'People won't watch an old Feluda'
Veteran Bengali actor Soumitra Chatterjee believes that Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore is very much a part of our present, but he is being read much less these days.
"It is inescapable. For a Bengali, getting away from Tagore is very difficult because his works reflect a gamut of creative experiences. You listen to his songs every day in some form or the other," said Chatterjee in his interview.
"But Tagore is being read much less these days. His poetry is not so popular any more, but strangely whenever people want a quotation to add literary flourish to any intellectual activity (be a simple letter, an essay, a social or literary event), people still fall back on Tagore's prose and poetry for the right expression," he said.
Chatterjee, 73, one of the country's top elocutionists based in Kolkata, was in the capital to recite Tagore's poetry as part of the iconic poet's 147th birthday celebrations at the Shriram Centre Saturday. Tagore was born May 8, 1861.
Elocution, feels Chatterjee, is a very important medium of expression for an actor. "The actor has to speak so much all the while. If his diction is not right, how can he build himself as an actor?" Chatterjee asked.
His favourite poems are Tagore's Baanshi (The Flute) and modernist Jibanananda Das' Bonolata Sen. "I love to recite them for the emotions that they portray, their lyrics and the experiences that they recall," the actor said.
For Chatterjee, Tagore has a pan-Indian appeal. The bard is not confined to Bengal alone, he says.
"In northern India, Mumbai and even in southern India, the culturally inclined follow Tagore and care for him much more than many Bengalis. They cherish his works," Chatterjee said.
Chatterjee, born in Krishnanagar, 100 km from Kolkata, in 1935, began his career as a showman on the stage in the late 1950s when Bengal was flourishing culturally. He was a regular at the Kolkata Coffee House, the hub of cultural debates by young Bengali intellectuals.
His world revolved around literature and the arts. "There was romanticism in the atmosphere then. The leftist idealism had developed into a conviction," he recalls.
The actor, always drawn to art house cinema, made his first appearance in 1959 in Satyajit Ray's Apur Sansar (The World of Apu), the final part of a trilogy about a boy from rural Bengal in search of his identity.
