‘Mistaken Mukul’, ‘Sonar Kella’ cast to meet for Ray event today
Times of India | 1 May 2024
Kolkata: Shantanu Bagchi, who played the role of the boy mistakenly kidnapped in place of Mukul in Satyajit Ray’s ‘Sonar Kella’, will join several members of the ‘Sonar Kella’ cast at a commemorative programme for the legend’s birth anniversary today. It will be held by Ray Society at Nandan.
“This is the 50th year of Sonar Kella’s release. We are organizing an evening with the film’s cast.Apart from Shantanu, we will have Siddhartha Chatterjee, Kushal Chakraborty and Ashok Mukhopadhyay at the evening adda, following which a restored version of ‘Sonar Kella’ will be screened at Nandan,” said Sandip Ray.
This is the first time Bagchi, who has directed a Hindi film, ‘Mission Majnu’, and is famous for his “mistake-mistake” dialogue from ‘Sonar Kella’, will attend a Ray event in Kolkata. His excitement is palpable: “I miss Manik kaku (Satyajit Ray) and try to find him in his works. Babu da (Sandip Ray) is very open to taking Ray’s works to the next generation. A programme like this will inspire the next generation to pick up the book and read it. To meet the cast of ‘Sonar Kella’ after so many years will be exciting.”
Going back 50 years, Bagchi remembers how as a four-and-a-half-year-old student of Patha Bhawan, he was already an avid fan of Ray’s ‘Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne’. “I loved the idea of Goopy and Bagha clapping their hands and landing at a new place. I wondered if I, too, could clap my hand with a friend in school and reach home,” he said. At the first meeting with Ray, the young Bagchi had volunteered to enact parts from the film. Some nine months later, he was cast in ‘Sonar Kella’.
Shooting primarily happened at Indrapuri Studios. Bagchi remembered Ray telling him he did not need to worry about learning two pages of dialogues as he would split the parts in small sections. But Bagchi had instantly said the two-pager wasn’t a worry at all. “I told him, ‘The teachers from my school are in the line of my eyesight. If you can request them to move further into the shadow zone, I will have no problem saying the lines’. During the take, everyone had moved back and it was a one-take OK. He applauded me after the shoot...” he said.
Among the others who will be part of today’s event is theatre personality Ashok Mukhopadhyay, who played the role of a journalist in ‘Sonar Kella’. “Back then, I didn’t have a landline at home. Around four months after Manik da had seen me in two plays, he called up on my neighbour’s number, asking me to meet him the day after. He offered me the journalist’s role, saying I was used to playing bigger roles in plays, but he was offering me a small one. I was more than elated to have been cast by him. Manik da drew my sketch at the meeting,” he said.