Frames per Second: Meet Uttam Kumar, the 'Nayak' of Bengal cinema

As we enter the 100th year of the matinee idol, it is important to revisit his legacy without falling into the lure of nostalgia

In the 1966 Bengali film ‘Nayak’, directed by Satyajit Ray, a young film actor, Arindam Mukherjee (Uttam Kumar), spends the night before his debut drinking with his friend, Jyoti (Nirmal Ghosh). While Jyoti is confident of the film’s success, Arindam is not so sure. He complains that some of the scenes, in which he shares the screen with senior co-actor Mukanda Lahiri (Bireswar Sen), are not good enough.

 

“But I don’t blame myself,” says Arindam. Instead, he blames Mukunda Lahiri, a melodramatic and insecure actor, who discerned that Arindam’s realistic acting style would expose his own overacting, and bullied the latter into performing badly. Jyoti is amused by his friend’s perfectionism. “You will do very well in your career,” he says. “Of course I will!” cries Arindam. Banging a table with his fist, he declares: “I’ll go to the top, to the top, to the top!” It is impossible for the audience to not be seduced by the burning ambition of a young man.

 

 

The film — a restored version was rereleased across the country earlier this year — is, however, an elaborate and meditative reflection on the very nature of ambition and success. It opens with Arindam preparing to go to New Delhi, to receive an award from the government. Literature and film scholar Sayandeb Chowdhury, who has also written a well-received biography of Uttam Kumar, suggests that the film’s story, written by Ray, is likely to have been inspired by a real-life incident.

 

After the success of his 1957 film ‘Harano Sur’, directed by Ajoy Kar, Uttam Kumar was scheduled to take a train from the Howrah station, to go to Delhi to receive an award. His travel plans, however, sparked a frenzy among his fans in Calcutta (Kolkata). “The local police chief showed up and requested that the trip be cancelled, because Howrah Station was choked to its last inch, the crowds having gone wild in expectation of his arrival,” writes Chowdhury.

 

Ray’s friend and British film critic Marie Seton, with whom the director corresponded during the making of the film, also suggests in her book, ‘Portrait of a Director: Satyajit Ray’ (1971), that at the time of ‘Nayak’s’ release there was considerable speculation that he had written the film with Uttam in his mind. In the film, Arindam meets a young journalist Aditi Sengupta (Sharmila Tagore) on the train. Through the course of their conversations and his troubled dreams, Ray peels off the layers of stardom and exposes the vulnerable human being underneath. 

 

Chowdhury, in fact, goes even further to claim: “Arindam Mukherjee is Uttam… Ray’s script… was daring the actor in Uttam to deconstruct the star. This meant that the better Uttam played the troubled hero, the more the fictional star (and in extension, the real star) would find himself diminished.” Ray himself was superlative in his appraisal of the actor’s performance. “In a two-hour film that centres around him, he is perfect from every angle, in every sense,” Ray wrote in 1980. “There is none like him, and there will be no one to ever replace him. He was and is unparalleled in Bengali, even Indian cinema.”

 

Born as Arun Kumar Chattopadhyay on 3 September 1926, Uttam’s road to cinematic superstardom was slow and uneven. His father, Satkari Chattopadhyay, was a film projectionist who also did amateur theatre, where Uttam was introduced to acting. He made his silver-screen debut with the 1948 Bengali film ‘Drishtidan’, directed by Nitin Bose. Unlike Arindam, however, Uttam had only a supporting role in his debut. In fact, most of his early films were box office duds, earning him the moniker “Flopmaster General”.

 

It was eventually the 1952 release, ‘Basu Paribar’, directed by Nirmal Dey, in which Uttam starred opposite Supriya Devi, with whom he would later have a long, extramarital, romantic relationship, that he found success. The next year’s ‘Sharey Chuattor’, also directed by Dey, would catapult Uttam to the pinnacle of fame and fortune. This film is also notable because it was his first collaboration with Suchitra Sen, with whom he would act in 30 films, of which 29 would be box office successes. The Uttam-Suchitra pairing has been compared to Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton or Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren.

 

From the early 1950s till his death on 24 July 1980, during the shoot of his last film ‘Ogo Bodhu Shundori’ (1981), an adaptation of ‘My Fair Lady’ by Salil Dutta, Uttam acted, produced, directed and composed music for more than 200 films. As the news of his death spread on 25 July, the streets of Calcutta were overrun by mourning admirers who accompanied his hearse to the crematorium. More than four decades after his death, Uttam remains what he was during his lifetime — an unparalleled, to quote Ray, cultural icon.

 

Despite his undisputed status in Bengali — even Indian — cinema, Uttam’s work, however, has never received adequate critical attention. Besides Chowdhury’s biography, there are surprisingly few books with robust research on the man. Notable among these are Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury’s Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen: Bengali Cinema’s First Couple (2010) and Smita Banerjee’s Modernities and the Popular Melodrama: The Suchitra-Uttam Yug in Bengali Cinema (2024). However, as their name suggests, both books are concerned more with Uttam-Suchitra as an onscreen pair rather than his life and works.

 

While researching this column, it was evident to me that much of the material on Uttam Kumar comprised hagiographic newspaper and magazine articles, published usually around the time of his birth or death anniversaries. As we enter Uttam Kumar’s centenary, it is essential that his legacy is recovered from trophy hunters and spin doctors for more engaged research and analysis. In recent years, icons of Bengali cinema, such as Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen, who have had their centenaries, have often been subsumed by the nostalgia industry that flourishes in West Bengal. Film scholar Meheli Sen shows in a 2022 article how Ray’s legacy is depoliticised through a sort of nostalgia that is “commodified in a very specific way.” A similar fate awaits Uttam Kumar — as evident from recent films like ‘Mahalaya’ (2019) and ‘Oti Uttam’ (2024) — unless we engage with his work with the seriousness that a star of his stature deserves.

 

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Uttaran Das Gupta is an independent writer and journalist