Out of the shadow

Her story reads much like the script of a Rituparno Ghosh film. An actress debuts on the big screen opposite one of Bengal’s leading men, directed by a legendary auteur. Her performance is panned by the acting fraternity in India and she fades out of the spotlight and into depression. Only to return 30 years later to star opposite the same leading man, winning acclaim this time. That is the story of Swatilekha Sengupta and it is by no means a film script. From Ghare Baire to Belaseshe it has been a long journey.

An Allahabad girl, Sengupta (née Chatterjee) grew up watching Charulata and Mahanagar at a local cinema hall on Sundays. Worried about her studies, she wrote to Satyajit Ray, asking if she could act in one of his films. But because she didn’t have the right address, the letter went astray. Later, having left Allahabad for Kolkata, she joined the theatre group Nandikar and landed a small role in Shambhu Mitra’s Galileo . As coincidence would have it, Ray came to watch her act. Sengupta’s phone started ringing; she thought the first caller was a hoax when he told her that he was actor Robi Ghosh and that Manikbabu — as Ray was called — would like to meet her. The calls persisted until someone from the theatre fraternity confirmed they were genuine.

Sengupta’s first meeting with Ray was on a day when the city was blocked by processions and she was forced to walk from her house in Vivekananda Road (in north Kolkata) all the way to Bishop Lefroy Road (a south Kolkata neighbourhood). She arrived half-an-hour early and waited outside the door so that she could ring the bell at the precise moment — Ray was always a stickler for punctuality. Cut to the director’s surprised face as he confronted the young actress on a day when nothing stirred — she had battled all odds to be there. Ray was moved.

Ghare Baire was a rewarding experience. Ray whistled Beethoven to her, was happy that she could play the piano and did not expect her to have read Tagore. The hard work seemed to have paid off — Vincent Canby, The New York Times critic, wrote in 1985: ‘Swatilekha Chatterjee is the pretty, surprisingly willful Bimala’. But America was one thing, Bengal was something else altogether. Ray had included his first full-blown onscreen kiss in Ghare Baire — based on a Tagore novel — and the Bengali bhadrolok sensibilities were outraged.

A band of leading heroines declared a vendetta on the woman who had come from stage to sweep the silver screen and the critics caught their fervour. “She never lived nor looked the role,” one reviewer wrote. Coincidentally, he was married to one of the actresses. Despite the fact that Manikbabu kept telling her to concentrate on the foreign reviews, Sengupta soon lapsed into depression.

A bedridden Ray finally insisted that she travel to Cannes with Soumitro Chatterjee for the screening of the film but she was unable to accept herself in the role until she had watched the film three times.

Though her husband Rudraprasad was supportive, Sengupta could not escape from Bimala’s shadow. None of the other roles that she was offered met her expectations.

Thirty years later, another story of a troubled relationship fell into her lap, a Shiboprosad Mukherjee and Nandita Roy film, Belaseshe . Her husband in a marriage worn thin was to be Soumitro Chatterjee. Sengupta admitted she was nervous to play opposite him again. But this time around the film silenced all her critics in Bengal — even Amitabh Bachchan tweeted his praise after Belaseshe went national last month.

After Ray, Sengupta naturally found Mukherjee’s directorial habits very different. He did not have every scene meticulously sketched out, but then, Mukherjee was her old student from Nandikar and she found that he had his own methods. Sohini, her daughter, who did a cameo in the film, kept her company on the sets. A comic stage version of Belaseshe is on the anvil with Sohini as the director.

For someone who has an unshakeable marriage, the two dominant films in her life have been about relationships where marital passion is ebbing. Sengupta though is not Arati or Bimala. Love, she says, changes over time but her husband remains her support. Rudraprasad went to watch Belaseshe and found himself moved to tears by his wife’s performance.

Anjana Basu is a Kolkata-based writer

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