When the Cannes Film Festival premieres a restoration of Satyajit Ray’s sexy and sobering Aranyer Din Ratri on Monday, lead actor Sharmila Tagore will be there. Producer Purnima Dutta will be there. American filmmaker Wes Anderson, a Rayphile who used scores from the Bengali master’s movies in his Darjeeling Limited, will be there. Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, whose Film Heritage Foundation restored Aranyer Din Ratri along with The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and The Criterion Collection /Janus Films, will be there.
Simi Garewal will be there too. Garewal, who plays an Adivasi woman named Duli in Aranyer Din Ratri, will be attending Cannes for the first time ever.
“I made this film in 1969, and I never thought that it would take me 56 years to get to the Cannes red carpet,” Garewal told Scroll. “When you work with a great director, it opens out the whole world to you.”
Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest) will be screened on May 19 at Cannes in its Classics section. Ray made the black-and-white film, adapted from Sunil Gangopadhyay’s novel of the same name, right after his comic fantasy adventure Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne.
Soumitra Chatterjee, Rabi Ghosh, Subhendu Chatterjee and Samit Bhana play four friends from Kolkata who travel to Palamu in present-day Jharkhand for a vacation. Their journey into what they believe is uninhibited terrain brings out their ignorance, hypocrisy and skewed understanding of gender relations. Samit Bhanja’s character Hari, in particular, has a sexual encounter with Duli, played by Simi Garewal with blackened skin.
Garewal was already an admirer of Ray before she met him for the first time at Raj Kapoor’s home in Mumbai in the late 1960s. Garewal had played a crucial role in Kapoor’s Limelight-inspired Mera Naam Joker, which Ray had admired.
Garewal remembers Manik da, as Ray was known, praising the segment in Mera Naam Joker that features Garewal as a school teacher who fires the imagination of one of her students. “Manik da apparently kept praising my work to whoever he met,” Garewal said.
A month after the encounter, Garewal got a letter from Ray asking if she could come to Kolkata for a screen test for his upcoming production. All Ray told Garewal was that she would be playing an Adivasi woman.
“I wrote back asking if I needed to speak Bengali,” Garewal recalled. “He said no, just pidgin Bengali. We will work it out when you get here.”
For Garewal, the opportunity to work with Ray was one she couldn’t pass up. Born in Ludhiana, Garewal spent her formative years in England, where she had watched Ray’s earlier films. By the time she received the offer for Aranyer Din Ratri, she had already been in a bunch of mainstream Hindi films, including Teen Devian (1965) and Do Badan (1966). But she yearned for films that were realistic, like the ones directed by Ray.
“I had watched Ray’s films while I was studying in London, and I thought that the films that I would make in Bombay would be like these films,” Garewal said. “But when I came to Bombay, I found the films to be completely juvenile. It wasn’t what I wanted to do. But when one is under pressure, one has accept what one gets.”
Besides, Ray only worked in the Bengali language and with Bengali actors. “I thought I didn’t have a chance, so when I got the letter from Ray, you can imagine how thrilled I was,” Garewal recalled.
Why did Ray cast Garewal – an urban and urbane woman – as an Adivasi character? “Ray had the ability and the vision to transform somebody, which, I am afraid, the Bombay producers lacked,” Garewal said. Her make-up for the role would take over three hours.
The practice of darkening an actor’s complexion rather than casting somebody who actually looks the part has now been largely abandoned. In this aspect, Aranyer Din Ratri, an otherwise razor-sharp, enduring examination of warped masculinity, hasn’t aged well. But Garewal has her own take on the matter.
“You needed a professional to play the role,” she said. A non-professional who might have appeared more authentic would not have been able to perform in front of the camera, Garewal said.
Garewal spent a week watching the other actors before she shot her own scenes. She remembers going to a local store where Adivasi women bought liquor. Ray encouraged Garewal to closely observe one of the women, her body language, her manner of speech. “All I did was to copy her, so it became easy for me,” Garewal said.
Her other memories from the shoot include basic facilities at the locations in Palamu. The lack of creature comforts didn’t matter – “We were so thrilled to be working with Ray that it was a small price to pay,” Garewal said. “The cerebral and creative joy took us along. When Ray praised us or encouraged us, it made us want to do our best.”
Aranyer Din Ratri is famous for a memory game between the four men and two women played Sharmila Tagore and Kaberi Bose. Ray was a reputed admirer of puzzles and word games, which he would solve with Garewal during the shoot, she said.
In 1973, Garewal was back in Kolkata for Mrinal Sen’s Padatik, his politically astute drama about the dynamic between an activist and the woman who shelters him. “I rang up Ray, who said, how wonderful that you are here, I have a new game for you.”
Garewal’s prolonged contact with Ray introduced her not only to the Bengali language but also Rabindrasangeet, she said. “Ray inculcated a whole culture in me,” she added. “I was so inspired that I started learning all these things, and they still live with me till today.”
In later years, Garewal became widely known for her documentaries on Rajiv Gandhi and Raj Kapoor as well as the celebrity talk show Rendezvous with Simi Garewal. She interviewed a host of film personalities for the television series. But she never interviewed Ray professionally.
However, they maintained a correspondence for several years. Garewal has kept all the letters. “I might donate them to the Satyajit Ray Foundation,” she said.
Apart from Aranyer Din Ratri and Padatik, Garewal’s talent was on display in Conrad Rooks’s English-language Siddhartha (1972), based on the Hermann Hesse novel of the same name. These three films are among the more unconventional titles in Garewal’s career.
“I have also done small films for no money, purely for the joy of acting naturally rather than swinging a bag and running around trees,” Garewal said. “I would have loved more roles that gave me the satisfaction of being able to act out a character in a natural, convincing way.”
