An unforgettable summer
UNDER HER SPELL — Roberto Rossellini in India: Dileep Padgaonkar; Viking/Penguin, 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110017. Rs. 550.
Anand Parthasarathy
Biographical references to Roberto Rossellini, the Italian master of neo-realistic cinema, tend to expend a lot of space to his “scandalous” affair with the Swedish star Ingrid Bergman, in the 1950s. Both were married to other partners, before their marriage, followed by divorce, some seven years later. Mention is also made of his earlier marriage to a costume designer, Marcella de Marchis. If the record is fastidious, there is also mention, when listing dates in his personal life, of a Sonali Dasgupta, though many entries particularly on Internet websites, qualify this with a question mark.
Who is this woman about whom information is so scrappy and what part did she play in Rossellini’s life? It has been a tantalising mystery till now. Uniquely positioned to dig out the details buried in personal memories, going back 50 years, Dileep Padgaonkar, fills crucial gaps in Rossellini’s life story, that cover the period of his visit to India in 1956-57 to make a documentary. It was a stay that was to set off a chain of extraordinary events, details of which have largely been dependent on the lurid tabloid media of the day.
The association
Padgaonkar has pieced together the real story, drawing on recently released official records as well as his own privileged contacts among many of the players on the sidelines of what still seems like a melodramatic Hindi film plot.
Rossellini landed in India in December 1956, intending to shoot a documentary film about the country. He flew in with 100 kg of spaghetti, writes Padgaonkar, just one of the fascinating bits of trivia that he has dug up. Among those the director met was Hari Dasgupta, who had served as an assistant to the great French film maker Jean Renoir who had made “The River” in India in 1949. Dasgupta hoped to attain a similar position with Rossellini. When that did not look like happening, he introduced his wife Sonali and got her a position on the director’s team, to help in a vague way with the script.
It is not clear what Sonali’s special talents in writing were but the association had an unexpected side effect. Rossellini seemed to have succumbed to Sonali’s charms and she was sucked into an “affair” that provided the stuff of many sensational and jingoistic stories. Even Jawaharlal Nehru was called upon at one point to intervene — though official correspondence that was released into the public domain in recent years, show that Nehru took a firm but humane line and ensured that Rossellini, whatever the official perception of his culpability, was not hounded.
A great auteur
Sonali made the break in late 1957 and preceded the director to Paris, with the younger of her two children, where she shared a home with him for almost 20 years. He acknowledged her third child, Raffaella, and adopted her second child Gil. He never legally married Sonali, although his marriage to Bergman had ended amicably during his stay in India. Padgaonkar met Rossellini on numerous occasions and had enough friends among the “New Wave” filmmakers to piece together this phase in the Sonali-Rossellini story.
The romance, if one can call it that, ended some three years before the director’s death in 1977 when he began an affair with Silvia d’Amico from the Visconti aristocratic family and went through a Mexican marriage (many biographies omit mention of this marriage). Ingrid Bergman died in 1982; Hari Dasgupta continued to work on documentaries for many years and died in 1996.
Sonali still lives. So does the final product of Rossellini’s brief but turbulent India years: in 2006, the film that Rossellini made in 1957 “India Matri Bhumi” was found after being lost for many decades and screened worldwide to mark the centenary of his birth.
Padgaonkar passes no judgment. In lively, yet unsensational prose, he has filled in some significant pieces in the jigsaw that was the life of one of cinema’s great auteurs. In the process he has done justice to the Indian woman who played her own role in the complex pattern of his life.
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