What was the world doing when you first saw Pather Panchali for the first time? I must have been 18 or 19 when I met Apu and Durga for the first time. They were so close, I could touch their heartbeat. I don’t know what happened to Subir Banerjee and Runki Banerjee who played Apu and Durga. But the two siblings in Pather Panchali have remained a part of our lives since 1955.
A year later Apu was a gawky youngster in Aparajito in pursuit of his dreams while his mother languished in the village. As Apu progressed to marriage in the astonishingly wispy Apur Sansar (married to the bewitching dough-eyed Sharmila Tagore) Apu transformed into the great Soumitra Chatterjee.
With Ray, it is always hard to imagine which was more memorable: the character or the actor playing the character. My favourite Ray-creation is Madhabi Mukherjee in Charulata. A beguiling complex exasperatingly paradoxical shout-out to womanhood, Charulata is unarguably Ray’s most fascinating character. She is at once Everywoman and yet fiercely individualistic.
Sharmila Tagore as the child-bride Dayamoyee in Devi who gets deified by her father-in-law is Sharmila’s own favourite from her entire oeuvre. She says the performance was entirely Ray’s. Dayamoyee is a stunningly quiet character, seething with an unexpressed anguish. Her performance as the underage child-bride Dayamoyee is so heartbreaking, I found myself choking with sorrow at many junctures in a story that is as timeless as it is timely.
Ray had discovered back in Apur Sansar how much Sharmila Tagore can convey through her eyes. She barely speaks out her pain and protest in Devi as her tyrannical father-in-law takes over her life, rendering her roles as a woman and a wife completely redundant.
The other potentially memorable female character in Ray’s cinema that was squandered in miscasting—the only occasion when Ray miscalculated so monstrously—is Ghaire Bhaire. The 1984 film suffered a huge blow as its female protagonist Bimala was played by an actress (Swatilekha Chatterjee) who just couldn’t rise to the occasion. One of the film’s principal actors told me that everyone knew from the first day of shooting that Ray had made a mistake in casting Swatilekha. For once Ray erred, proving he was after all human in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
On a lighter note who can forget Goopy and Bagha in Goopy Gyan Bagha Byan. Ray could be seen having oodles of fun with this absurdist fable of a singer who couldn’t sing and a drummer who couldn’t play the drum.
Unlike Goopy and Bagha, Satyajit Ray could do anything. Except make Swatilekha Chatterjee act.
