Soumitra Chatterjee: Actor, star, culture icon

The camera slowly zooms into a letter — it’s a letter of recommendation that says Apu is a “sensitive, conscientious and diligent” person. It then pans to Apu’s face: a young man with an earnest smile who beams in a black and white frame. This was Satyajit Ray’s introduction to the debutant Soumitra Chatterjee in ‘Apur Sansar’.
He was the hero we all wanted to adore — sensitive, intelligent and homely. An eternal wanderer who yearns to discover a compassionate world, gets bruised repeatedly and loses way when he reproaches his son for having caused his wife’s death, but never loses the purity of his soul.Chatterjee had famously told Ray’s biographer Marie Seton in ‘Portrait of a Director’ how he found “half of himself ” in Apu.

The cinematic masterpiece wasn’t just a teaser for love and loss in matrimony either. Chatterjee had said that “plenty of young men” who watched his debut opposite Sharmila Tagore had come to him and said they would like to get married. Chatterjee’s conviction and malleability breathed life into this tenderly shot and achingly poignant tale.

‘Apur Sansar’ influenced the thought process of generations and redefined Indian cinema. It also changed the trajectory of Chatterjee’s own life. “Playing Apu gave me a chance to grow into ‘Ray’s favourite actor’. That epithet itself is something any actor would covet. Additionally, I got a lifetime friend in my co-star, Sharmila Tagore,” he had said.

One day, Chatterjee had gone to watch the shooting of Chhabi Biswasstarrer ‘Jalsaghar’. As he was about to leave, Ray said: “Let me introduce you to Chhabi Biswas. You haven’t met him, have you?” In his customary baritone, he said: “Chhabida, this is Soumitra Chattopadhyay. He’s playing Apu in my next film, ‘Apur Sansar’.” That was the first time Chatterjee was told he had bagged the role.

After reading the screenplay, Chatterjee tried to innovate with the time-lapse portions, the time gap between shots. Following the Stanislavskian method, he would imagine what Apu would do and write that down. Sometimes, he would even include autobiographical elements. This was Chatterjee’s way of getting into the skin of Apu’s character. While Chatterjee had the courage to share these with Ray, the master director inspired him to think further.

The result showed when ‘Apur Sansar’ released on May 1, 1959. It went on to win the National Award for Best Feature Film that year.
According to Seton, Chatterjee felt his portrayal of Apu to be the “image of the contemporary Indian man in the process of becoming modern”. Few can remain unaffected by the emotional intimacy of matrimony in the scene where Chatterjee finds a note pasted by Tagore on the cigarette packet saying: “Khaoar pore ekta kore — katha diyechho (You promised not to smoke more than one after meals!)” or the moment when Chatterjee asks Tagore if she has any “anushochona” (regret) about marrying him and she innocently asks him the meaning of the word.
According to director Goutam Ghose, this film also stood out for the discoveries of two great actors. “In contrast to Sharmila who was completely raw and natural, Soumitra came across as a trained actor,” Ghose said.
For director Atanu Ghosh, the interplay of love, pain and pathos in Soumitra-Sharmila scenes have some of the finest rendering of beauty in Ray’s world.
Sixty-one years after the film’s release, ‘Apur Sansar’ remained an all time favourite of Chatterjee.
It is this movie he would go on to mention when asked which among the 14 DVD of his Ray films would he carry along if he ever met his icon Charles Chaplin.