Uttam Kumar: A Life in Cinema. Sayandeb Chowdhury. Paperback. Bloomsbury Academic, India December 2021.
Sayandeb Chowdhury
S
atyajit Ray was not a man to go after cults. He had a recondite logic of understanding his world. Like other so-called cultural truisms to whom he rarely bowed, he did not share the general cynicism of the art-film fraternity about the plastic charms of a popular hero. Even if he did, in some cases, he was unwilling to reach the final verdict unless he tried them. In the case of Uttam Kumar, it was the latter. In fact, he had for long watched Uttam from a distance, often wondering if this man, who clearly oozed talent, would want to step out of the comfort zone of greasepaint stardom. Ray wrote later, “I was not a film-maker yet when I first saw Uttam on the screen. I had heard of the emergence of the new hero and was curious to see what he was like. The heroes that one saw on the Bengali screen those days—Durgadas Banerjee, Pramathes Barua, K.L. Saigal, Dhiraj Bhattacharya—were hardly in the same league with the Hollywood heroes one admired. I saw three of Uttam’s films in a row, all made by one of our ablest directors, Nirmal Dey. First impressions were certainly good. Uttam had good looks, a certain presence, an ease of manner, and no trace of the theatre in his performance. He, obviously, had a future.”
That future, as a star and a marquee matinee idol, was much more in excess of any prediction that Ray and others could have made. So, with time, Ray became even more intrigued with the phenomenon of Uttam Kumar, but did not have the chance to work with him. “The opportunity to work with him came much later. By the time, Uttam Kumar had already become something of a legend. Every other Bengali film had him in the lead, usually paired with Suchitra Sen. This was a romantic team which for durability and width of acceptance had few equals in world cinema. Uttam was certainly a star in the true Hollywood sense of the term. The question was: was he also an actor?” Ray wrote. Ray’s intention to probe Uttam’s talent has been a matter of deliberation. This is because before he started to shoot with Uttam, his opinion of popular actors was far from glowing, as Andrew Robinson recalls in his book on Ray.
In the mid-1960s, Ray was at the peak of his powers and a much admired global cinema auteur, so an invitation from him was a mark of distinction far beyond the limits of Bengali cinema. But little did Uttam know that Ray had bigger plans. “I was anxious to work with Uttam and wrote a part with him in mind. It was a part I thought he would find easy to identify with, being that of an ordinary middle-class youth who gets a break in films and quickly rises to the top. In fact, a rags-to-riches story which bears some resemblance to Uttam’s own life. Uttam liked the part and accepted to do it although he could see that it meant shedding—at least for the time being—some of his glamour boy mannerisms. He also agreed to use no make-up although a recent attack of chickenpox had left its mark on his face.”
For Ray, the stripping of greasepaint glamour was part of his plan to chip away at the facile exterior of a star and extracting the person within. But it still required a star. As Robinson writes: “Here, though, a star was doubly appropriate since he was being asked to play a matinée idol and, according to Ray, he had read somewhere that “if you are showing a matinée idol, then you have to cast a star. Nobody else would do; people wouldn’t accept the fact. So I thought that I was doing the only possible thing.” On the other hand, he “always believed Uttam had it in him to give good performances.” So was born Nayak (The Hero, 1966), which portrayed, in a span of a train journey, the loneliness of a phenomenally popular, always-on-the verge-of-being-mobbed cine-star. As Pico Iyer writes in a recent article: “Ray sends a handsome star of the silver screen from Calcutta to Delhi to receive a prize. As soon as he boards the train, the professional heartthrob, named Arindam Mukherjee (Uttam Kumar), finds himself, by turns, released from his public role and obliged to play it constantly. Everyone recognizes him, sighing over his legend, yet as soon as he’s alone, he’s overcome by memories and dreams that move him to ask himself whether he made the right choice in deciding to become a commercial icon.”
A still from Nayak (1966)
In fact, the closed space of the train works as a precise co-relative of Arindam’s claustrophobia—offering him little escape from himself or from a set of passengers who get down to creating transactional value out of the time they spend on the journey; including evaluating their famous co-commuter. Arindam had prepared to spend the journey sleeping but was perturbed by a recent case of having lost his cool, an incident that had warmed the newspapers that morning. So, when a journalist (Sharmila Tagore) casually approaches for an impromptu interview, Arindam expresses a sense of resigned dismay. But he also finds in her a safe haven, because she remains somewhat dismissive of his public persona. Slowly, she manages to coax out of the star a frank and unguarded appraisal of his own life, revealing his inner torment, his acute isolation, moments of severe dilemma and his incessant fear of failure. As he goes back in time, either in conversations with her or by himself, Arindam hunts for signs in his incredible rags-to-riches story; while also looking for redemption in the counsel and conscience of an intelligent woman. Arindam’s confessions lead him to two impressionist dream sequences and an alcohol-fuelled moment of forbearing self-loathing; but next morning he emerges into light with his habitual self-assured persona restored. Aditi, the journalist, decides to discard the interview. As the train arrives in Delhi, she walks away stoically, while the star vanishes into an ecstatic cry of assembled adulation.
So, what was on paper a rags-to-riches story was in actuality a psychologically loaded, demanding and layered script. And how did Uttam respond to it? Ray’s peek into the crepuscular solitude of a matinee idol’s inner life gave Uttam what he needed: an author-backed role, and Uttam rose to the challenge with “considerable intelligence and sophistication”, to quote the hard-to-please critic Chidananda Dasgupta. Agrees Iyer. “The film is anchored at every moment in Kumar’s performance, and to me it’s an astonishment. Everything about his soft hands as the film begins, his designer socks in two-tone shoes, his baby-faced insouciance, gives us a sense of spoiled entitlement; here is a man who thinks nothing of decorating his home with large, framed glossies of himself. Yet the beauty of Kumar’s Arindam Mukherjee is that he has the capacity to surprise us, again and again. He can be witty and charming and kind. As Ray and Kumar push beneath the leading man’s smooth surfaces, we expect, perhaps, demons and sleepless nights; but we may not be prepared for such grace. The professional hero, after boarding the train, helps an old man open a bottle and is patient with an elderly scold who dislikes all “talkies”; he even uses a glossy picture of himself as an instrument of compassion to heal an ailing child. Maybe because she’s the rare soul who doesn’t need him to be anything other than what he is.
But one must note that as a film where Uttam was the subject, it made very atypical demands from him. It, of course, dared him to step into the more stringent territory of screen realism and paint-free close-ups. It also touched upon his ordinary origins, his passing compromises, his attendant vulnerabilities and his overwhelming aura. But most importantly, the film, rather than boasting the idea of a hero, probed against the phenomenon itself; putting under a harsh scanner the very nature of Uttam’s formidable and forbidding stardom. And it was Uttam who had to do the surgery. But few people then saw it that way. In fact, Iyer’s appreciation of Uttam is a far-cry from the time of the film, even if it was liked, among others, by Pier Paolo Passolini, a member of the jury at the Berlin Film Festival, where Nayak won the Critics’ Prize in 1966. Marie Seton’s book on Ray gives an idea of the Indian critical reception, which was unhappy because not only had Ray allegedly bowed to the charms of commercial cinema, but more so because the film was anything but a sordid expose of that cinema’s corrupt workings. In fact, the quietness and sophistication of Ray’s interrogation of mainstream stardom baffled them more than it irked them. This is a typical mistake because critics only managed to see Nayak as a Ray film. It is also, equally, an Uttam film. I would hence rather see Nayak as a virtuoso specimen of moviemaking where two titans of Bengali cinema meet and interpret the idea of stardom, putting under investigation the furtive tensions between art and populism, camera and stage, person and persona and the reality and plasticity of fame. It is also a crowning testament of a top actor in top form. Needless to claim that this was always Uttam’s best work and perhaps one of the finest by any leading actor anywhere in the world. It would not be precocious to claim that Uttam’s stardom, having secured the rite of passage through Ray’s censorious homage, was now ensconced in history.
References 1. Sandip Ray (ed.), Satyajit Ray on Cinema, Columbia University Press, 2013. 2. Andrew Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, IB Taurus, 1989. 3. Pico Iyer, ‘Satyajit Ray’s The Hero Revisited’, NYRB, 27 February 2018, available https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/02/27/satyajit-raysthe-hero-revisited/. 4. Marie Seton, Satyajit Ray: Portrait of a Director, Penguin 2003 [1971].
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Note The still from the film shown above is an add-on and not part of the book
Sayandeb Chowdhury teaches in the School of Letters at Ambedkar University Delhi and is a doctoral fellow in the Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. His research and teaching interests are in colonial and postcolonial visual modernisms, cinema and photography studies, adaptation studies and city studies. His essays have been published in Film International, Journal of South Asian History and Culture, South Asia Review, European Journal of English Studies, Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), and scholarly collections Rituparno Ghosh: Cinema, Gender and Art (2016), Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea 1600-Present (2016), L'entrée en ville: Aménager, Expérimenter, Représenter (2017), Mistrust: Developmental, Cultural, and Clinical Realms (2017), On the Politics of Ugliness (2018) and Ideas of the City in Asian Settings (2019). He was a UKNA Fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden, in 2015, and a Charles Wallace Fellow in 2016. He has written on art, books, politics and cinema for Huffington Post, The Monthly Review, Art India, Caravan Magazine, Café Dissensus, Outlook, Biblio, Indian Express, Critical Collective, TheWire, Scroll, Business Standard, The Hindu, Anandabazaar Patrika and others. More about his work and interests can be found at www.sayandeb.in.
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