely qualifies as a biopic, at least not the thudding Hollywood variety. Instead, it is a movie — a virtuoso, among his best — investigating the nature of power: how it is created, how it is kept in balance, and how it leads people into murky moral quandaries that refuse simplistic answers.
Happy Birthday, Mr. Nolan. We are lucky to watch you magically wield your craft as one of the modern masters of avant-garde cinema.
At Indendencia Street, in downtown Guadalajara, a sign was placed on the ANDA Theatre: “Hoje! Não trabalhamos porque vamos ver Pelé”, translated “Today! We don’t work because we’re going to see Pelé”.
At the end of the 1970 World Cup, the English newspaper The Sunday Times published a historic headline: “How do you spell Pelé? GOD”. In the glorious championship in Mexico, Pelé showed Brazilian football to the world, like no one else, and made a city stop working to watch him. In 2019, the official page of Santos, the club where the player made history, joked with the photo: “ Work dignifies the man, but seeing Pelé on the field dignifies him even more. Privileged are those who had the chance to live this unforgettable experience”.
Pelé was one of the first global sporting superstars who transcended continents, admired for his wizardry and sometimes criticized for his political stance, or the lack of it. Pelé’s greatness can be measured by the simple fact that he could make football a spectacle of natural grace and beauty when he missed as much as when he scored. He was the national treasure who once managed to bring about a 48-hour ceasefire between two warring factions during the Nigerian civil war in the 1960s, just so they could watch Pelé play in an exhibition game in Lagos. He was also the person who played a big part in Calcutta hosting him and the New York Cosmos during its tour of Asia in 1977. Pelé played in that game against Mohun Bagan at the Eden Gardens for about half an hour, in the winter of his career and far from his best, but still a turnout of 80,000 mesmerized.
Pelé suffered World Cup disappointments too, none more than when he was brutally kicked out of the competition in England in 1966. He left the scene of the 3-1 defeat by Portugal at Goodison Park draped in a blanket after a succession of fouls that left him limping on one leg, with his right knee heavily bandaged. That knee injury was caused by earlier savage challenges in Brazil’s first game against Bulgaria and Pelé was so disgusted by his treatment that he vowed never to play in another World Cup – a decision the game was grateful he later reversed.
Brazil’s 1970 World Cup win was the pinnacle of Pelé ‘s career. He was the focal point of a dream team that has become enshrined in the game’s history. Pelé may have been the headline act but he was accompanied by names such as Rivelino, Jairzinho, Tostao and Gerson, as well as the great captain and leader Carlos Alberto. Testimony to Pelé ‘s brilliance are two occasions in the 1970 Mexico World Cup when he failed to score – and yet are used to this day as prime exhibits of the skill, power, elegance and mental speed and agility that mark him out as arguably the greatest to have ever graced the game. The first came in Brazil’s opening group game against Czechoslovakia when Pelé , from several yards inside the centre circle in his own half, received the ball languidly then spotted keeper Ivo Viktor off his line. In an elegant, instinctive swing of his right boot, he sent the ball in a high arc towards goal, landing inches wide, with the panicking Viktor making a scrambling retreat before the relief of realising he had not been embarrassed by Pelé ‘s genius. Fast forward to the semi-final against Uruguay, again in Guadalajara, when Pelé raced at full speed on to Tostao’s pass, yet still had the presence of mind to run past keeper Ladislao Mazurkiewicz, also allowing the ball to run past the pair. The keeper had been sold perhaps the greatest dummy in World Cup history. Sadly, the angle was subsequently too tight for Pelé to score but the moment is still replayed whenever World Cups are relived and as the late, great BBC commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme, probably taken as much by surprise as Mazurkiewicz, said in that wonderful moment: “What genius. Incredible.”
Brazil, in 1888, was the last Western country to abolish slavery, and Pelé was born just 52 years later, a poor Black child who started out life shining shoes. Edson Arantes do Nascimento was born on Oct. 23, 1940, in Três Corações, a tiny rural town in the state of Minas Gerais. His parents named him Edson in tribute to Thomas Edison. (Electricity had come to the town shortly before Pelé was born.) When he was about 7, he began shining shoes at the local railway station to supplement the family’s income. One of Pelé’s earliest memories was of seeing his father, while listening to the radio, cry when Brazil lost to Uruguay, 2-1, in the deciding match of the 1950 World Cup in Rio de Janeiro. The game is still remembered as a national calamity. Pelé recalled telling his father that he would one day grow up to win the World Cup for Brazil. And he did in 1958. He had become such a hero that, in 1961, to ward off European teams eager to buy his contract rights, the Brazilian government passed a resolution declaring him a non-exportable national treasure. I am not joking. You can check the records !!! When Pelé was about to retire from Santos in the early 1970s, Henry A. Kissinger, the United States secretary of state at the time, wrote to the Brazilian government asking it to release Pelé to play in the United States as a way to help promote soccer, and Brazil, in America.
In his 21-year career, Pelé — born Edson Arantes do Nascimento — scored 1,283 goals in 1,367 professional matches, including 77 goals for the Brazilian national team. Many of those goals became legendary, but Pelé’s influence on the sport went well beyond scoring. He helped create and promote what he later called “o jogo bonito” — the beautiful game — a style that valued clever ball control, inventive pinpoint passing and a voracious appetite for attacking. Pelé not only played it better than anyone; he also championed it around the world. Among his athletic assets was a remarkable center of gravity; as he ran, swerved, sprinted or backpedalled, his midriff seemed never to move, while his hips and his upper body swiveled around it. He could accelerate, decelerate or pivot in a flash. Off-balance or not, he could lash the ball accurately with either foot. Relatively small, at 5 feet 8 inches, he could nevertheless leap exceptionally high, often seeming to hang in the air to put power behind a header.
How does one define an ICON? A person or thing regarded as a representative symbol or as worthy of veneration They say Muhammad Ali was arguably the greatest sports personality of all time. Pelé was that and more. In his pomp, Pelé was Ali from the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, Jesse Owens in Berlin Olympics. He was Rafael Nadal at Roland Garros, Tiger Woods at Augusta, Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps in Beijing, London and Rio. All rolled into one, many times over!! Maybe it’s best to let pop-culture icon Andy Warhol define Pelé’s legacy in his own inimitable fashion,
“Pelé is one of the few who contradicted my theory,” “Instead of 15 minutes of fame, he will have 15 centuries.”
Tilting at Windmills is an English idiom which means “attacking imaginary enemies”. It originated from Miguel de Cervantes’ early 17th century novel Don Quixote. Thanks to my school curriculum I was exposed to excerpts of this classic as a 12-year-old, although , if yours truly may sheepishly admit, at that point, the full realization of its significance was to yet to dawn upon the then young impressionable mind.
In the passage that I am alluding to, mounting his skinny horse, the protagonist of Don Quixote , charges an army of giants. In his eyes, it is his duty to vanquish these behemoths in the name of his beloved lady, Dulcinea. However, this act of valour is ill conceived. As his squire Sancho Panza explains to him time and again, these aren’t giants; they are merely windmills. Don Quixote is undeterred, but his piercing lance is soon caught in their sails. Never discouraged, the knight stands proudly, and becomes even more convinced of his mission.
So why do I invoke the delusions of a literary character on a day when my nation celebrates the 73rd anniversary of the august occasion of the adopting the Indian constitution and officially transition into a Republic – a Sovereign , Secular, Socialist, Democratic Republic. Because I feel that I need to mark my protest , maybe , a futile attempt, denouncing whatever is transpiring right now in the name of New India. I am a nobody in the larger scheme of things but if maybe 50 years from now, someone is reading my blog (unlikely), they will know that with a clear conscience, I refused to be a mute spectator to the nightmare that is unfolding right in front of my eyes. And this is my way of speaking up …
The attacks on India’s democratic and secular fabric have been relentless in the past few years but events from the past few weeks , seem to point to an even more sinister future. Very recently, I came across the disturbing news of women ( prominent liberal faces who are embodiments of this nation’s Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb ) being apparently auctioned via a mobile application. My horror was further compounded by the fact, that this app targeted two prominent faces with whom I am connected on social media. One of them is an eminent Indian writer, critic, and literary historian. The other person is an extremely popular Radio Jockey. And the common thread binding them is the fact that they both represent the liberal progressive voice which runs counter to the narrative of hate and propaganda that is now all pervasive. The other incident that shook me to the core was the news of a so-called “religious” congregation where in broad daylight oaths were taken to eradicate members of a certain minority community. If you are part of the silent majority that thinks “ this is not my concern”, I assure you , this fire will singe you and your near and dear ones shortly, before you know it. It is a familiar playbook that has been repeated too often in the annals of history , so whether you stand for the majority or minority voice , it will not matter !!
Ananta Dey was my great grandfather from maternal side. He was a freedom fighter who had been imprisoned for 14 years in the Cellular Jail. His name is inscribed in the white marble plaque list of freedom fighters incarcerated by the British at the Cellular Jail (refer to the picture shared above ), where 6 of these 14 years are officially documented. Unlike Savarkar, he didn’t write mercy petitions to the British seeking an early release. Born into wealth, he was a socialist and immersed himself in the cause of freedom struggle in the prime of his youth , renouncing the comforts of a secure life. If I must write about him, one paragraph or even an essay might not do justice. He passed away one year before I was born. Sometimes I imagine how would he (or men of his ilk) have felt about the India they had envisioned and the India that is slowly unravelling before us right now, transforming into an illiberal, majoritarian and intolerant nation.
The state of Indian democracy is very perilous: Parliament has become a rubber stamp, as most of the significant pieces of legislation are passed as laws without discussion; the supreme court’s abdication has been the most spectacular and disappointing. I think, in some senses, it is even worse than the Emergency, because now it stretches across a whole range of judicial issues, where the Supreme Court is simply not willing to challenge the government on constitutional basics. The present ruling dispensation is openly giving dog whistles to communalism which is, you know, a kind of poison that is permeating across our civil society in ways that are quite unprecedented in recent years.
This would not be, for example, possible without the support of Indian capital and the organised and systematic way in which the flow of information is controlled and manipulated, without in a sense the complicity of India’s professional and middle classes. Meaningful Discussions and deliberations have ceased in the public discourse, parliament barely functions, select committees don’t even operate. So, India’s democracy has diminished and shrunk. What feels more disturbing and insidious is the fact that the Indian media openly legitimises and disseminates hate and prejudice. Whether it is print or electronic, most of the media-houses and publications are propagating hatred against minorities in covert or overt forms.
Civil Society is the new frontier of war. The ruling class essentially brands any dissenting voice or stream of thought as an “Enemy of the State” OR in other words like I had mentioned in the beginning of this write-up , “the windmills” are being falsely masqueraded as the principal adversary. I think it was the current Supreme Court Chief Justice who observed the other day that investigative journalism has virtually ceased to exist in India as he says, “everything in our garden appears to be rosy”. Here I am tempted to quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” !!
We have already been reliably informed that Abide with Me will not be played in this year’s Beating Retreat Ceremony because it feels less Indian. This should not come as a surprise. Discarding a wonderful hymn with a universal and humanist message ( and a decades old military tradition) fits in with what New India wants to be. I am afraid that we have moved beyond the inflection point and the shift away from pluralism , secularism and multi-culturalism is now perceptible, decisive, and permanent. It would be naïve to think few election outcomes will change this. However, there will be no one happier than myself to be proved wrong.
Recently Netflix released the Meryl Streep starrer “Don’t Look up”, a doomsday dark comedy / satire on everything that is wrong with our democracies where two scientists are desperate to get the public and political classes to react to a planet-killing comet. With the hope of snapping the masses from their stupor, Jennifer Lawrence’s character, a young scientist with a Greta Thunberg-like disdain for the apathetic, screams into the camera during a live TV appearance: “You should stay up all night every night crying when we’re all, 100 percent, for sure, going to [expletive] die!” She’s swiftly dismissed as hysterical, and an image of her face is gleefully seized on for the full meme treatment.
Maybe, just maybe, if we as a nation collectively decide to wake up from our willful slumber and apathy , LOOK UP and start pushing back , there is still a glimmer of hope , albeit a faint one…
Let me end by tracing the etymological roots of the word REPUBLIC, derived from the Latin expression res publica (“the public thing”). Oxford provides two definitions. The modern interpretation is “ a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch.” The archaic definition is “a group with a certain equality between its members.” I cherish the sentiment echoed in the archaic version, what about you !!
In the picture (L-R) : Preamble to the Constitution Of India, An artist’s depiction of Don Quixote , Names of freedom fighters inscribed in marble plaque who were incarcerated at the Cellular Jail pre-independence.
Commenting on his acting in Satyajit Ray’s Teen Kanya, veteran director Shyam Benegal had once observed –
“Soumitra Chatterjee’s performance can be compared to a fine Persian carpet, subtle and exquisite. It is only when you turn to look at the back of the carpet do you see the intricate weave that has gone into its making.”
So which Soumitra Chatterjee are you going to reminisce today ?
The Actor
The Poet
The Writer
The Playwright
The Reciter
The Painter
The Public intellectual
Soumitra Chatterjee, the thespian , was all of the above and much more.
He was the protagonist of one of the greatest movie trilogies ever made in world cinema and he was also the voice of Amit Ray in Tagore’s শেষের কবিতা (Shesher Kabita).
To call Soumitra babu as one the greatest actors this country has ever produced , would be an understatement. He is an institution, a cultural icon and right up there in the pantheon of legends along with the likes of Toshiro Mifune, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Robert DeNiro & Marlon Brando.
Chatterjee was also someone who has steadfastly remained an integral part of the Bengali cultural landscape for close to six decades, an embodiment of the typical Bengali bhadralok — sensitive, vulnerable, and intelligent.
The world of Apu catapulted Soumitra to international acclaim, but his naturally unique and sensitive portrayal of Amal in Charulata is unforgettable and also took him closest to his one of his three mentors , Tagore ( the others being of course theatre legend Shishir Bhaduri & the auteur Satyajit Ray himself ). Chatterjee has acted in 14 films directed by Ray that comprised of many diverse layers of characterization, performance, style and presentation. His epochal collaborations with Ray ( his alter-ego according to many ) have few parallels in world cinema , only two instances of worth I can recollect right away ‘Kurosawa – Mifune’ & ‘Fellini – Mastroianni’.
It is hard to believe that someone who essayed the role of Bhibutibhushan’s Apu could also reinvent himself as the proud and ill-tempered taxi driver Narasingh Rajput in Abhijan (অভিযান, The Expedition). In fact it is a little known fact that the character of Narasingh was a direct influence for the character of the cynical cab driver Travis Bickle (played by Robert De Niro) in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. On one frame he was the conscientious and honest Dr. Gupta is Ganashatru, on the other , the revolutionary Sandip in Ghare Baire.
Writing in the New Yorker, critic Pauline Kael said this about Chatterjee: ‘Soumitra Chatterjee, Ray’s one-man stock company, moves so differently in the different roles he plays them, he is almost unrecognisable.’. In Tapan Sinha’s adaptation of The Prisoner of Zenda, Jhinder Bandi, Soumitro could play the role of handsome but fiendishly wicked Mayurbahan with equal elan. All this while he was never typecast and could also effortlessly straddle the world of commercial films with star turns in Teen Bhuboner Pare , Saat Pake Bandha & Basanta Bilap to name a few.
But then there was this other side of Soumitra babu as the public thinker and many of his characters brought his intellectual beliefs to the fore as someone who could speak truth to power , be it Udayan Pandit in Hiraak Rajar Deshe ( দড়ি ধরে মারো টান, রাজা হবে খান খান ) or as the swimming coach Khidda in Koni struggling against the impossible odds of the corrupt system (“ Fight Koni, fight !!), memorable performances which will forever remain etched in the cinematic lore.
Chatterjee was a polymath. Apart from the 300 or so films under his belt, he was also a dramatist with over 15 adaptations and more than 30 productions to his name, poet, writer , elocution artist , painter and an editor for two decades of one of Bengal’s most versatile literary magazines Ekshan. On stage, he is most famous for his rendition of Shakespeare’s King Lear.
The last time I saw his acting was in Mayurakshi , an intensely emotional tale of an 84-year-old Sushovan, a brilliant former professor of History, presently suffering from dementia and cognitive decline. In fact, Chatterjee is no stranger to the current Netflix generation , remember the short film Ahalya by Sujoy Ghosh where he was cast opposite Radhika Apte.
With his passing away today, another remnant of my childhood is also gone forever. You cannot imagine Hercule Poirot without David Suchet, Sherlock Holmes without Jeremy Brett. Similarly, Soumitra Chatterjee immortalized Ray’s super sleuth Feluda a.k.a Pradosh C Mitter on the silver screen. His antics as the cerebral detective in Sonar Kella , his sparring duels with Utpal Dutta’s Machiavellian Maganlal Meghraj in Joy Baba Felunath are all part of a cherished memory jukebox and any Bong kid worth his/her salt , will happily attest to the same.
And that brings me back to my earlier question. Which Soumitra Chatterjee will I remember ?
The answer, Soumitra Chatterjee … Bengal’s Last Renaissance Man.
For someone of his stature , one can’t write an obituary .. maybe an eulogy , not that he needs one.
Let me end by borrowing words from one of Tagore’s immortal creations , boundless reverence for whom , we both share.
There is something in the air of Pabna, where Mahanayika Suchitra Sen (Rama Dasgupta) was born in the then undivided Bengal Presidency.
As the legend goes, Pabna gets its name from a Robin Hood-like bandit named Pobana who lived there long ago and was venerated for his good deeds. Later the district became the epicenter of the Indigo revolt (Neel Bidroho) and the same Pabna gave us Rajanikanta Sen, whose fiery patriotic songs immensely inspired the freedom fighters and the Swadeshi Movement.
59 films, the quintessential doe-eyed Bengali beauty, the hypnotic smile, the larger than life screen presence, what really defines Suchitra Sen ? Probably all of them and much more.
So how will Suchitra Sen’s legacy shape up? That is best left to the film historians to ponder over and of-course her films will take up lion’s share of any such discussion. After all, her rise to super stardom is marked by some unforgettable performances which mesmerized a whole generation of the bhadrolok bengali. And her on-screen pairing with the other matinee idol Uttam Kumar ushered in the Golden Age of mainstream Bengali cinema. In fact there are very few instances in World Cinema where a reel-life duo can generate such adoration, hysteria and an almost distinct genre of cinema. Elizabeth Taylor – Richard Burton in Hollywood or Marcello Mastroianni – Sophia Loren in Italian Cinema , immediately come to mind. And to think of it, Suchitra-Uttam shared a wonderful friendship with tremendous mutual respect (“metaphysical” is how the Mahanayak’s son Goutam described their relationship)..
Sen in fact created a new image in Bengali Cinema of the articulate if tragic heroine carving out an independent space outside that of family and tradition. That in my view, is her most important contribution to Bengali society and her enduring legacy as well. In a male dominated film industry and a patriarchal society, Mrs. Sen was the original feminist. As the noted film critic Saibal Chatterjee puts it, Sen “combined understated sensuality, feminine charm and emotive force and a no-nonsense gravitas to carve out a persona that has never been matched, let alone surpassed in Indian cinema”.
Two of her most memorable performances as the Anglo-Indian Rina Brown in Saptapadi or in the dual role of the courtesan Pannabai and her lawyer daughter in Uttar Falguni , established her as actress par excellence but also provided an insight into a dynamic personality, someone who lived life on her own terms. In fact all through out her glittering career, she broke the established norms. Be it acting post-marriage (considered unthinkable in those times) or charging more than her male co-stars, Mrs. Sen (as she was called on the sets) challenged the status quo. Being married to a rich industrialist, money was never the motivation, passion for acting was. The industry held her in such awe and admiration that her name appeared above Uttam Kumar’s in the credits of Harano Sur & Saptapadi. Such instances where unheard of, even in Hollywood, where things started changing only with Meryl Streep and much later Julia Roberts. And did I mention her refusal to act in Satyajit Ray’s Devi Chaudhurani which forced the maestro to shelve the project. Only Mrs. Sen had the audacity to this 🙂
No wonder when Gulzar decided to make the political drama Aandhi, he cast Sen as the mature female politician, a role modeled loosely on the real life persona of the then prime minister Indira Gandhi.
And then in a Greta Garboesque act, Suchitra Sen quit movies, leading a life of determined seclusion, far away from the public & media gaze at her Ballygunge residence till her last breath.
In her native Pabna (modern Bangladesh), the Suchitra Sen Memory Preservation Committee has been set up, to celebrate her life and achievements, clearly showcasing the pride and adulation she commands on the other side of the Ichamati.
An Icon , an Enigma, the Diva, in the words of my friend Navonil HAzra ,
“Suchitra Sen holo ekta Concept” ..
.. maybe he is right , a concept that will remain timeless in public memory.
An example of how deeply she has invaded the Bengali psyche. Even to this day and age, if a girl drapes herself in a saree in the traditional bengali style, there is a high probability of her getting the below compliment,
“Puro Suchitra Sen lagche. (You look exactly like Suchitra Sen).”
মহানায়িকা … in your absence, our lives certainly seem less magical ..
Calcutta Chromosome 