Sohini Haldar & Sudipta Chakravarthy

They share more than an award
SOHINI Sengupta-Haldar and Sudipta Chakravarty share between them, the national award for best supporting actress of the year. Besides the National Award, they share several other things as well. One, both of them were born into theatre families. Sohini’s parents, Rudraprasad and Swatilekha Sengupta, are the torch-bearers of a 40-year-old theatre group in Calcutta, Nandikar. Her husband, Gautam Halder, has often been described as “one of the greatest sons of Bengal for the year 1994-95 for his one-man performance in the classical play Meghnadbadh Kavya, a Nandikar production.

Sudipta’s father, Biplabketan Chakravarty runs his own theatre group, Theatrewalla, founded in 1993. Her mother, Deepali Chakravarty, is a dancer with the Calcutta choir. Her two sisters too, are deeply involved with theatre.
Two, Sohini is 24 and Sudipta is just a year her junior. Three, both girls had their initiation into theatre while still very young. Four, both have bagged the National Award very early in their career. Five, neither have the drop-dead looks of a potential Suchitra Sen or a Madhuri Dixit. Period. Sohini gets her award with her debut in films, for portraying the role of the schizophrenic Khuku in Aparna Sen’s Paromitaar Ek Din. Sudipta’s award comes for essaying Malati, Bonolata’s maid in Rituparno Ghose’s Bariwali. But this was not her debut film.
So, when asked what they felt about their award after the first moment of excitement, they both say, “it is a tribute to the stage and a recognition given to artistes from the theatre.”

But this is where the similarity between these two young women ends. Sudipta is an extrovert, and a very familiar face to Bengalies hooked on to their television sets, addicted to the Bengali channels, both DD7 and satellite channels like AlphaBangla, Tara and ETV. She reads out the news everyday on DD7 produced by Rainbow Productions, a pirvate firm producing television software for local networks. Khaas Khabar finds Sudipta sharing the newsdesk with her male colleague, prim and proper in the politically correct attire of the typical news-reader, serious expression with eyes hidden behind her glasses, saree pinned and draped just-so, reading out the day’s news in a deadpan voice and with a deadpan face.

But watch her perform in a serial and you’ll know the difference. She can be naughty and serious by turns. Within a brief span, Sudipta has dabbled in everything there is to do with the audio-visual media, theatre, newsreading, anchoring magazine programmes like Sreemati, acting in soaps and serials, and of course, films.

Sohini, who made her debut in theatre while very young, never really wanted to be an actress. “I am a very shy and introvert person by nature. But destiny deemed it necessary that I choose the stage. After all, as the only child of my parents, the responsibility of carrying the Nandikar torch forward is vested in me. Even so, I really wished to take up teaching as my profession,” says this young lady who has done her post graduation in literature from Jadavpur University, following this up with a BEd. “It is a bit funny, my having won this prestigious award, considering I consistently refused to play Khuku for Reena-Maashi (Aparna Sen.) But she insisted that she wanted no one else for Khuku but me. Then, as I went through the workshop conducted by Sohag Sen and supervised by Reena-Mashi, I began to get the feel of the character and enjoyed the experience of delineating Khuku,” says Sohini.

When asked, what Khuku was all about, Sohini begins to explain her prize-winning role. “Khuku is a rather unusual character. She is a schizophrenic girl, the only daughter of the matriarch, Sanaka (Aparna Sen) in Paromitaar Ek Din. She is in her late 20s fat, and has fantasies of getting married, something that will never happen in her sad life. She is childlike, naïve and innocent too, and her moments of clarity are enriched by her brilliant singing talent. She has moments of lucidity where her insight could take any normal person by surprise. She has violent phases as well. She is deeply attached to her mother and to Paromita, her sister-in-law who leaves the house when she divorces Khuku’s elder brother. I slowly discovered the challenge and the freedom that lay latent within the role. The workshop helped me get a sense of history of the character. A mentally deranged person does not offer any true line of action. So, I had a lot of freedom to play around with the interpretation of the character within the framework Reena-Mashi gave me. I had read some psychology for my BEd, and that helped too. Then, there was the personal experience of having encountered a schizophrenic. Reena-Maashi too, drew from her experiences of relating with one of her two sisters who has a problem. All this helped in fleshing out the character of Khuku. My husband’s friend, the famous poet Joy Goswami, actually wept over the phone when he congratulated me after seeing the film. He had a relative like Khuku and he said my performance made him cry for her. This was before the award and I was deeply moved. In fact, Joy wrote an analytical review of the film in Desh, the Bengali weekly, focussing totally on Khuku in the film.”

What next? “Well, the award is a bit scaring in the sense that I will have to take my career more seriously from now on” she says, rushing off to the final rehearsal of the Nandikar performance, Ei Shahar Ei Samay. As this writer watched her in this theatrical performance, she was wonderstruck by the sheer versatility of Sohini’s talent. She stands out among the group performers of Nandikar, all of them extremely talented youngsters, with her spontaneous breaking into a dance number, letting down her hair, literally, to enact a satirical love scene. There is an electric vibrancy in her performance that is infectious. Yet, she has the power to keep this in total control, when enacting a mentally deranged young girl with repressed physical desires as Khuku in her maiden screen performance.

It is now Sudipta’s turn to talk. “Well, I first appeared on stage in 1983, I was in Class One then, in my father’s play produced by Ankush, that was the name of the group when we lived in Howrah. It was a very important role in a play called Ghare Phera and fetched me quite a few awards for best child actress. Then, in 1989, I had the good fortune to act under the direction of Utpal Dutt. The play, Choiti Raater Swapno, was a Bengali translation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Her entry into television was triggered off when the late Jochhon Dastidar of Sonex, the founder of Bengali serials of DD7, asked Sudipta to do a role in Naachni when she was in Standard VI. “I did the role of a leper and at that age, it was difficult. Though I did a major role in Tritiya Pandab during the prelims for SSC, I managed to score the highest in Bengali. My acting has never interfered with my studies,” says Sudipta who will appear for her finals in English Honours from IGNOU.

What, does she feel is so important about her role as Malati for her to fetch the top award in the country? To this, a surprised Sudipta responds with, “I don’t really know myself because I have not seen the film yet, not after the release-ready print came out of the lab. But I loved Malati who is the landlady Bonolata’s (Kiron Kher) maid. They have a strong rapport between them.
Yet, on the surface, they are totally distanced from each other. Bonolata is much older, single and unattached, educated and aristocratic. Malati is not educated, is of humble origins, is over-awed by the film unit that is shooting in the house, and is engaged to be married to a young man (Chandan Sen.) There is this strange love-hate relationship between Bonolata and Malati. Bonolata is at once protective and jealous of Malati. It is the fine tuning between these two women that drew me to the role. I am thrilled about the award.”

One hears she had a lip-to-lip kissing scene in the film with co-star Chandan Sen who plays her boyfriend. How did she react to it? “I asked my father. He said that once I had decided to step into acting, I had to do what the role demanded of me and what the director demanded of the role,” she says. Of the three, theatre, television and cinema, Sudipta openly says that she finds theatre the most fulfilling. “Though reading the news is a highly educative exercise for me. The minute I accepted the Khaas Khabar assignment, I began watching the news on the BBC, CNN, Star News, the works. I felt it necessary to invest my persona as newsreader with the dignity it deserves. So the serious look you see on the news. As for the rest, I give myself totally up to the director.”

So saying, she rushes off to catch the next train to Hyderabad, where Sudipta is acting in a telefilm for ETV Bangla.

Shoma A Chatterjee