Bengal’s beloved Feluda left for his heavenly abode after a 40-days-long struggle against COVID 19. Soumitra Chatterjee, besides being the only other Indian recipient of the highest French civilian honour after the master film-maker Satyajit Ray, had earned numerous awards for his immense contribution to Indian cinema in his six decades of a sprawling career as a film and theatre actor.
The Bangali middle class often find themselves amidst an age-long debate about who the real Mahanayak of Bengali film industry is - Chatterjee or his greatest contemporary Uttam Kumar.
While their peers often reminisce about the times when the actors found themselves at political and ideological differences against each other, the basic point at which their followers differ is Uttam Kumar’s charm and his aura which makes him the hero of the masses and Chatterjee’s ability to get into the skin of the characters he plays which makes him a favourite among the Bengali intelligentsia. The actor, however, might have proved his followers wrong time and again with the myriad characters, he played on screen and stage.
His death, which is sure to leave a gaping vacuum in Indian cinema, might not save him from the cultural gatekeepers - the Bangali Buddhijibi (Bengali intelligentsia) - just like his guide and philosopher Satyajit Ray could not save himself from this dreaded group. Ray in his Apu trilogy, that earned him immense praise throughout the world, tells the story of a rural boy Apu with big dreams, who finds solace after his beloved’s death in the forest away from the big city where he loses himself every day. He also tells the story of the adventures of two friends, Goopy and Bagha, who talk in the simplicity of rural dialects and the pain and suffering of a village delved into a famine. But did his stories reach their protagonists?
A privileged group of 'intellectual cinephiles' keep worshipping his works in their closed sanctum away from the masses. Chatterjee himself might have shone time and again in parallel, arthouse movies and theatres being the terrific actor that he is, but Ray’s blue-eyed boy is so much more than Feluda, Amal and Ashim. While Uttam Kumar saw large crowds next to his car due to the superhero status that his ‘commercial’ films had earned him, every time he crossed the threshold of his Bhawanipur home, Soumitra reached the very population away from the metropolitan showiness through jatrapalas (Bengali folk theatre). On one hand, he edited the prestigious literary magazine Ekkhon, while on the other, he continued to produce hit mass movies one after the other.
Time and again Soumitra Chatterjee has resonated the thought that he shared with Ray about how it is sheer ignorance to try and categorize an artform like cinema into the narrow constraints of “Art film” and “Commercial film”. There are good films, bad films and mediocre films and this is based on the artists who create these films and not their consumers. In a very recent interview with the Times of India, the actor said,
“I know from my personal experience that there are many people who strictly reject films that feature such heavyweight actors. They are not interested in watching the so-called art films. What will happen then? I always feel that as an actor, whatever role you get, you should try and do justice to that character.”
The answer to his rhetorical question of “what will happen then?” might have fuelled him to play important roles in movies that were mainly made to be consumed by the masses in rural and suburban Bengal. His unparalleled fame in these areas sky-rocketted after he starred in supporting and antagonistic roles in films by directors like Sapan Saha.
Sapan Saha and Anjan Chowdhury are those film-makers of Bengal whom the bhadraloks conveniently ignore, if not directly attack, for making “B grade movies lacking intellect”. However, the popularity of these films in rural and suburban Bengal remained untarnished for almost two decades across the later 80s to the early 2000s. These films would have a common trope- a couple in love opposed by their family, mostly a patriarch of either of the two leads. Soumitra Chatterjee has starred in dozens of such films as the father who opposes the lovers or as the main villain who would send in his people to beat up the hero. But did that take away anything from his awe-striking presence in ‘elite art house movies’ like Oshukh (Rituporno Ghosh), Gonoshotru (Satyajit Ray), Abohoman (Rituporno Ghosh) and hundreds of others? Instead, he kept prospering the Bengali film industry till his last breath with his unparalleled talent and knowledge of film, literature and art.
Now that the industry has lost one of its most worthy gems, it is the collective responsibility of the people of Bengal to let his legacy live on. To put it bluntly, the worst way to do it is by appropriating his work as meant for the “intellectuals” and keeping them locked up away from the mass. He is, by no means, the alternate superstar meant for the elite middle class. He is the hero of all, with his charisma touching the lives of every Indian- from the metropolitan to the suburban.
Really loved this alternate nuanced take