Madhabi Mukherjee - Working With Satyajit Ray

Working With Satyajit Ray

In the early 1960s, she was recruited by Satyajit Ray to portray the role of Arati in the 1963 film, Mahanagar (The Big City).

Recalling her meeting with Ray, Madhabi wrote:

In Mahanagar, Madhabi Mukherjee plays Arati who takes a job as a saleswoman due to financial constraints in the family. The large joint family is horrified at the thought of a working woman. For Arati, going door to door selling knitting machines opens up a whole new world and new friends and acquaintances including an Anglo-Indian friend, Edith. Earning money also raises Arati's status in the family especially when her husband (Anil Chatterjee) loses his job. When Edith is sacked unfairly, Arati resigns in protest...Madhabi's towering performance as Arati dominates the film. Quoting Film critic Roger Ebert: " it might be useful to see the performance of Madhabi Mukherjee in this film. She is a beautiful deep, wonderful actress who simply surpasses all ordinary standards of judgment."

This film was soon followed by her portrayals of Charu in Charulata (The Lonely Wife), the 1964 film based on Rabindranath Tagore's novella Nashtanir (The Broken nest, 1901). Mukherjee's stunning portrayal of Charulata,a bored and neglected housewife of Calcutta in the 19th century, is undoubtedly a towering performance in the history of Indian cinema.

Without doubt Madhabi reached the peak of her career with this film, possibly Ray's greatest film as well, the Apu trilogy notwithstanding. As the bored and neglected housewife in Victorian Calcutta of the 1870s who gets attracted to her husband's cousin Amal (Soumitra Chatterjee), Madhabi makes the central role of Charu her own. It is without doubt one of the greatest performances of Indian cinema. She lives the role. She is Charulata. Till date Madhabi in Charulata remains the benchmark for what an ideal Tagore heroine should be and it is said that when Ray returned to Tagore with Ghare Baire (1984) (The Home and the World), he stylised Swatilekha Chatterjee in a manner similar to Madhabi in Charulata.

Madhabi's third and last film with Ray was Kapurush (The Coward) in 1965.. The films looks at Amitabha Roy (Soumitra Chatterjee), a screenwriter whose car breaks down in a small town. He lodges with a local resident, Bimal Gupta (Haradhan Bannerjee). Bimal is married to Karuna (Madhabi Mukherjee), who was a past girlfriend of Amitabha, a fact which Bimal is unaware of. Despite playing out predictably, Kapurush still has a great deal of charm, most notably in the wordless acting prowess demonstrated by Soumitra and Madhabi. Through their subtle eye movements and small body gestures, we are able to discern their unspoken turmoil especially Madhabi's who behaves totally indifferently to Soumitra even as he tries to re-connect to her.