SHE has no specific idea how Bengali film-maker Satyajit Ray came to know about her. “All I know is that Manikda [Satyajit Ray] placed an advertisement in the papers in search of a teenage girl for playing the part of Aparna, Apu’s wife, in his new film Apur Sansar,” says Sharmila Tagore. “My cousins advised me to send him my photographs. But I didn’t because I knew very little about films. And, of course, I could not do it without my parents’ permission. I was 13 years old at the time and seeing films was taboo, let alone working in one. Tinku, my sister, was allowed to work in Kabuliwala, an award-winning film by Tapan Sinha, but that was different as she was only five and the story was by Rabindranath Tagore. One day, my father received a phone call from Manikda, who said he wanted to see me.”

Andrew Robinson, Ray’s biographer, has described Sharmila as hailing from “the more orthodox side of the Tagore family”. Her maternal grandmother, Latika, was the granddaughter of Dwijendranath Tagore and her grandfather, Kanakendranath, was the son of Gaganendranath. Her father, Gitindranath, had a liberal mind or else he would not have permitted his daughters to work in films at a time when acting by women was heavily frowned upon.

Ray explained how he had spotted Sharmila while searching for a suitable girl to play Aparna. “We put an ad in the papers asking for photographs of girls between the ages of 15 and 17 to play Apu’s wife. More than a thousand replies came, but not one of these deserved to be called for an interview,” he wrote in his memoirs published posthumously.

“Once again, we were beginning to despair, then word came about a girl called Sharmila who had appeared in a dance recital for the Children’s Little Theatre. She was related to the poet Tagore and was thought to be quite talented. We got in touch with her parents and asked them whether we could take a look at their daughter for a possible key role in a further episode of ‘Apu’.”

Sharmila’s parents took their daughter to Ray’s south Kolkata flat. “I was wearing a frock that day, though I was used to wearing saris as well, particularly on ceremonial occasions,” says Sharmila. “He was very tall and had a towering personality but I was not in the least intimidated. He behaved very well with me. Monkudi [Bijoya Ray] too was present. She dressed me in a sari.”

And what a startling transformation it brought about! As Ray wrote, “She wore a little yellow frock, which made her look like she was in her early teens, which in fact she was. Dressed like that, it was difficult to imagine her as Apu’s bride. Her shoulder-length hair was not right for Aparna — and yet she had the right features. My wife all too plainly showed her disinterest, but something about the girl’s eyes told me not to reject her outright. I called my wife and told her to dress the girl up in a simple striped cotton sari as is normally worn by a village maiden and to tie up her hair in a bun and then bring her back to the sitting room where I waited with the parents.

“The magic worked! Dressed like that, she was Aparna to the fingertips. She herself behaved differently after the transformation took place. She was then only 13, but now looked over four years older.”

The screen test took place in a studio. “Manikda asked me to look in this or that direction. I did whatever he said like an obedient student. It was a silent screen test. He did not ask me to speak any dialogue.”

Ray wanted “Apu’s one-room flat in Calcutta to be right on the railway track” because he decided to use the train, which appeared as “a poetic element” in Pather Panchali and Aparajito as a motif to “bind the three films together”. He found the house of his choice at Tallah in north Kolkata. “It had a small room which overlooked a series of railway tracks on which trains shunted back and forth,” he wrote. Sharmila remembers the first day of her shooting, which took place at Tallah. It was the scene of Apu arriving at his rented room along with his newly-wedded wife. “I had no lines to say on that day. But on the second day, Manikda asked me to speak a long dialogue. Seeing I found it difficult to say the dialogue, he broke it into short pieces,” she says.

Throughout the shoots for Apur Sansar, Sharmila was carefully directed by her director. Ray warned his new discovery that she was going to start “with her most difficult scene”. Sharmila listened but kept silent. Aparna, the new bride, had just arrived at her husband’s place in a big city, far away from her father’s house in the village. Tired and overwhelmed by loneliness, she burst into tears while Apu was away paying off the horse-drawn carriage. “There were no rehearsals. I shouted directions, urging Sharmila to sob to her heart’s content once she had lost control of herself,” Ray wrote. “After some time, when Sharmila was asked slowly to regain her composure, she did so with considerable conviction.”

Sharmila noticed Ray had a particular habit. “He used to chew his handkerchief, so much so that he needed a new handkerchief every day. I found him chewing his handkerchief whenever he was sitting alone next to the camera, deep in thought,” she says. “I also remember that he ate fried fish and mishti doi every afternoon. One other thing I remember is that he frequently whistled different tunes and he whistled them beautifully.”

Playing Aparna in Apur Sansar made Sharmila a household name in Bengal, but she had to pay a price for it. “I was told that if I decided to act in a film, I would have to leave school,” she wrote in an article on Devi. “The principal of my Bengali-medium school felt that having a film-star amongst her students would be scandalous.” Her father tried hard to convince the principal that working in a Ray film was an honour rather than a scandal. But his arguments went in vain. Frustrated and disgusted, he ultimately took her out from Kolkata’s St John’s Diocesan School and got her admitted to an English-medium school in Asansol where he was posted at the time.

She again got an invitation to work in a Ray film almost as soon as the shoots for Apur Sansar were over. It was decided that she would go to Kolkata during her summer holidays to do the shooting. She had grown a little more then. Reading the script for Devi gave her the feeling that she had been offered a challenging role. “The exploitation of Dayamoyee in the name of religion made a profound impression on my mind,” says Sharmila. “I was weighed down as if by an inexplicable burden during the shooting. The dark ambience created by Bansida [Bansi Chandragupta], the smell of the burning incense sticks, the garlands around my neck and all the rest of it made me feel listless and depressed. I felt isolated because no one spoke to me during the breaks, which added to the feeling of oppression. But it was probably just that which helped my performance.”

Sharmila is the only actress who had the privilege of working with Ray in lead roles in five films. Even though she went to Mumbai (then Bombay) in 1963, she came back over and over again to work in Bengali films. “I went to Mumbai because I wanted to be economically independent. Actors were poorly paid in Kolkata,” she says

Not that Sharmila has no regrets. Ray wanted to cast her as Manisha in Kanchenjungha. She missed out on that as she had board exams during the time. “Manikda also wanted me to play Charu in Charulata. He even gave me the script, but later changed his mind,” she says.

Sharmila was one of the most valuable of Ray’s discoveries. She calls him “my mentor who introduced me to the wonderful world of cinema”. Ray was evidently happy to see her go to the top. He finished his memoirs with the following words, “Sharmila made an extremely successful career for herself in Bombay, although she returned to work for me in a number of my films.”

The writer is CEO of the Kolkata-based society for the preservation of Satyajit Ray archives.

—By arrangement with Asia News Network-The Statesman

Published in Dawn, September 16th, 2015

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