Reveries of One’s Childhood: A Brief Eulogy for Soumitra Chatterjee

Soumitra as the grief-stricken Apu contemplating a future without his deceased wife, Aparna: a still from Apur Sansar (“The World of Apu”)

When Soumitra Chatterjee passed away on November 15, I felt, quite likely in common with many others in India and especially West Bengal who had followed his career, or who had at least more than a passing familiarity with the cinematic oeuvre of Satyajit Ray, as though some part of my own childhood had been yanked from me.  Soumitrada came to fame as the young man Apu who, in the third part of Ray’s trilogy, Apur Sansar (“The World of Apu”), has abandoned the village and the life of a family priest for the thrills and hazards of life in the big city:  Calcutta.  It is said that Ray had wanted to cast him as Apu in the second part of the trilogy, Aparajito, but he was too old for the part of the young Apu.  Yet, such was the spell cast by Soumitra Chatterjee, it seems as if even the child and adolescent Apu were played by him.  The trilogy closes out Apu’s life, but so many lives of the young were set in motion with Apu’s life.  Soumitra Chatterjee, one felt, had been Apu throughout; and Apu’s life became one’s own.