'When Durga Died, We All Felt The Loss'

'I often wondered while watching the film/trilogy, what if Durga had lived.'
' What if Ray made The Durga Trilogy.'
Sandip Roy looks back at Pather Panchali's Durga and the woman who brought her alive, Uma Dasgupta.

For generations of film lovers, in Bengal and beyond, if heartbreak had a name, it was Durga.

'That scene when Harihar realises that Durga is no more. I have never cried more watching a film,' tweeted writer and film critic Aseem Chhabra recently.

He was referring to Satyajit Ray's 1955 masterpiece, Pather Panchali.

Harihar returns home to his village after a long time away, bearing gifts for his family, not knowing that his daughter Durga is dead.

As he holds out a sari for her, his wife breaks down, the piercing wail of a taarshehnai drowning out her sobs. It is a gutting scene. Even now whenever I watch that film, my eyes well up in anticipation of that scene.

Pather Panchali was the first film in Ray's world-famous Apu Trilogy.

The films trace Apu's journey from a wide-eyed boy in a little village to becoming a young father in Kolkata. His sister Durga's story ends in the first film itself.

Unlike Apu, Durga has never aged in our imagination.

She is forever that teenaged girl with dancing eyes running like quicksilver through the fields of our memory.

But Uma Dasgupta, who acted as Durga, grew older like everyone else. She died in Kolkata on November 18 at the age of 84.

Pather Panchali was her one and only film. Even that almost didn't happen. She had been plucked out of school for an audition.

She thought it was for a play and wore a favourite green printed frock and a pearl necklace.

An aghast Ray said, 'What are you wearing around your neck? My film will have nothing like that in it.'

In My Years with Apu, Satyajit Ray writes he took her to the roof to take some photographs with his Leica.

'Since she seemed a bit demure, and Durga was a tomboy, I asked her to make faces for the camera. She obliged with a total lack of inhibition.'

Those photographs are now on the cover of a collection of Dasgupta's writings, Umar Panchali.

But even after Ray was happy, her father Paltu Dasgupta, an ex-footballer for the Mohun Bagan club, declared no girl from his family would act in a film.

It took a lot of persuasion by Ray and her sister to make him change his mind. But he categorically refused to let Ray pay her.

Ray bought her a bound set of the works of Rabindranath Tagore instead. Later, Uma recalled that whenever anyone introduced Paltu Dasgupta as 'Uma Dasgupta's father', he would retort, 'Please say Uma Dasgupta is Paltu Dasgupta's daughter.'

That film made her world famous.

American magazines listed her as one of the teenagers of the year.

When Jawaharlal Nehru attended a special screening in Calcutta, she had to felicitate him with a bouquet.

'After the film ended, he told me many things. Scared and shy, I understood almost nothing,' recalled Dasgupta.

'Thankfully, Manikda (Ray) managed the situation.'

Rabindranath Tagore's niece Indira Devi Chaudhurani sent her a hand-written note along with a photograph she herself had taken of Tagore.

Many wondered why, after all that acclaim, Uma Dasgupta never acted again.

In Umar Panchali, she says she had neither the looks nor the temperament.

She writes, 'In a middle class family like ours, working in films was neither desirable nor respectable.'

She finished college, married Diptikumar Sen, a river pilot and set up a family.

As Uma Sen, she became a teacher for a school in Kolkata.

Parents of the students would often exclaim, much to her irritation, 'Are you really that Durga? It's impossible to recognise you now.'

She wrote poems and short stories, drew pictures. But Pather Panchali never left her.

People would seek her out every time that film had an important anniversary.

Dasgupta writes she worried she was becoming a 'cliche' doomed to doing an 'action replay' of that one extraordinary role.

When an aunt took her to Madhyamgram, showed her off to all the neighbours and then made her sit on a makeshift stage while the film was screened on a sheet, she almost died with embarrassment.

It was tiring to face the same questions -- how did Ray select you? How did he direct you? How close were you to Apu?

She writes just did what she was told.

'Perhaps I was able to do it because I didn't think too much about it. I didn't have that seriousness,' she said.

Shoot days felt like a picnic as they traveled to a small village. Ray gave her a script illustrated shot by shot.

'But don't memorise it,' he told her. 'I might change it.'

She rues she did not save her copy.

'I didn't know its worth then,' she writes.

But that role of a life interrupted haunts us even today.

'I often wondered while watching the film/trilogy, what if Durga had lived. What if Ray made The Durga Trilogy,' writes film critic Tanushree Ghosh.

'I felt for Durga, not Apu.'

Ray unflinchingly showed us how her mother doted on her son and treated the daughter harshly, trying to bend her into demure compliance.

But the genius of Ray was he never forgot to also remind us there was still love, threadbare and worn as it was, that tied this little family together.

Apu doted on Durga. She was his protector. He was her shadow.

When she died, we all felt the loss.

Durga died but perhaps her unfinished story was picked up in other films in other roles of women who wanted to live outside the little circles society earmarked for them.

Arati in Mahanagar stepping out of home to work.

Charu in Charulata on that swing watching her orderly world turn upside down.

Mrinmoyee in Teen Kanya on a madcap chase behind her pet squirrel.

In Umar Panchali, Dasgupta wonders what life would have been like if she could have spent her life in a 'freeze shot' as Durga.

Instead, she did something extraordinary.

She went back to an ordinary life as Uma, which is another name for Durga.

As she exits the stage, she has left behind through Umar Panchali some snippets of the woman she became.

The last poem is from this year itself:

Manik-da took 'Durga'
Oh so high
There are a few steps still to descend.
I have got love and affection in spades
Though sometimes I also float and sink in a web of lies
So let me draw the closing line now
No, let me not say if I come or go
My age after all is just eighty-four.

Run in peace, Durga.

Sandip Roy is a podcaster and columnist and the author of the novel Don't Let Him Know.