Two books on two of the finest filmmakers Indian cinema has seen offer fresh insights into the lives of the masters, and the making of their classics, writes Neha Bhatt
Bimal Roy’s black and white classics were films created in silence. “He was a remarkable sight, especially when he stood behind the camera like a silent statue carved out of a rock,” writes director Tapan Sinha of his friend in an essay, part of a new book on the filmmaker edited by his daughter Rinki Roy Bhattacharya. It’s this aura Roy created around himself, consciously or unconsciously, that has intrigued his fans, critics and colleagues alike. Some of their contributions in the recently published book, The Man Who Spoke in Pictures: Bimal Roy, are insightful.
Bhattacharya, a journalist and documentary filmmaker, while pointing out the lack of information available on her father, has picked a wide range of contributors for this collection of anecdotes, memoirs and cinematic analysis. The list of writers is long: There are the likes of Mahasweta Devi, who knew Roy like a family member, and others who rose to fame while working under him; those like Gulzar, Amit Bose, Ritwik Ghatak, Nutan, Shashi Kapoor, and Naseeruddin Shah.
Expectedly, there is a lot said in this book of Madhumati, a film labelled as one of Roy’s most commercial works, and Devdas, one of his biggest successes. Film scholar Sonja Majumdar sees more art than commercial technique in Madhumati, while writer Kishore Chatterjee puts forth a case for the music of Madhumati being “intensely Mozartian”. He argues, “Now I am fairly certain that Salil Chowdhury did indeed, very cleverly and creatively, mingle folk melodies with the Mozatian sense of perpetual movement, which can be termed a divine momentum.”
In the same strain, there is a familiar opinion in the book that, undoubtedly, Roy’s films benefited from the talent of his music composers Salil Chowdhury and S D Burman. Roy’s use of music and picturisation are highlighted by contributors like Gulzar, Shantanu Moitra, Prasoon Joshi, Shyam Benegal and even Rachel Dwyer, a professor of Indian cinema at University of London. Further, Dwyer, finds the “deep ambivalence for the aesthetic of the old” common to both Roy and Satyajit Ray. Dwyer and other overseas contributors are able to observe and appreciate the heavy influence of the European humanist tradition in Roy’s work. While some of Roy’s female characters, particularly those essayed by Nutan in Sujata and Bandini, have often been hailed for having rare qualities far above the stereotypical woman, Naseeruddin Shah questions the filmmaker’s inconsistencies in this area.
The book is far from exhaustive but given its format, it is notable for the variety of voices it strings together.
THE MAN WHO SPOKE IN PICTURES: BIMAL ROY
Edited by: Rinki Roy Bhattacharya
Publisher: Penguin Viking
Pages: 256
Price: 499
In the late 1940s, it was a cheap teashop called Paradise Cafe in south Calcutta where a bunch of unemployed, aspiring filmmakers met to discuss films. These included Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Salil Chowdhury and Hrishikesh Mukherjee, all of whom would later become icons of the new wave in Indian cinema. Sen was perhaps the last of this bunch to taste success, having experienced several bleak periods at the beginning of his film career. Author Dipankar Mukhopadhyay, who first wrote Sen’s biography — Mrinal Sen: Sixty Years in Search of Cinema — 15 years ago, returns with an updated version; well-researched and wonderfully written.
Mukhopadhyay, who was managing director at the National Film Development Corporation, has known Sen closely, having also published a book of conversations with the filmmaker called Kathapurush. Embarrassing details that Sen may have dismissed in his otherwise remarkable film career — his first film Raatbhore, which sank without a trace a few weeks after its release in late 1955 — are among incidents that Mukhopadhyay treats with subtlety and sensitivity.
The narrative takes us to Sen’s departure from his native Faridpur, and follows his journey to Calcutta, a city which eventually became Sen’s “oyster”, and beyond. The book reiterates the significance of the city in Sen’s life where he witnessed partition, famine, social and political unrest and rebellion. These are circumstances that shaped the core of Sen’s cinema. His second film, Neel Akasher Nichey, salvaged his career. This was when, Mukhopadhyay says, “Sen had arrived.”
The book gradually draws Sen’s personal life into the cinematic one. One of the many anecdotes to cherish is Sen’s recollection of the time he sought to hold the hand of his to-be wife Gita while walking on a bridge, in the process losing his grip on the book he was reading then — A Case for Communism. The book toppled into the river and floated away — Mukhopadhyay illustrates this particular incident as one that could have very well been a visually beautiful scene from one of Sen’s films.
The updated version of the biography includes a section on Sen’s life now — “The lion in the winter”. At 86, the lion is ridding himself of the few vices he has ever had: the black tea is getting weaker and the pipe kept away.
The author’s retelling of the friction between Sen and his greatest contemporary Satyajit Ray shared is intriguing. Ray was particularly scathing in his criticism of one of Sen’s films, Akash Kusum, in letters published in The Statesman in the 1960s (included in the appendix of the book). Their friendship turned slightly bitter. Some of the friction, however, was not only constructive, Mukhopadhyay reiterates, but it provided a provocation that Sen would gravely miss after Ray’s demise.
MRINAL SEN: SIXTY YEARS IN SEARCH OF CINEMA
Edited by: Dipankar Mukhopadhyay
Publisher: Harper Collins
Pages: 316
Price: Rs 399
