Uma Dasgupta passes away: Pather Panchali’s Apu, Subir Banerjee, remembers his ‘didi’

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Seventy years later, Banerjee has lost his Didi. Dasgupta, Ray’s first heroine, is survived by her daughter. “In Pather Panchali, she died leaving me alone. In real life too, I have lost my Didi today,” says Banerjee.

He remembers her as someone with a lot of patience. “She was so kind to me. It was her first film too, but I would depend on her for guidance. I remember for the rain sequence, which eventually leads to her death in the film, we were made to sit all day under a berry tree. We were waiting for the rain to arrive. Kakababu (Satyajit Ray) made us sit there for hours. We had no choice but to entertain ourselves, so we would play word games, tease each other. And when it eventually rained, we were shivering. She was holding me close, just like she was supposed to in the film,” says Banerjee.

Dasgupta, who has marvelled generations of cine lovers, was noticed by Ray during her stage performance as a child artiste at a school function. The director then got in touch with her school and family. She, however, chose not to act in any other film. Filmmaker Sandip Ray, Ray’s son, says that his father always lauded Uma’s natural ability as an actor. “I was too young to remember the shoot, but later in his life my father talked about Uma di’s intelligence. He claimed that working with her was very easy. She was a natural and could understand complexities of a scene very easily. She chose to stay away from cinema for her own reasons, but even then she will remain one of the most iconic actors of world cinema because of that one performance,” says Sandip.

But why exactly did she choose not to act in another film again? Banerjee, who also didn’t act in any other film after Pather Panchali, says there are multiple reasons. “We knew we wouldn’t be a part of anything this magical again. That awareness was there. We have discussed that many times later. But at that time, for most middle-class Bengalis, the film industry was not a very nice place. My parents, too, were not happy about me acting in Pather Panchali, Uma di’s father was very strict. He didn’t want a film career for her at all,” says Banerjee.

Another Satyajit Ray heroine, the iconic Madhabi Mukhopadhyay, rues the death. “I have met her only a few times and the news of her death does make me very sad. But I feel she had so much potential as an actor and it’s such a loss for us that we didn’t see her in any other film,” she says.