Sharmila Tagore in Aradhana (1969)

Apur Sansar made me a household name but it came at a cost. I was asked to leave my school as the principal of my Bengali-medium school felt I would be a bad influence on the other girls. My father tried to reason, but when nothing worked, he told the principal he would rather I act than stay on in this particular school. I also had to leave Calcutta, the home of my grandparents where I grew up, and went to live with my parents and my sister. Compared to the life in a joint family, always bustling with life, this was so different. Also, I had to go to a new school, this time an English-medium one. It was quite traumatic, so many changes all at once. It was scary, almost humiliating, having to get used to a new language. I was so good in Bengali. I used to dread going to school because I had to converse in English. But with the help of my class teacher, who made me her mission, I managed to learn the language and caught up with the class within the year.

It was during the school vacations the next year that Manikda called me again to act in Devi.

Devi is set in the second half of the 19th century, when in Bengal the confrontation between Hindu orthodoxy and rational reformism was at its most intense. The characters in Devi embody this conflict between obsessive blind superstition and the emergence of rational thinking. Devi is the story of a feudal patriarch’s obsessive conviction that his daughter-in-law is the goddess incarnate. The opening shots of the film set the tone by revealing the fervid religiosity of Kalikinkar Roy as he watches goddess Durga being worshipped. The scene evokes a sense of unease and the audience is aware that they are watching one who is intoxicated by faith. I play the role of Dayamoyee who becomes a victim of feudal patriarchy and religious orthodoxy. She is too young and too conditioned by the existing traditions and environment to question what is asked of her. But even as she is garlanded and worshipped, Daya is wracked by doubts. It is not long before the relentless assault of being worshipped and her gradual disconnect from all things familiar disturb her sense of reality, as Ray proceeds to unfold the doom that is now Daya’s fate. Daya is treated in big close-ups, which continue to haunt long after the film is over.

When I read the script this time, I realized this film offered a greater opportunity for performance. Somehow, the film’s set-up and character probably impacted me even during the shoot. Unlike Apur Sansar, where I felt energized on the sets, here I was constantly beset by a feeling of heaviness as though I was carrying a massive weight on my chest. The claustrophobia was inescapable. It was as though the oppression of Daya had reached out to infect me. This worked very well for the character.

I am immensely proud of this film and it remains my favourite performance. In fact, Manikda often said that Devi and Charulata were his favourite films because he felt that he had made fewer mistakes in these. When I see this film today, I do not find a single superfluous shot. The film stirred a controversy when it was released. Ray was a Brahmo, and it was being suggested that he had chosen the subject to attack Hinduism, which, of course, was an absurd allegation. If anything, the subject remains relevant even now. In the name of tradition, family and honour, women continue to be oppressed and exploited. We continue to witness how, all over the world and in all religions, women become the first targets of religious orthodoxy.

Aranyer Din Ratri

I returned to work with Satyajit Ray seven years later, after moving to Hindi cinema in the early 1960s. In the meantime, he had wanted to cast me in Kanchenjunga, but I had my exams at the time and missed out on the film. When he offered me the role of the female protagonist in Nayak, I was thrilled.

My next film with Ray, Aranyer Din Ratri, marked a distinct shift in the film-maker’s repertoire. By this time, Ray was being attacked and derided for being apolitical at an intensely turbulent moment in West Bengal’s history. The film critic and Ray’s one-time close friend, Chidananda Dasgupta, wrote: “The Calcutta of the burning trams, communal riots, refugees, unemployment, rising prices and food shortages does not exist in Ray’s films.” But this was not true. No one was unaffected by the political turmoil, least of all Ray. A number of his films addressed the political situation but in ways that were reflective and introspective.

Aranyer Din Ratri, based on a novel by the acclaimed author and poet, Sunil Ganguly, was the beginning of Ray’s effort to understand the youth of the time. At one level, the film could be seen as a romantic comedy about four educated young men escaping into a forest resort for a reprieve from city strife. How their “days and nights” in the forest transform the young men is the central theme of the film.

Ray’s script made a few departures from the novel which met with disapproval from the author. For instance, he changed the class character of the protagonists. The unemployed youth who travelled ticketless in trains in Ganguly’s novel were, in the film, changed into four well-heeled middle-class men, three of whom held jobs while one even had a car. Perhaps it was the educated middle-class (to which he belonged and understood well) that Ray held guilty of becoming “nowhere people”; of being divorced from their environment and of being oblivious to the impact of their actions on those who they considered their intellectual and cultural inferior — in this case, the tribals of the region. There is a delightful irony — Ray seems to say in the film — that those who cannot appreciate a forest or a sunset without the crutch of Western literary tropes should somehow consider themselves culturally superior!

The women in Aranyer Din Ratri provide a strong moral contrast to the men. Aparna reveals the hollowness of the men, particularly Ashim, who is attracted to her. Stuart Byron in Film Quarterly (1972) sees the film as a “deeper statement on male chauvinism”. The one aspect of Ray’s cinema that I have missed while working in Bombay films has been his deep insights into women’s psyche. Bombay films, notwithstanding their scale and circulation, rarely offer ‘strong’, author-backed roles to women.

My tryst with Bombay cinema

Even as I signed on for Aranyer Din Ratri, I was already committed to shooting for the Hindi film, Aradhana, to be directed by Shakti Samanta. He was responsible for my break in Hindi films with Kashmir ki Kali, which was a runaway hit. My second film with him, An Evening in Paris, was also a huge hit. He now wanted 40 days at a stretch to shoot for his new film, Aradhana. At the same time, the offer to act in Ray’s film arrived. I had no intention of missing the opportunity of working with Ray notwithstanding my fondness for, and personal loyalty to, Shaktida. Shaktida understood my predicament and readjusted his schedules to fit my requirements. I ended up having the best of both worlds. Aradhana became a monster hit — arguably the biggest of my career. And I had the privilege of being a part of Aranayer Din Ratri, which was, in the words of Stuart Byron, “apart from Charulata, the greatest film to date by a great director”.

This anecdote well sums up my career, which straddled the world of Bengali films on the one hand and Bombay films on the other. Between 1963 and 1989, I had a film release every single year without a break, during which time I acted in over a 100 films with an average release of four films a year. It goes without saying that Bombay cinema gave me a visibility that no other cinema could have. I remember an interaction with people of Indian origin in South Africa whose passports did not allow them to enter India during the apartheid regime. They shared with me how, every Sunday, they dressed in their finest clothes and went to see my popular song and dance movies. This, they said, was their only link to India, and how I through my films had brought them closer to India. What better tribute to the reach and contribution of Bombay films. But throughout my career, I continued to work in Bengali films, which exposed me to a different world of acting, films that stood the test of time and are remembered even today. Being an insider in two different industries within the same country allowed me to understand Indian cinema from a very unique vantage point.

Having said all this, I have to acknowledge that my life was never circumscribed by the trappings of stardom. I am an intensely private person and despite the ‘publicness’ of my persona, I never liked the intrusion into my privacy and, consequently, did not like the limelight to be constantly on me. My work was central to my existence but I always knew a world beyond the studios. Perhaps this is what allowed me to make unconventional career choices, like playing mother to the star sensation of the era in Aradhana at the age of 25, or playing the deglamourized prostitute in Mausam.

Similarly, I made unconventional life choices regardless of what impact they would have on my career. I made no secret of my courtship and subsequent marriage to cricketer Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi at the peak of my career at a time when a woman star getting married was considered professional hara-kiri. To make matters complicated, my husband was Muslim and I was Hindu. There were disapproving murmurs but we never let them bother us. Then, once again, as a top heroine in the industry, I opted to have a child which was akin to professional hara-kiri twice over! But I was determined to have a family and didn’t mind if it came at the cost of stardom. I think it was a classic example of having my cake and eating it too. I wanted it all.

Despite the inevitable and usual ups and downs, I have never regretted the choices that I have made in life or in films. I wanted a career in films that gave me wings and I wanted a family that kept me rooted. But often the demands from both were more than I could handle, but somehow, despite the many struggles, moments of despair and exasperation, with the help of friends, family, luck, chance and determination, I have managed so far to live life the way I have wanted to, on my own terms. It hasn’t been easy but it has been worth it.