Early September last year, needing to find out the year of birth of the person who played Durga, the Durga in Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, I asked the hugely knowledgeable authority of matters cultural and sports-related, Gautam Bhattacharya, for it. He got back within hours: “… Sir, spoke to Durga… she is very unwell… (But) she said while the shooting started she was around 14. That makes her a 1940 born…” When the film was being made, she stood (in the words of H.W. Longfellow in his poem, “Maidenhood”) “with reluctant feet where the brook and river meet”.
On November 18 last year, Gautam messaged again: “… Sir, you may have heard the sad news. Durga has passed away…”
Two days from now, it will be the first anniversary of that passing away. Durga is how Uma Dasgupta, the gifted star of that film was, is, and will always be, known. Uma died at age eighty-four in Calcutta, not exactly in unknown or unacknowledged obscurity but certainly out of the glare of arc-lights. No crowds waited to hear medical bulletins on her, no media thronged the precincts of her Crossing. There was something sublimely apposite in the way she slipped out of life into the great beyond, for she had died in the story and in the film exactly like that. In the dead of night, as a storm kept all interventions away, leaving but her mother, Sarbajaya, played by the unforgettable Karuna Bandyopadhyay, who sat dazed while her brother, the elfin Apu, played by Subir Bandyopadhyay, wandered from here to there in a state of befuddled unknowing.
In a very real sense, that particular Durga died three times. First in the story, Pather Panchali, written by the peerless Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay; next in the film of the same name directed by the genius, Satyajit Ray; and finally in life. Real life as scripted by Time.
So is this column about the Durga of the story or the Durga of the film or about the Durga that was Uma, actor, student and teacher, in Calcutta?
I do not know.
I do not know?
Now that surely is preposterous. I do not know the basis for this column and have the temerity to impose it on readers! Preposterous.
But everything about the fate of Pather Panchali’s Durga was and is preposterous, a situation which young Uma seemed to understand instinctively, intuitively and — intellectually.
Nothing of what happens to her in the story should have happened to her. Her feet, half brook, half river, should have stood, run, traipsed, danced, drawn patterns on sand, left footprints on moist earth, riverbanks, pond-side, hopped the two steps of broken brick that led to their hut-home, darted from home to grove, forest, field, sliced
the rain-soaked air from a soft perch, then gathering her feet stitched that air together again. And one day, she should have had alta put on the soft ridges of her feet, as she went, half-happy, half-apprehensive, to her husband’s hearth, found gladness there, found more than gladness, found… But let me stop there. I am not meant to continue where Bibhutibhushan stopped. I am foolish to have come thus far but not that foolish as to go further into a patha beyond that immortal panchali.
Durga’s end in the story and the film is unacceptable. Sarbajaya’s — Karuna’s — eyes frozen in disbelief, a mother’s disbelief so strong as to not let grief admittance, tell us that. It cannot be, just cannot be. It cannot be, it is not true.
But now on the eve of Uma-Durga’s first punya tithi, the question forms itself: how much does a writer create in a character and how much does the character grow under the pen, under the keys of a board? How much does a director make happen in the actor and her acting and how much does an actor become the part she is acting herself? Can the two be measured separately, quantified in a ratio? I believe not.
When Bibhutibhushan makes his Durga defy her mother, dare her brother — over small, sweet nothings — is he conjuring that Durga? Or is a prototype from his memory or his subconscious mind slipping into the character unbeknownst to him? When Ray asks Uma to listen to the candy-man describe his wares with barely-concealed longing, her little tongue moving to the corner of her mouth, and when she asked Apu to go to their father and ask for some coins to buy the sweets with, or when Ray asks her to let her hair down in the rain’s torrent, and she does it, turning the wet slope into something of a small waterfall, is it him causing that or is it her? Then, when she huddles with her brother, wrapping his soaked form with hers, has he told her to do so, exactly so, or have her soft sister limbs found their natural bent and clothed the little imp within their sanctuary? And does her smile then, the smile of spontaneous love and untutored responsibility, come wholly from a directorial indication alone or also from an inner understanding that no mortal direction can ordain? And do her ominous sneezes, under that sky-shower, so soft, so innocuous, come at the director’s prodding or …?
Uma knew Durga. Uma became Durga.
And when in the film, on the good doctor asking her, prone under the onslaught of malaria or pneumonia or god knows what, to let him see her tongue, she shows it, she re-creates the great goddess Herself. And as Apu watches her, bemused, we watch him watch her. With breath held in suspense, hope held in abeyance, prayer held in fear.
Uma as Durga was, is, the soul of the story, the film.
She is impossible to define.
Is her mischief, mischief?
Is her smile, a smile?
Is her death, a death?
When she transfers the beads’ string from her neighbour’s home to her, is she telling us what stealing is or what it is not?
And when Apu, his sister gone to her repose, flings the thing into a pond and a layer of moss steals over it, is Ray letting a supposed stealth get covered or is he unravelling a truth that will stay in Time’s womb for a later earth to find, caress and cherish?
Durga in the story is its life, its soul. Uma is Durga’s life and her soul.
In thinking of her three departures from the cares of mortality, we are thinking of a verity that we must contemplate without seeking to interpret.
She dies in her living form, but defies death in her dying.
Pather Panchali and its Durga are deathless not just because as a story they are so, as a film they are so, but because the characters are not studio figures. They have been choreographed by life from life.
Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay and Satyajit Ray have written and directed their great works. But each one of us scripts and directs them each time we read, see or recall them. With Durga who is Uma and Uma who is Durga by our side.
This year, which is the 75th year of Bibhutibhushan’s passing and also marks the 70th anniversary of the film, Pather Panchali, let us accept that the novelist and the director are drawing not just from their skill but from the skein of life of which death is part. And that each character portrayal is a replay of that which happens in the great play of life.
And going beyond this masterpiece, we must read and watch all great art in the humbling knowledge that mystery will always mark life, that answers and solutions are about quizzes and crossword puzzles.
Our not knowing if Uma actuated Durga or Durga ‘made’ Uma is part of that mystery.
Only the moss knows the beads it covers.
I have described her as the star of that great film, for that is what she was, is and will always be. Perhaps a stricter description of her would be child star for she was but fourteen when the film was shot, ‘with uncertain feet where brook and river meet’. And that is how the master film-maker intended her to be and how, before him, the master storyteller of that story, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, meant her to be.
And she never grew out of that situation for she moved from mortality to immortality in the story, in the film. And has stayed there in the imagination of all who have read the story or seen the film, or, if even more fortunate, done both.