Foreword
Soumitra Chatterjee was one of those extraordinary actors who straddled both the Theatre and Cinema with equal ease.
A thinking actor whose performances eliminated that fine line distinction between performing and being. He made any role offered to him, his very own. It was as though no one else could play that part anymore. Very much like the great Bengali cultural icons before him, such as Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray, Soumitra Chatterjee was a man of many talents; actor, writer, poet, painter-in short, a renaissance man.
In the films of Satyajit Ray, he totally personified what Ray had in mind or imagined-it was as if they thought and responded exactly alike to the world in which they lived and belonged.
About four decades ago, I wanted to cast him in my film Kalyug as Shashi Kapoor's older brother. He was required to speak in Hindi as it was a Hindi language film. Being the perfectionist that he was, he declined the part, as he felt he did not know the language well enough to speak in the film, nor would he allow his voice to be dubbed. In short, I lost the one opportunity I had to work with him.
Murmurs-Silent Steals with Soumitra Chatterjee is a marvelous portrait of this great actor. You get to hear him, know him, in an extraordinarily intimate fashion. Once you have finished reading these musings of Soumitra Chatterjee, it is as though you were listening to a close friend, almost a confidant.
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