Sharmila wth Nandita Das in Shubho Mahurat

behind the camera

• Bengali cinema has also had some significant contributions from the journalist fraternity. Subrata Sen, a journalist for a decade with Ananda Bazar Patrika and The Statesman , and made the transition to filmmaking, with the successful Ek Je Aache Kanya. He followed it up with the controversial Swapner Feriwala, the experimental Nil Nirjane (India’s first digital full-length feature film) and the oversexed Hothat Neerar Jonye. He has also tried his hand at the telefilm format with Shirinra ? once again, an experimental and interesting venture.

• Sudeshna Roy, a journalist with ABP and other papers for many years, worked on TV serials and telefilms for quite a while, and assisted Aparna Sen and Rituparno Ghosh before graduating to feature film direction. Her first film, Shudhu Tumi, which she has co-directed with Abhijit Guha, released last Puja. She has also assisted director Mahesh Manjrekar on It Was Raining That Night (the English version of Astitva).

Before the camera

Sharmila Tagore and Uttam Kumar in Nayak

• The most unforgettable journalist in Bengali cinema is, of course, Sharmila Tagore in Satyajit Ray’s Nayak (1966). The editor of a small women’s publication, Sharmila was intelligent, intellectual, poised, dignified and a trifle snooty. Not taken in by the outward glamour of matinee idol Arindam Mukherjee (Uttam Kumar), she asked him probing, searching questions, helping the troubled superstar to come to terms with himself.

• In Ray’s Charulata (1964), Sailen Mukherjee played Charu’s husband, Bhupati, the liberal, progressive and very Brahmo editor-publisher of a nationalist newspaper. Deeply absorbed in his work and passionately involved in the Freedom Movement, Bhupati had no time for his beautiful, intelligent and very lonely wife.

• Ray’s Ganashatru had Manoj Mitra in the role of Adhir, the ‘rational’, Left-leaning newspaper editor, who gave in to social pressure and refused to publish Dr Ashoke Gupta’s (Soumitra Chatterjee) article warning people about the contaminated ‘holy water’ of the local temple.

• Utpal Dutt played the sharp, astute editor of a leading newspaper, who asks a sensitive young man (Anjan Dutta) to do a newsy, yet intimate story of his own middle class milieu, in Mrinal Sen’s Chalchitra (1981). The young man, endowed with erratic enthusiasm, sets every bit of situation he comes across to critical analysis, but fails to build a wholesome reportage. He then meets the editor a second time, and the inevitable compromise follows.

• Nandita Das was a cute little rookie journalist in Rituparno Ghosh’s Shubho Mahurat (2003). Bubbly, enthusiastic and trying very hard to be taken seriously, Nandita was immensely likeable.

• Goutam Ghose’s Dekha (2001) featured Indrani Halder as one of those by-the-way journalists. She came into Soumitra Chatterjee’s house on the pretext of doing a story, but spent most of the film getting intricately entangled in a complicated affair with him.