At 6pm Saturday evenings, all Calcuttans irrespective of whether they were from Allepey, Amritsar, Aizawl or Aurangabad would sit before their EC TVs to watch the feature film in Bangla. This was how a Malayali eight-year-old got acquainted with the premium presence of Uttam Kumar. If the film starred a lesser light, my father would bury himself in The Statesman editorial while my mother would get back to the breathless shenanigans of her Barbara Cartland novel. However, if it was an Uttam starrer, they would put everything aside to watch the Guru’s incredible charisma and his measured performances.A year after I began to watch television, Uttam Kumar died and was bid farewell in a funeral that was mammoth and anguished in equal measure. Yet, Uttam Kumar remained the highlight of Saturday evenings, the man whose films had the oomph very few Bengali films could boast of in his absence. His pairings with Suchitra Sen resulted in classics that continue to be held up as the gold standard of Bengali romance.If ever the platitude of the legend lives on made sense, it was in the case of Uttam Kumar. There could be a few reasons why his presence remained undimmed over the years, untarnished by the arrival of a new set of successful actors and filmmakers.The emotional tether that bound Uttam Kumar to his legions was cut with brutal suddenness. There were whispers about how he was working too hard and neglecting his health, but the shock of his passing was something that caught the city unprepared. This would be hard to explain to millennials who might not be able to wrap their heads around the idea of the privacy actors enjoyed back then. Further, there was a clutch of films that he was working on which were completed and released posthumously. Apocryphal tales of how a barber was used as his double abounded, and the films themselves were blockbusters thanks to the Pakeezah effect, of a film benefitting from the demise of its main star.
A still from Nayak: The Hero (1966)
Next is the loss that cinema in Bengal suffered with the passing of its leading light who had the gift of timing for comedy, the heft for emotional roles and a screen presence that was mesmerising. What would an ageing Uttam could have done with some of Ray’s later films? Would he have worked with Rituparno Ghosh or in Aparna Sen’s directorial ventures? Would Uttam have directed more films? One of his directorial ventures, the not-very-nice Kalankini Kankabati released around the time of his passing so it was a clue that he might have been exploring the idea of directing. These delicious imponderables have added to his aura but have also resulted in heightening the sense of a void and a slide in the quality of Bengali cinema, especially from the late ’80s.Finally, it was the choice of roles that made him so synonymous with the golden age of Bengali cinema. He never played the role of a ruffian who reforms, the lumpen who is violent and angry, or anything close to a hoodlum. Even when he played a negative role, Uttam tread carefully. It is said that in Shesh Anka, he changed the scripted brutal strangling to an accidental knifing. It was a rare blackguard turn by the Mahanayak and he wanted to calibrate how far he would go to with the villainy.Looking back, perhaps the greatest legacy of Uttam Kumar was how he played his age. He was barely fifty when he played a slightly older character opposite the fresh-faced Sumitra Mukherjee in Bikele Bhorer Phool. Similarly in films like Agniswar and Ogo Bodhu Shundorihe was shown as an older character, albeit central to the film. That grace cannot be lauded enough at a time when actors in their 60s are still romancing heroines half their age.Grace, was what made Uttam Kumar special and it is because of the absence of national television and a pan-Indian television diet that ‘awbangalis’ got a glimpse of this superstar’s works. He and his younger contemporary Soumitra Chatterjee defined a certain era of Bengali cinema when it was just so fine.
Malavika R Banerjee, cultural entrepreneur
– Writes Malavika R Banerjee, Cultural entrepreneur
