The beginning was a bit stark, if you'd pardon the pun. Every time Rahul Bose appeared on screen, his father found — much to his dismay — that his son was seemingly without clothes. When the actor began shooting for his first film, debutant Dev Benegal's English August (1994), a scene had him masturbating under a sheet. He appeared naked again in Benegal's second feature film Split Wide Open (1999). Then, of course, there was the quirky comedy Mumbai Matinee (2003), where he was a porn actor.
'My father sighed and wondered if I was ever going to act with my clothes on,' laughs Rahul Bose.
The lightmen on the sets of English August were shocked. 'They thought I was a porn star,' he says, admitting there were times when even he wondered if that was where his career was headed.
Bose continued to scandalise the conservatives. He necked and kissed a man in Onir's I Am (2010). 'I understood I'd have to either submit to my character completely, or I shouldn't do the film. I Am took me to places as an actor no human being wants to visit. To be stripped naked and jeered at by an authoritarian figure is the worst kind of humiliation and degradation imaginable.'
That he willingly put himself through this nightmare makes Bose the actor he is today. After commercial hits such as Jhankaar Beats (2002), Chameli (2003) and Pyaar Ke Side Effects (2006), he could well have created a niche for himself as a mainstream lead. But he chose to return to the art house cinema he was happier doing — with films such as Dil Kabaddi (2008), The Japanese Wife (2010), I Am and Midnight's Children (2011) — without ever running down the former.
'I never felt out of place in mainstream movies,' he says. At the Green IIFA celebrations in Macau earlier this year, when he went up to accept an award for the Most Socially Conscious Bollywood Actor, he asserts that he 'felt part of the family and was proud to be a part of an industry that celebrates different kinds of cinema and views'.
It's been over a decade but Bose's tryst with the mainstream reverberates with the jhankaar beats of R.D. Burman's music. He, however, admits that despite playing a die-hard Pancham fan to perfection in Sujoy Ghosh's directorial debut, he never listened to Hindi music in his spare time when he was young. 'But the radio always played at home, tuned to Binaca Geet Mala, and the songs I heard in the 70s came in handy later,' he smiles.
And did an encounter with a woman of the night help him find his way through Chameli, the story of a prostitute? He chuckles. 'I never met a woman of the night, before or after Chameli, though I do meet a lot of NGO workers. A few women spoke about Chameli wistfully probably because the character of Aman Kapoor was as appealing as that of Jahangir Chaudhury aka Raja in Mr & Mrs Iyer,' he says, referring to the 2002 Aparna Sen film where he played the lead opposite Konkona Sen Sharma. 'Urban, well-travelled Raja was very close to me,' he adds.
If Raja was like Rahul, Snehamoy Chatterjee, the small town schoolteacher of The Japanese Wife, was so unlike him that he had to build him through the imagination of the Bengalis he'd met in his grandparents' house in Calcutta. 'I had absolutely no clue how I was going to play him till one hot, summer day in Calcutta, I stepped out of my guesthouse wearing a dhoti and panjabi (kurta), opened my umbrella and began to cycle around. Slowly, the goodness and calmness of Snehamoy began to seep inside me,' Bose flashbacks.
He is now part of the Bengal renaissance and the resurgence of a new cinema with films such as Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury's Anuranan (2006) and Antaheen (2009) and more recently Kaushik Ganguly's Laptop (2012). He also stars in the yet-to-be-released film Shesher Kobita.
'It feels great to be working with 40-year-old filmmakers making good, sensible movies... And then, there's Buddha (Buddhadeb Dasgupta) whose Kaalpursh (2008) gave me the opportunity of working with a master,' he adds.
Right from his first film which took him to the Toronto Film Festival 'on a wing and a prayer' and got him a standing ovation, Bose has been a familiar face on the international circuit. Apart from the two Benegal films, he has been lauded for his directorial debut Everybody Says I'm Fine (2001), Santosh Sivan's Before The Rains (2007) and Midnight's Children (2013).
Deepa Mehta's film, based on Salman Rushie's novel, 'closed the circle', as he told Rushdie seconds before the Indian premiere. Twenty years ago, he had been approached to play Salim, the main character.
'We were just one week away from going on the sets when the project was put on hold,' recalls Bose, who eventually ended up playing Zulfikar, Salim's uncle who moves to Pakistan after Partition and becomes a general in Mehta's film. 'A part of Salim remained inside me, but Zulfi got me the kind of appreciation an actor can only dream of even though within 60 seconds of his appearance you know he's going to die. Even in death he remains unforgettable,' he smiles.
Meanwhile, the tryst with world cinema continues as Bose moves across the border to Bangladesh for an English-Bangla film with Shahana Goswami. Then there's the Kamal Haasan's Tamil-Hindi film Vishwaroop/Vishwaroopam 2 in which he returns as Omar Qureshi, the dreaded terrorist. Given the controversy surrounding Part 1 earlier this year (some accused the film of an anti-Islam bias), isn't he apprehensive about the reception to the sequel?
'If there was even a whiff of communalism, I wouldn't have come anywhere close to the project,' he avers. 'But there was nothing objectionable about the film.'
And so the journey goes on to explore new spaces, to seek out different cinema, to boldly go where no actor has gone before. With or without a few naked scenes.
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STAR TREK: (From top) Rahul Bose in Vishwaroop, Midnight's Children, Mr and Mrs Iyer and Chameli
