In Soumitra Chatterjee and His World, journalist and editor Sanghamitra Chakraborty provides a comprehensive account of the life and work of the actor who was best known for his collaboration with Satyajit Ray. A prodigious talent, Chatterjee had a certain je ne sais quoi on camera, and towering grace and generosity off it. The excerpt below highlights the immense love he received from actors, directors and lovers of cinema from around the world, even as a worthy celebration of the icon evades the landscape of Indian cinema beyond Bengal.

The Indian cultural establishment notwithstanding, Soumitra Chatterjee’s global reputation remained untarnished. He came to be known and admired widely as Ray’s favourite actor. Soumitra’s oeuvre was celebrated with a lifetime achievement award at the Napoli Film Festival in Italy in 1999. Not too many media platforms in India reported this achievement. Soumitra was definitely not the kind of artiste to engage in self-promotion and very few of his admirers got to know about it.

In 1999, he was also decorated with the Officier des Arts et Metiers, one of the highest awards for the arts given by the French government, and became the first Indian to receive it. He was bestowed with France’s highest civilian award, Chevalier de la Legion d’honneur, in 2018. It came to him thirty years after Satyajit Ray had received it. ‘To be honoured in the same league as my mentor is unbelievable because one does not work keeping awards and prizes in mind. One works for the love of the job,’ Chatterjee told an interviewer. ‘There must be something in my work that won over hearts abroad. As a Bengali, I feel proud and as one who has been inspired by French art and cinema, I feel it’s a special honour.’

Alexandre Ziegler, ambassador of France to India, celebrated Chatterjee’s accomplishments with these words: ‘Your association [with Satyajit Ray] is reminiscent of the greatest “director–actor” duos of cinema, like those formed by Jean-Pierre Léaud and Francois Truffaut or Marcello Mastroianni and Federico Fellini … I could just put it all in a nutshell and say that you are the most famous and respected Bengali actor.’

In 1997, Catherine Berge, a French documentary film-maker, came to India to make a film produced by Merchant Ivory on Soumitra Chatterjee. ‘To film Soumitra was to capture an epoch,’ said Nayeem Hafizka from the Merchant Ivory team, talking about their decision to make Gaach, the documentary on Soumitra. Berge knew about Ray’s world, but while researching him as a student at Columbia University in New York, she decided to focus on Soumitra. When I met Berge in Paris in the summer of 2022, she was visibly emotional speaking about Soumitra: ‘I haven’t seen another committed actor like him. To me he is comparable to Laurence Olivier. If he had worked in Hollywood, he would have touched that kind of global fame.’ Berge also found Soumitra’s humanity extraordinary. ‘He was a good man, above everything else. I cannot imagine he is gone,’ she told me, her eyes welling up.

Soumitra once shared a story about his father with Berge, which inspired the title of her documentary. Soumitra’s father would often say that each of us needed to grow up to become a large tree (gaach in Bengali): the kind of tree that can offer shelter to birds and the shade of its branches to travellers. For Berge, ‘Soumitra was that comforting soul. There was no count of the number of people for whom he was a gaach, to whom he provided his gentle shadow.’

When I reached out to the American film-maker James Ivory in upstate New York, on the phone, he was effusive in his praise for Soumitra. ‘His work in Ray’s films were elevating experiences. He is in a class by himself.’ When directors have a leading man or lady they use over and over, it is a kind of projection of the director’s own feelings and impulses, according to Ivory. ‘Chatterjee was that actor for Ray, which is why he used him in so many kinds of roles for years and years. He was a projection of Ray, for sure.’

Andrew Robinson, Ray’s biographer, wrote in his obituary of Soumitra for Sight and Sound: ‘He could play a village-born youth in pre-war Calcutta, a Victorian would-be writer, an affluent 1960s Calcuttan semi-intellectual and a caste-ridden Brahmin village priest during the 1940s Bengal Famine, not to mention a shrewd, charming, up-to-the-minute detective—all with equal conviction, appeal and humour.’

The New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, wrote in 1973 that Soumitra and his frequent co-star Sharmila Tagore were ‘modern figures with overtones of ancient deities’. This was positively hyperbolic, given Kael’s usual sour attitude as a critic.

When some of Ray’s early films were first released in the United States in the 1960s, The New York Times critics called Soumitra Chatterjee’s performances ‘strikingly sensitive’ and ‘timid, tender, sad, serene, superb’. American film-makers like Martin Scorsese and Wes Anderson have cited as inspirations some of the Ray films in which Soumitra featured in lead roles. When, in an interview, Wes Anderson was asked to cast any non-living actor in one of his films, he picked five: ‘Joan Blondell, Toshiro Mifune, Jack Benny, Soumitra Chatterjee and Judy Garland.’

Anderson, who is considered among the most stylish and cerebral of today’s film-makers, said in an interview: ‘I just love him [Chatterjee]. His voice, his personality, his charm. He is a wonderful actor, and then it goes beyond acting. I think the relationship [with Satyajit Ray] is one of those crucial most important ones in cinema: Dietrich with Von Sternberg, Léaud with Truffaut, Mastroianni with Fellini, De Niro with Scorsese and Soumitra Chatterjee with Satyajit Ray.’

Soumitra acted in two prominent international projects in his career. In 1988, he worked with John Hurt and Hugh Grant in La Nuit Bengali (The Bengali Night), a film set in Kolkata; Shabana Azmi and Supriya Pathak were his co-actors in this film. And in 2004, he acted in Shadows of Time, made by German filmmaker Florian Gallenberger; Irrfan Khan, Tannishtha Chatterjee and other Indian actors also featured in it.

Home and the World

Despite this global recognition and his reputation in West Bengal, Soumitra remained unsung among Indians. He was well aware of the love and support of those who championed him—the foremost being Sharmila Tagore—in the film fraternity across the country. Sharmila remained a close lifelong friend of his. In a tribute, after his passing, she wrote a beautiful eulogy in The Indian Express: ‘If there is any regret I have it is that the legacy of Soumitra, like his mentor Satyajit Ray, is better known as part of world cinema than Indian cinema.’ Writing in 2012, journalist and poet Pritish Nandy had also made the same point: ‘Soumitra is the finest actor in the land today, but totally unheard of outside Bengal. It’s a loss for India, Bollywood and, I guess, a bit for Soumitra.’

Shyam Benegal, one of India’s most accomplished and respected directors, identified Soumitra’s rootedness in the ordinary, his ability to become a person who was recognisable, as the actor’s special talent. Actor Shabana Azmi worked with Soumitra, playing the role of his wife in La Nuit Bengali and later on his daughter in Aparna Sen’s 15 Park Avenue. She, too, remains in awe of his talent. She recalls an occasion when cinema buffs abroad showered the actor with love and attention: ‘I was in a film group that was honoured at the prestigious Centre Georges Pompidou [The Centre Pompidou] in Paris sometime in the ’80s and it was so incredible to watch the adulation showered on Soumitrada by French fans. They called out to him as Apu and Amal and rushed to get photographed with him. Soumitrada seemed to take it all in his stride and said modestly, “It’s because Ray made these characters so memorable that I am reaping the benefits of it.” I was amazed at how lightly he wore his fame.’

Director Goutam Ghose, who also travelled to festivals overseas on multiple occasions with Soumitra Chatterjee, says, ‘When we travelled, he was always highly respected as Ray’s actor. But inevitably, in discussions on cinema, Soumitrada came through as a livewire. He would floor the audience with his charm and articulateness. Wherever we went, the French critics who knew him always revered him.’ These festivals often became an arena for the actor to meet and interact with artistes from India—particularly some of the most talented artistes from Bombay.

In Paris, during the Festival of India in 1985, Soumitra and Deepa [his wife] met actor Naseeruddin Shah for the first time and decided to catch the Kurosawa film Ran together. When Shah did not turn up as planned, the Chatterjees went into the hall. Meeting Shah later, Soumitra asked if everything was all right. Shah explained that he was about to leave when he found that Ashani Sanket was showing on French TV. Since he had not seen the film before, he could not tear himself away. ‘It’s an outstanding film,’ he said to Soumitra. When Soumitra asked him what he thought of his work, Shah paused for a bit and responded: ‘I deem my actor’s life fulfilled if … I can inspire someone the way you have inspired me.’ Chatterjee was moved. He had been a great admirer of Naseeruddin Shah’s prodigious talent, and coming from him, these words were extraordinary.

Excerpted from Soumitra Chatterjee and His World by Sanghamitra Chakraborty with permission from Penguin Random House India. No part of this excerpt may be quoted or reproduced without prior written consent from its publisher.

This article was originally published in the March 2025 issue of ON Stage.