Playing Second Fiddle to Vidya Balan

Bollywood’s latest entrant Parambrata Chatterjee would rather be known as Vidya Balan’s ‘heroine’ than Ritwik Ghatak’s grandson

He is currently the nation’s favourite cop. A strapping young lad with very middle-class Bengali looks, Parambrata Chatterjee—who plays Satyaki Sinha, ‘heroine’, as he calls himself, to (hero) Vidya Balan’s Bidya Bagchi in Sujoy Ghosh’s film Kahaani—has become the current poster boy of Tolly, er, Bollywood. “Till Baishe Sraban [a Tollywood crime thriller by Srijit Mukherjee], my fan base was limited to the Chatterjees and Banerjees. Today it also includes the Kapoors and the Purohits,” says the actor, who is up to his nose with phone calls, text messages and tweets from all over India and beyond, post Kahaani.

The 30-something Parambrata, aka Param, is lapping it up. “I have suddenly hit big league with Kahaani,” he says. But he was already a part of the big league in Tollywood, having begun his career in 2003, coincidentally opposite Vidya Balan, in Hemanter Pakhi, and then following it up with a series of Feluda movies, where he plays the  second-most coveted role—of Topshe, Satyajit Ray’s Watson. Besides, there have been Sandip Ray’s Nishijapon, Anjan Dutta’s Bong Connection (which impressed Sujoy Ghosh enough to offer him Kahaani) and Chalo Let’s Go, Gautam Ghosh’s Kaal Bela. And then there was Srijit’s Baishe Sraban, a thriller in which too he’d played a cop. 

“Yes, yes, I was in the big league, particularly after Baishe Sraban,” says Param with characteristic humility, “But Kahaani has given me pan-India exposure.”  What has intrigued Parambrata is that “it’s not just young girls but their mothers too who are sending me mails from their daughters’ IDs. Besides, back home, there is this ‘having done Bengal proud’  kind of thing, you know. People are proud that a Bengali boy has done well in Bollywood”.

Given this, Param is surprisingly quiet about the fact that he is the grandson of the Bengali doyen of filmmaking, Ritwik Ghatak. Insisting that Ghatak hasn’t had any influence on him, he says, “I have never thought of myself as Ritwik Ghatak’s grandson. But I have always known that I would be in films since I was in Class VIII.”

And he does take his character sketches seriously. This is nowhere nore obvious than in the fact that his roles of the cop in Kahaani and Baishe Sraban are so unlike each other. “In Baishe Sraban, Bijay Pakrashi is an IPS officer, but in Kahaani, Satyaki is a rookie policeman, who has just come out of training and belongs to a very different social strata. He lives on the fringes of the city and takes a tram back home after work,” Param explains.

So how did he flesh out Satyaki’s character? The actor feels being a Bengali helps immensely. “You have so many reference points, so many models that one can follow. My reference point for Satyaki was Uttiyo in Rabindranath Tagore’s Shyama, even Kishore from Rakta Karabi.” Both Uttiyo and Kishore in Rabindranath Tagore’s plays are men with unrequited love for heroines who are both stronger and older than them. “In Satyaki, I find a young boy who is in love with a stong woman. He shouldn’t probably even dream of having her, so his love remains silent though he has to give his audience an inkling of his state of mind,” he says.

As for Baishe Sraban, he says he took inspiration from David Fincher’s Se7en. “Of course, I adapted it to a very Bengali situation,” he says. Whenever he is offered a role, Parambrata does his own background research. “I ask the director questions—is he single, has he had sex, is his father alive? After that, I try and find role models. When I have found a couple, I bounce it off the director. If he likes them, good. If he doesn’t, he has to give me good reason why he doesn’t. If it sounds plausible to me, I hunt for some more role models. Usually it’s a mix-and-match when we share our perspectives on the role.”

Parambrata had just finished a course on film production at Bristol University when he started shooting for Kahaani. “I was on a holiday in the continent when I got a call from Sujoy, and I left everything to join him in Mumbai,” he says. “I’m more of a filmmaker than an actor. Even as an actor, I am a filmmaker,” says.

After his stint in the UK, Parambrata is a more confident man, confident as an actor as well as a filmmaker. His first directorial debut, Jiyo Kaka, with Rituparna Sengupa in the lead, received mixed reviews. It was about the underbelly of Tollywood, things that newcomers have to grapple with while entering the industry. “Right now, I have too much on my plate as an actor. I have a number of big releases. And in between all this, I am writing the script for my next film, which I will hopefully start late next year,” he says.

About Bolly offers, Parambrata clearly points out, “I would love to get opportunites to act in Bollywood, but I won’t forsake Tollywood for that. It would be stupid of me to do so. The Bengali film industry has just taken off, with a lot of good films being made and a lot of positive energy here. So I will never sacrifice Tollywood for the sake of Bolly.”

Talking about the resurgence in Tollywood that reminds most people of the Satyajit Ray-Ritwik Ghatak-Mrinal Sen era, the actor says, “It is really not fair to compare. The economics of filmmaking has undergone a vast change. Besides, even post Ray or Ritwik, in the late 1980s and 1990s, the old order was giving way to a new order and the latter took some time to take off. And don’t forget, Gautam Ghosh and Aparna Sen were still making films at that time.” However, he agrees that today Tollywood is producing many more good films far more frequently. “Actually now, a number of educated, cultured people have come into the industry, and they have brought good sensibilities and aesthetics,” says  the actor, whose mother was a consultant at Film and Television Insitute of India and his father was a photo-journalist incharge of the entertainment section of Sambad Pratidin. The actor, who lost his father at the impressionable age of 19, misses him the most at his times of success. “He became such an important part of my life after he passed away,” he says. Even now, when he sits down with a drink, he raises a toast to his father. “Actually, by not being there for me, he helped me become a strong man,” says Satyaki, aka Bijay Pakrashi, aka Topshe.

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Karabi Basu