Sonali Dasgupta

Revision as of 08:01, 9 June 2014

End of the Roman holiday

Dileep Padgaonkar

Sonali Dasgupta and Roberto Rossellini

The Times of India Jun 08 2014

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 Jun 07 2014, 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.

Padgaonkar 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 Padgaonkar’s last conversation with her she also said with just a hint of irony: “Ask me what it means to live with a genius.”

Showcasing India in Rome

Malini Nair TNN  The Rossellini affair so overwhelmed 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.”