There are few actors, too few even for finger count, who have worked with four stalwarts of Bengali cinema — Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Tapan Sinha and Tarun Majumdar. One of them lived — and died — in Salt Lake.
An interview of the couple that was published in The Telegraph Salt Lake on September 18, 2005
Debraj Ray, more readily remembered as the good-looking anchor with a dulcet voice reading the 7o’clock Bengali news on Doordarshan through the 80s and 90s and even into the new millennium, passed away on October 17 at a private hospital in Salt Lake. He was 69.
“He did not want to take up the news-reading offer when the station director Shipra Roy had approached him. He had big screen dreams and thought news reading would be boring. But his father (theatre personality Tarun Ray) told him that TV would enter every house one day,” recalled his bereaved wife Anuradha. “He did not join full time though he read the news for years, even after we shifted to Salt Lake.” That was in 2000, when they shifted to a rented house in Baisakhi to oversee the renovation of a single-storeyed house in AE Block. The house on a corner plot at Kwality More, now three storeys tall, has been home to the Rays since 2004.
Among his neighbours in the block was his schoolmate Subir Majumdar who sat next to him in Mitra Institution. “Debraj came from a theatre family. There was a 100-seater hall in the ground floor of their Chakraberia Road house, called Theatre Centre. He even directed a a comedy, titled Kawboy by Premendra Mitra, that we, the schoolmates, staged,” said Majumdar.
Fame came early to Ray. His debut in Ray’s Pratidwandi took place when he was still in school. Yet he never bragged. “Once he was absent for a few days. Later we heard that he was acting in a film,” Majumdar said.
Back-to-back releases with big directors, especially after his sterling performance in Sen’s Calcutta 71, earned him legions of fans. Among them was Anuradha, who wrote to him after seeing him star in Dinen Gupta’s Marjina Abdallah and giving lip to Manna Dey’s hit song Baje Go Bina. “He wrote back, sending me tickets for his play Athacha Sanjukta, in which his parents too acted. The play made my father renew his acquaintance with Devraj’s father who was with him at Presidency College and also led me to join the cast of their next production Ksudhito Pashan for my dancing.”
Since then, the two have acted in innumerable plays before and after marriage in 1976. Anuradha remembers his maiden directorial venture Bishbriksha. “It created a stir because of the modern format he presented Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay in. We staged over 100 shows,” recalled Anuradha, who had acted in the lead role of Kundanandini while Debraj played Nagendra. “It fetched him an award which we went to Delhi to collect.”
Another play he had directed, Bhasan, took him to Malda for research. “It was based on the life of Gambhira artistes.” She still remembers a dialogue he delivered as Hossain Shah in the eponymous historical play which he directed. “Barindranath Das’s play was set at the time of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. His courtiers were converting to Vaishnavism on the sly. The frustrated ruler wonders aloud what Chaitanya can give them that he, a ruler, cannot,” she said, remembering the experiments Debraj would make on stage. They even toured the US and the UK with their plays.
Asked to name her favourite screen roles, Anuradha names Tapan Sinha’s Raja and Ganadevta, directed by Tarun Majumdar, other than the Ray and Sen films. “His role was small but very significant in Tanubabu’s film. I must have seen it at least five or six times in cinemas,” she said, referring to Majumdar. He had also featured in Ronald Joffe’s City of Joy and The Peacock Spring, a 1996 TV movie directed by Christopher Morahan of The Jewel in the Crown fame.
He had worked in jatras and TV serials too. Despite being a gifted actor with striking looks, Devraj did not get a lasting name on the big screen. Anuradha attributes that to his introvert nature. “He would never ask anyone for work.”
Block secretary Tapas Sengupta, whose house is diagonally opposite to the Rays’, recalled the actor visiting his house for Jagaddhatri puja a couple of times. “He and Anuradha had also performed audio play at our AE Part II puja,” he recalled.
Both husband and wife were busy with their acting careers till Debraj suffered a cerebral attack that restricted him movements in 2017. “Before that, I would spot him getting into the car, leaving for some play in the districts. In recent years, he would sit in the verandah and we would speak from across the road,” Sengupta said. Majumdar recalled getting a telephone call earlier this year, when he complained of loneliness.
In August, he fell and broke a femur bone. Since then, his health went downhill. “He was a gentleman without any celebrity airs,” his neighbours concurred.