For generations of film lovers, in Bengal and beyond, if heartbreak had a name, it was Durga.
“That scene when Harihar realizes that Durga is no more. I have never cried more watching a film,” tweeted writer and film critic Aseem Chhabra recently.
He was referring to Indian film maker Satyajit Ray’s 1955 masterpiece Pather Panchali - Song of the road. Harihar returns home to his village after a long time away, calling out the names of his children, Apu, Durga, bearing gifts for his family, not knowing that his daughter Durga is dead.
PP1: Apu, Durga
As he holds out a sari for her, his wife breaks down, the piercing wail of a taarshehnai string instrument drowning out her sobs.
PP2 - ei dekho durga jonyo ekhaan sari, aar bhaabna ki, aami eshe gechi - Music
It is a gutting scene. Even now whenever I watch that film, my eyes well up in anticipation of that scene.
PP3: Durgaaa
Pather Panchali was the first film in Ray’s world-famous Apu Trilogy. The films trace Apu’s journey from a wide-eyed boy in a little village to becoming a young father in Kolkata. His sister Durga’s story ends in the first film itself. As a result unlike Apu, Durga has never aged in our imagination. She is forever that teenaged girl with dancing eyes running like quicksilver through the fields of our memory.
But Uma Dasgupta who acted as Durga grew older like everyone else. She died in Kolkata recently at the age of 84.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata.
Pather Panchali was her one and only film. In My Years with Apu, Satyajit Ray writes he took her to the roof to take some photographs with his Leica. “Since she seemed a bit demure, and Durga was a tomboy, I asked her to make faces for the camera. She obliged with a total lack of inhibition.” Those photographs are now on the cover of a collection of Dasgupta’s writings - Umar Panchali.
But even after Ray was happy, her father, Paltu Dasgupta, an ex-footballer, declared no girl from his family would act in a film. It took a lot of persuasion by Ray and Uma’s sister to make him change his mind. But he categorically refused to let Ray pay her. Ray bought her books instead. Later Uma recalled that whenever anyone introduced Paltu Dasgupta as “Uma Dasgupta’s father” he would retort “Please say Uma Dasgupta is Paltu Dasgupta’s daughter.”
That film made her world-famous. American magazines listed her as one of the teenagers of the year. Many wondered why, after all that acclaim, Uma Dasgupta never acted again. In Umar Panchali she writes “In a middle class family like ours working in film was neither desirable nor respectable.” She finished college, married and became a teacher for a school in Kolkata. Parents of the students would often exclaim, much to her irritation, “Are you really that Durga? It’s impossible to recognize you now.”
But Pather Panchali never left her. People would seek her out every time that film had an important anniversary. When an aunt took her to Madhyamgram, showed her off to all the neighbors and then made her sit on a makeshift stage while the film was screened on a sheet, she almost died with embarrassment.
But that role of a life interrupted haunts us even today. “I often wondered while watching the film/trilogy, what if Durga had lived. What if Ray made The Durga Trilogy,” writes film critic Tanushree Ghosh. “I felt for Durga, not for Apu.” Ray unflinchingly showed us how her mother favored the son. But the genius of Ray was he never forgot to also remind us there was still love, threadbare and worn as it was, that tied this little family together. Apu doted on Durga. She was his protector. He was her shadow. When she died, it felt personal.
In her book Umar Panchali Dasgupta wonders what life would have been like if she could have spent her life in a “freeze shot” as Durga. But instead she did something extraordinary. She went back to an ordinary life as Uma, a name that is another name for Durga.
And as she exits the stage, she has left behind through Umar Panchali some snippets of the woman she became.
The last poem is from this year itself which I’ve taken the liberty of translating
Ray took ‘Durga’
Oh so high -
But there are a few steps still to climb.
I have got love and affection in spades
Though sometimes I also float and sink in a web of lies
So let me draw the closing line now
No, let me not say if I come or go
My age after all is just eighty-four.
Run in Peace, Durga. Keep running.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW