Sixty years ago this month, an affair between the great Italian film
director, Roberto Rossellini, then married to Ingrid Bergman, and a
young Bengali woman, Sonali Dasgupta, wife of the filmmaker Harisadhan
Dasgupta, made headlines in the yellow press in India and in Britain and
America. The coverage was a potpourri of innuendo, xenophobia, envy and
outright fabrication.
One individual who witnessed the scandal
from its genesis to its denouement - a young Frenchman called Jean
Herman, later renowned as a prolific and much acclaimed novelist,
filmmaker and screen-play writer under the name Jean Vautrin -passed
away at his home in village near Bordeaux in south-west France on
Tuesday.
I was privileged to get his account of what had
transpired during those turbulent months in the course of an extended
conversation in a cafe located right across the Montparnasse railway
station - a conversation that subsequently figured in my book on
Rossellini's passage to India. The film director, hailed for his
'neo-realist' films made in Italy in the wake of the %Second World War,
had arrived in Mumbai in December 1956 at the invitation of Jawaharlal
Nehru to produce a series of documentaries as well as a feature-length
film in four episodes that would showcase the country a decade after it
won its independence from British rule.
Rossellini has first
asked Francois Truffaut, then an enfant terrible among French film
critics who went on to become one of the leading lights of the French
New Wave Cinema, to work as his assistant in India. But Truffaut had
other fish to fry. He therefore suggested the name of his friend Jean
Herman, a dropout from the French Institute of Higher Cinematographic
Institute and a lecturer in French literature at the Wilson College in
Mumbai, as his replacement.
Herman had married a fellow student
at the Institute, Lila, an Indian, done the French sub-titles of
Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali and published articles on cinema in the
Illustrated Weekly of India. This periodical, then a highly-valued brand
of the Times of India Group, also carried the photographs he had shot
during his travels across India.
No sooner had Rossellini
offered him the post of assistant director than he resigned from his
lecturer's job to follow, as he told me, in the foot-steps of the new
Messiah. The two walked the streets in Mumbai from dawn to dusk.
Rossellini, Herman noted, was in thrall of the sights, sounds and
smells of the city. The details that caught his attention would find
their way in some form or the other in the scripts he dictated for the
films: diversity of communities, clothes, headgears, languages,
diversity of trades and professions, diversity of places of worship,
diversity of musicians, hawkers, holy men and rituals.
Herman
was present when Sonali, who agreed, at her husband's behest, to join
the script sessions at the Taj. Rossellini seldom looked at her, Herman
said, but there was not the slightest doubt that he sought to mesmerise
her with his effusion of eloquence, intelligence and charm. He wanted
her to be part of the shooting unit. When she refused, Herman said, he
would send her one telegram after another. And when the telegrams went
unanswered, he would chase her whether she was in Mumbai, Kolkata or
Jamshedpur. Eventually, left to fend for herself by her husband and to
face her angry and distraught relatives, she moved in with Rossellini.
Herman told me that for Rossellini India was much like Italy: a country
in a permanent state of frenzy and delirium. Like the Italians, he
believed, Indians were both emotional and highly pragmatic. Both
belonged to the civilisation of 'draped clothes' rather than to the
civilisation of 'stitched' ones.
Where did Sonali figure in all
this? This is what Herman told me: " Roberto always need to merge the
vicissitudes of the cinema with the vicissitudes of his life. It was a
romantic and liberating need. You can almost say which woman mattered to
him in each of his films. It was no different in India."
He
added: "Roberto fell in love with Sonali instantly. To him she
personified the nobility, beauty and intelligence of India. He was a
compulsive talker. She, on the other %hand, hardly said a word. Her
silences were a mystery to him. And the only way he could unveil the
mystery was to seduce her."
All of this - the heat and dust of
the scandal - had been relegated to the past. What remained, Herman told
me, was the serenity and courage with which Sonali faced the hostility
of the relatives and the yellow press and the way she adapted to her
life in Italy. That was no easy task. As Sonali herself once confided to
me: " Ask me what it means to live with a genius." But Herman took what
seems to me to be a lucid take on Rossellini's Indian interlude: "
He had made up his mind that he would use his Indian experience to
profoundly change his life, the way he shot his films and indeed his
very ideas about the cinema." And that is what he did in his subsequent
documentaries: they delight but do not dazzle.
The death of
Jean Herman - alias Jean Vautrin brings %to a close one of the most
fascinating footnotes in the history of cinema.
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