Detailed research, pictorial writing made Shankar’s stories tailor-made for films

Kolkata: Uttam Kumar sat beside Mani Shankar Mukherjee at the first screening of Pinaki Bhushan Mukherjee's 1968 film, ‘Chowringhee'. When the lights came up, Shankar turned to the matinee idol and said his performance was more compelling than the Sata Bose he ever pictured on the page. Uttam asked him to put the compliment in writing; Shankar only laughed it off — an author's certificate was beside the point, he said, because audiences would never wait for his verdict.

That lightly worn authority — at once affectionate and unsentimental — shaped Shankar's relationship with the cinema of Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Basu Chatterjee, Pinaki Bhushan Mukherjee, Srijit Mukherji and Bimal Roy Jr. Added to that was his "detailed research" and "pictorial writing", which was dotted with layered characters. He resisted the idea of the possessive author, and compared the act of adaptation to giving a daughter away in marriage: once the work left his hands, it had to find its own life.


Before the 2019 release of Srijit Mukherji’s adaptation of ‘Chowringhee’ as ‘Shah Jahan Regency’, he invoked the govt’s “Do Not Compare” ads from the transition from “ana pai” to “noa poisha”. He nonchalantly remarked that after the 1968 adaptation, the next came in 2018, and that people might try again in 2050.


His first cinematic adaptation never saw the light of day. In 1959, Ghatak started adapting Shankar's ‘Koto Ajanare'. Film scholar Sanjoy Mukhopadhyay said: "Ghatak likely chose the novel while looking for popular material, drawn to its unusual courtroom setting and its focus on characters outside the dominant social order. Barwell functions as an innocent observer of the country’s feudal structure. That outsider perspective appealed to Ghatak. Financial pressure forced him to abandon the project after 20 days of shooting, leaving only 7 edited reels."

Ray adapted two Shankar novels. In ‘Seemabaddha' (1971), Ray held on to the broad architecture but reworked the material with decisive freedom; in ‘Jana Aranya', he stayed far closer to the novel's line and texture. Barun Chanda, who played Shyamalendu in ‘Seemabaddha' and is a writer himself, said Ray found in Shankar the corporate story he was looking for. "Manik-da’s only film set in the corporate world was ‘Seemabaddha’. In the novel, my sister-in-law’s character is largely decorative and never truly enters the hero’s life. Manik-da transformed Sudarshana—her depth and purpose are entirely different in the film. That’s why many say she isn’t merely a character but the hero’s private conscience. The film’s opening and ending were also completely different from Shankar’s,” Chanda said. He described Ray’s approach to ‘Jana Aranya’ as the reverse. “I was at Manik-da’s house when he called Mani Shankar-da to ask detailed questions about what happens in red-light areas. Shankar’s research was meticulous, and Manik-da was spellbound. The bleak political climate in Bengal that Shankar wrote about drew him in, and he largely preserved it on screen," Chanda said.

Arunava Sinha, translator of ‘Chowringhee', said Shankar's layered characters naturally suited cinema. He noted that Shankar captured the inner conflict of successful, or seemingly successful, people, showing how the drive to get ahead can clash with personal morality. “Not just Sata Bose in ‘Chowringhee’, there is Shyamalendu Chatterjee in ‘Seemabaddha’ and Somnath in ‘Jana Aranya’. While Shyamalendu is a bright corporate star who battled inner conflicts, Somnath exemplified the kind of dilemma and moral torture people went through in the 1970s to simply make a living. Shankar wrote female characters with great integrity; while the narratives follow men’s arc, women often serve as strong moral foils," Sinha said.

That admiration for his characters that became cult on screen was shared by his readers and is also evident in the ‘Shah Jahan Regency' director's social media post after Shankar's demise. Thanking the author for making him "fall in love" with his Kolkata through a novel which has been "an indelible part" of his "adolescence", Srijit Mukherji wrote: "May you have a smooth check-out and thank you for a memorable stay, along with the memories and characters you created."