Sonali Dasgupta

Jun 08 2014 : The Times of India (Kolkata)

Showcasing India in Rome

Malini Nair

TNN





The Rossellini affair so over whelmed Sonali Dasgupta's story that it eclipsed every other facet of her life. But the truth is that decades before Indian crafts became big business in Europe, she set up a successful boutique in Rome in the early '60s which specialized in westernwear crafted from Indian textiles.

The eponymous `Sonali' was located on Via Borgognona, a fashion street in Rome, and sold Indian jewellery , clothes and handicrafts till age forced her to shut it down. Far from being a shadow of Rossellini, she was a feisty businesswoman whose client list included the Italian film fraternity and Hollywood actor John Malkovich.

“She was an independent, self-made woman,“ says her brother Karun Senroy over the phone from Ventabren, France. “She managed the store on her own even as she raised her children.” Senroy was the only one of her three siblings who Sonali remained in touch with after her flight to Rome.

Sukanya Wignarajan, her niece, recalls that she took great pride in her collection of handloom saris. Now a Tokyo-based psychotherapist, Wignarajan remembers as a child being shown a design sketchbook by her aunt featuring her sartorial ideas. Sonali, an important part of the city’s social circuit, was perhaps the best advertisement for her store. “In the ’60s, she cut this really uncommon figure in Rome. She was 5’8”, slender, dressed entirely in saris and very elegant. My uncle who worked in Milan said she always drew a lot of attention,” says Wignarajan.

In the last few years, she busied herself with writing. “She was always a reserved person, unless you goaded her to talk,” says Senroy. “But she was always Indian, very, very much so.”

Jun 08 2014 : The Times of India (Kolkata) End of the Roman holiday Dileep Padgaonkar   It was the scandal of the '50s: a doe-eyed Bengali beauty leaves husband, child to elope with celebrated Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini. But for Sonali Dasgupta who died in Rome on Saturday, the love story didn't have a happy ending Except for a few months in 1957, when she was thrown in the vortex of a scandal that made headlines in the yellow press across the world, Sonali Dasgupta lived her life behind a thick veil of anonymity . Before the scandal erupted, she led the humdrum existence of a housewife, resigned, unhappily no doubt, to playing second fiddle to her husband, Harisadhan Dasgupta, a gregarious, ambitious and talented documentary filmmaker. She had studied at Shantiniketan and took a lively interest in Indian culture. But no opportunity came her way to turn that interest into a vocation. Her lot was to bask in the reflected glory of Harisadhan ­ first in Kolkata, where he had founded a film society along with Satyajit Ray and Chidananda Dasgupta, and later in Mumbai, where he directed documentaries for the Films Division and for major business houses. His success allowed him to socialise with Mumbai's commercial film industry circles, including, especially , with fellow Bengalis like Bimal Roy who happened to be a relation as well. It is at a film party , held in December 1956, that he learnt of the imminent arrival in Mumbai of Roberto Rossellini, the great Italian film director, to direct, at the behest of Jawaharlal Nehru, several documentaries, and perhaps also a feature film, to mark ten years of India's independence. All that mattered to him now was a chance to serve as an assistant to Rossellini. That would be another feather in his cap. But that was not to be since he was in the midst of shooting a film for a corporate house. So he tried another tack: persuade Rossellini to hire Sonali to help him write the scripts for his films even though she had no experience in script-writing. Nor did she fancy herself in that role. Not that Rossellini, whose marriage to Ingrid Bergman was on the rocks, needed much persuasion. The very first time that he set his eyes on Sonali he was seized by a mighty passion to seduce her. In his eyes, her beauty , intelligence, grace and, not least, her wondrous enigma incarnated the very soul of India. Discomfited yet flattered by the attention Rossellini lavished on her, Sonali succumbed to the charms of the Italian. Her chagrined and outraged husband threw her out of the conjugal home. Soon two scandal sheets ­ RK Karanjia's Blitz and Baburao Patel's Filmindia ­ ran a series of salacious and concocted reports for weeks on end. That prompted Hollywood gossip columnists to join the fray . Pressure mounted on the government to cancel Rossellini’s visa. It was Nehru who saved the day. He had known Sonali whom he affectionately called Monkey. She was given a passport and arrangements were made to dispatch her to Paris along with her younger son – then a mere toddler. Rossellini joined her a few weeks later. Not long afterwards they shifted to Italy where she gave birth to a daughter, opened a fashion boutique that boasted of a high-end clientele, helped Rossellini in his novel film ventures and got along famously with his children from his two previous wives. But the idyll didn’t last long. One tragedy after another marked her final years: Rossellini, estranged from her, succumbed to a heart attack; Harisadhan, wasted by drink, died in appalling penury; Gil, her younger son, passed away after a freak accident. Her daughter, who trained in the theatre, reportedly embraced a rigid form of Islam and migrated to the Middle East. I met Sonali two days running in Rome while doing research on Rossellini’s sojourn in India. She was poised, serene, stoic. She spoke little. But the little she spoke was singularly free of bitterness, remorse or chagrin. She had fulsome praise for Rossellini’s accomplishments as a filmmaker. But at the end of our last conversation she also said with just a hint of irony: “Ask me what it means to live with a genius.”

Jun 09 2014 : The Times of India (Kolkata) `MA DIDN'T MISS ME' Subhro Niyogi | TNN   Raja Dasgupta talks about his relationship with mother Sonali and why there was more to her than just a scandal W hen filmmaker Raja Dasgupta learned that his mother Sonali had passed away in Rome early on Saturday, he was overcome by a sense of `relief '. The word slips out almost accidentally towards the end of a serene conversation at his Golf Club Road residence over the woman who had left her filmmaker husband Harisadhan Dasgupta and six-year-old son Raja in 1957 to marry celebrated Italian film director Roberto Rossellini. At the time, Rossellini was married to Hollywood diva Ingrid Bergman and the scandal made headlines in tabloids across the world before petering out. But for Raja, it was never really over, surfacing every now and again to pose awkward questions that he himself had avoided asking, perhaps aware that there were no answers. The relief, Raja insists, is for his half-sister Rafaella (Roberto Rossellini and Sonali's daughter) who would have found it extremely difficult to take care of their mother in the vegetative state she had been reduced to. “Ma's left side had become paralyzed. For Rafaella, who lives with her husband in Shar jah, it would have been an impossible situation to manage,“ he explains. Dasgupta may not admit in as many words but the relief that `it' is finally over seeps through the conversation. Though he denies facing the stigma of being deserted by a mother at such a tender age, his mother in absentia did always hang like a dark, unexpected cloud over his life. “I felt no great affection or rancour towards her. She didn't miss me. And I didn't miss her, growing up in a large extended family of grandmother and aunts. I never questioned why she left me because I didn't feel lonely ,“ he says. Raja, for whom the separation was fated, has borne it with stoic calm for nearly all life. They had met later, twice in Rome and several times in Delhi, nurturing the fragile bond for a few days and at times a few hours before parting ways. Then, four-five years ago, Sonali became estranged once again. Though Raja tries to reason that the death of his younger brother Arjun aka Gil on October 3, 2010, had devastated his mother and turned her into a complete recluse, he could not come to terms with the way she treated him thereafter. “I've never really understood Ma. I never will now. But while it never bothered me all these years, these past few days have been difficult. My son Birsa wanted to meet his `dida', but she was reluctant. That actually hurt a lot more than her leaving me. When I would call to wish on her birthday , she would take the call and then disconnect the line when she'd realize it was me at the other end. When Chaitali (wife) and I went to Europe in September 2012 and I persuaded her to meet us for an hour, she spoke barely five minutes with me and spent the remaining time with Chaitali. If she ever needed to get in touch with me, it would be through her lawyer who mailed. If we wanted to get in touch, we would call my maternal uncle or aunt, who also live in Europe, and get word through. She would then call back. It was difficult, very difficult. I used to feel very angry,“ he remarks, sounding resigned rather than bitter. Going back to the early years and his first meeting with `Ma' since her disappearance, Raja recounts the unusual gift he had received from `Baba' when he had just completed Class X -a ticket to Rome. And it was a Roman holiday that he would never forget. “Of course, I was excited to meet Ma. And she did shower me with a lot of affection in the seven weeks I spent there. But looking back, it is with Rossellini that I bonded more than I did with Ma. He embraced me as though I was his son, driving away all the apprehensions about a step-father. We would spend hours together discussing so many things. He would take me to his shoots and take me on drives in his Ferrari. He even introduced me to Enzo Anselmo Ferrari, founder of the Scuderia Ferrari Grand Prix motor racing team. On that trip, I learnt to put each one -Baba, Ma, Roberto -in separate compartments. If you didn't mix them, you didn't get confused or hurt,“ he explains. While he learned nearly the entire craft of filmmaking from his father, it is Rossellini who taught him how to economize on the set without compromising on quality . “I'd be amazed at the presence of 12-13 hand-picked men at his shoots. Each of them could perform a variety of tasks and were brilliant at what they did. I have tried to implement the tightness in my shooting schedule despite interference from the guild,“ he says. During that trip to Italy , Raja became friends with Roberto's other children, who Sonali took care of. Apart from his own brother Gil, with whom Sonali had left India when he was just 11 months old, there was Renzo, born of Rossellini's first wife Marcelina; twin daughters Isabella and Ingrid and son Robertino born of Ingrid Bergman and Rafaella, Raja's half-sister. They all accepted Raja as an extended member of the Russollini family . “Rafaella and I became close friends, a friendship that has endured time and distance. It is she who flew down to take care of her the last time she was ill. It is again she who is now in Rome to perform the last rites,“ said Raja. He won't be performing shradhh or follow any other customs because he doesn't believe in them. “I did so after Baba died because my paternal aunts insisted on it. Now, there is no such pressure. In any case, she had severed all relations with us towards the end,“ he points out. Years later, when Raja lost his father, Isabella wrote him a beautiful letter, expressing her condolence. She then went on to write: `It feels sad that we get so much more of your mother's love and affection than you do.' In the end, what would be his lasting impressions of his mother who had created such a sensation 57 years ago? Raja finds it difficult to picture those fleeting moments between mother and son. Instead, he speaks of Sonali Dasgupta, the person. “There was more to her than just the scandal. She was very upright, independent and had her own identity . She was the first to set up an Indian boutique in Rome, decades before Indian fashion designers became famous. She was fiercely Indian and never wore anything other than the sari. And she continued to write Bengali in beautiful long hand and perfect diction as long as she did. On the more personal front, she would get Margo soap and Neem toothpaste from Kolkata till stores in Rome began to stock them a decade ago. And though she was not the religious type, she would always get the panjika (almanac) from here,“ he recounts. As the interview draws to a close, Raja smiles impishly remembering something. He hesitates a moment or two before disclosing it almost shyly. “You know, Satyajit Ray had designed Baba and Ma's wedding card. Isn't it something?“ True, even the maestro couldn't have foreseen how the script would evolve a few years on. But then, more than half a century later, few can still fathom what prompted Sonali to leave Raja behind. To Raja, Ma will forever remain an enigma.