HAPPIER TIMES: Suchitra Sen with her granddaughter Raima, who herself is a Bollywood actress now.

By Gautaman Bhaskaran

If one were to have lived in Kolkata even for a short time in the 1960s and the 1970s, one could not have missed hearing about actress Suchitra Sen, who died last week in a city hospital.
She was 82, and along with Ritwick Ghatak, Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Uttam Kumar, Soumitra Chatterjee, Suchitra was part of a distinguished group which made up Kolkata’s literati, each a legend in his or her own right.  
Yet, there was always something down-to-earth about them. They led austere lives that had none of the trappings which we see in the cinema stars of today. Ray would open the front door himself for a visitor. Suchitra would answer the phone herself, and I have seen her in crisp Bengal cotton saris walking into a theatre to catch a film, no retinue of secretaries or body-bouncers, no shimmering brocades and silks!
And mind you, these men and women were celebrated all right, though not in the way we see such celebrations today — which are boisterous and vulgar display of pomp and wealth.
Suchitra acted mostly in Bengali movies, a few in Hindi with Aandhi creating a storm of sorts in 1975. Ironically, that was the year of the draconian Emergency in India, imposed by the country’s “Iron Lady”, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
Even more ironical, Sen played a politician in Aandhi, a politician supposedly modelled on Indira herself with Sanjeev Kumar essaying the Bengali doe-eyed beauty’s estranged screen husband.
The film had great music (Gulzar-R.D. Burman-Lata-Kishore), and Suchitra’s role was to have gone to Vyjayanthimala; she refused as she was not comfortable doing it.
Aandhi could not get a proper theatrical exhibition in 1975, but it did well after the Janata Party came to power a couple of years later when Indira and her Congress Party faced a terrible electoral defeat — clearly a vote against the Emergency. Although Aandhi did very well, Sen did only two more movies after this, both in Bengali, the last being Pronoy Pasha in 1978.
She quit acting and went into a reclusive state, refusing to meet anybody other than her daughter, Moon Moon Sen, and some close members of her family. Nobody knows why she did this, and there was a time when I used to meet Moon Moon often in Kolkata, even visiting her home, but she could never tell me why her mother gave it all up.
And in all those years that I went to Moon Moon’s home, I never once saw Suchitra, who lived in another house, separated by miles of Kolkata’s concrete.
Suchitra once said famously: “I never accepted any proposal for acting since I decided to retire. I spend the morning watching the sky, the trees and the flowers in the garden, in the evening I watch the twilight sky, and I like talking to my granddaughters whenever they paid me a visit”.
Often described as the Indian Greta Garbo — with the Swedish beauty too stepping down at the pinnacle of her career and leading the life of a recluse for 50 years before she died in 1990 aged 84 — Sen has always evoked curiosity about her privacy.
Derek Malcolm, the renowned British film critic, once tried explaining Garbo’s reclusiveness in relation to Suchitra’s: “There was an element of calculation in the way Garbo severed her relationship with journalists. She did not like the Press. She kept her private life private. She was bisexual and had a lot of affairs with women at a time this could not be made public. She used one of the tricks people have forgotten and which today’s Hollywood people could learn. She realised the less she gave interviews and the more she remained intensely private, the more it made people want her and the more mysterious she became.”
But this may not quite apply in the case of Sen.  What can be possibly truer in the case of the Bengali star is what the British academic and author of a number of books on Hindi cinema, Rachel Dwyer, had to say: “There may be two major reasons,” she averred. “One is that some stars, usually very beautiful, hate seeing themselves grow old (I remember Dev Anand did not want anyone to see his dead body, and so I presume the cremation took place in London, where he died.). Some probably find it harder than the rest of us to deal with these changes. However, others may want to escape their own beauty and the image of them created by publicity in the media or made by their studios and the public’s concept of them created by the roles and the way they were presented in the movies themselves. Some may want to conceal something such as their private lives or their sexuality.”
We know that Garbo had something to hide from the public which worshipped her. In the case of Suchitra,  we really do not know why she retired from the world, although as her granddaughter (and Moon Moon’s daughter), the excellent but oft-neglected actress, Raima, once said her grandmother used to go shopping with them, hiding behind huge dark glasses.
“Even then people would recognise her and chase her for autographs”. So, Suchitra was not a total recluse as some would have imagined her to be.
But the fact that she completely vanished from the screen added to her mystery if one may say so, added to her iconicity. People revered her in Bengal (her fame did not quite spread outside Bengal), though the admiration did not take on the kind of mad revellery which one sees in the case of Tamil Nadu’s Rajnikanth, Kamal Hassan and a few others.
But I have always had my reservations about Suchitra’s performances. Malcolm, who simply adored Sen (he has always had a soft corner for Bengali cinema having introduced Ray in Britain after he was discovered at Cannes in 1956 with Pather Panchali), once commented:  “She was very, very beautiful. She had this ‘still’ quality. She did not need to do a lot of ‘acting’.” The last sentence had Malcolm the critic talking, and therein lays the truth.
Sen was rather wooden, unlike Bollywood’s Madhubala or Nutan or Waheeda or Vyjayanthimala or Rekha. Yet, Suchitra was immensely popular with the masses.  Probably, her boxoffice successes came from what many saw in her, and easily, her ethereal beauty. Also a large part of her glory came from the Bengali hits she managed to give with Uttam Kumar.
While Kumar even acted in one of Ray’s films, Nayak (after which there was a positive improvement in his style and substance), Sen was never part of Satyajit’s repertoire. She refused Ray’s Devi Chaudhurani, because she did not have the dates. Incidentally, Ray never made the movie!
In an interview, she had averred: “I refused to work with Satyajit Ray…He wanted me to act exclusively for Devi Chaudhurani. But I had two other commitments at the time and I could not have refused people who made me Suchitra Sen. I assured him that I would give my best in his movie, too, but he did not agree. So, I said no to Ray. Why should I agree to such a proposal?”
Was she gutsy to say no to someone like Ray? Or was she snooty or egoistical? Maybe a bit of both as another quotation of Suchitra’s indicates.
“I had refused Raj Kapoor’s offer almost immediately. He came to my residence offering a lead role and, as I took my seat, he suddenly sat near my foot and gave me a bouquet of roses while offering the role. I rejected the offer. I did not like his personality. The way he behaved — sitting near my foot — did not befit a man”.
Suchitra was contradiction all right. Disarmingly simple at one level, she was fussy with strong likes and dislikes. There was a way men had to conduct themselves in her presence. And nobody could demand exclusivity on her time. What is more, she had to have the last word with producers/directors. She insisted on her name appearing before Uttam Kumar’s in the films they played together.
Some of her movies reflected these traits of hers. The characters she essayed were classy and powerful who were often ensconced in palatial mansions with French windows and flowing curtains. They were regal, and they were, well, proud.
Yet, Suchitra Sen was the kind of woman whom men and women adored, who dreamt of her, their fantasy and fascination fired.

* Gautaman Bhaskaran grew up in Kolkata watching Suchitra Sen
and Uttam Kumar mesmerise crowds, and he may be e-mailed at [email protected]