REMEMBERING SOUMITRA CHATTERJEE'S GREATEST ROLES

As we mourn Soumitra Chatterjee, a thespian of rare artistic integrity, we also celebrate his immense contribution to the kind of Indian cinema that’s counted among the world’s best

- Maithili Rao

He will forever be synonymous with the sensitive, poetic, and tragically marked Apu, and his final reconciliation with reality. The final image of a bearded Apu with his son Kajal astride his shoulders, walking towards a new beginning, is a magical vision of hope and renewal. A performance and screen persona that seeped into our soul with its purity, innocence, emotional resonance, and beguiling beauty. There are so many other facets of Soumitra Chatterjee that only a retrospective of his work will fill the gaps in our knowledge of him.

It is with great trepidation that I write this tribute because for a non-Bengali, so much of his life and work is secondhand information. The rest of India outside the vast range of Bengali culture that encompasses literature, music, theatre, and cinema, is deprived of the immensity of his achievement. He is simply slotted as the alter ego of Satyajit Ray over 14 films, practically all major landmarks, with a few minor works of our greatest auteur. This diminishes Chatterjee’s rich legacy. He is as much a renaissance man as the genius who cast him in Apur Sansar, the culmination of the seminal The Apu Trilogy. Soumitra