At 100, Uttam Kumar, the Mahanayak or nice hero of Bengali cinema, is essentially the most agreed-upon man in Bengal. The settlement conceals a protracted negotiation, by which Bengal accepted sure issues about him, refused others outright, and has nonetheless not accepted the one obligation that issues.The centenary arrived on schedule on September 3 and with higher than regular paraphernalia: statues garlanded at Tollygunge, the house of the Bengali movie trade, and at Ahiritola, the north Kolkata avenue the place he was born; a twenty-foot cutout exterior the enduring single-screen Bijoli cinema; a padayatra with artistes; LED vans doing the rounds; an exhibition of booklets and behind-the-scenes stills at Nandan, the state-run movie centre; and a commemorative stamp and canopy from the Division of Posts.And, past the day itself, the equipment of a yr: a basis stone in New City for a movie centre on three acres; a twenty-member advisory board with the Chief Minister as chief patron; a year-long calendar; and a competition opening, inevitably, with Nayak, Satyajit Ray‘s research of a matinee idol, written for him.The Prime Minister posted a tribute within the morning and directed everybody to what he had stated in regards to the actor on Mann Ki Baat, his month-to-month radio tackle, the earlier Sunday: that he had stored working by means of early failure, and ought to be admired for it. All of that is true, and virtually none of it’s fascinating, as a result of perseverance is the one high quality you possibly can commemorate with out displaying anyone a movie.The extra helpful query on a hundredth start anniversary isn’t what Bengal liked about Uttam Kumar. Bengal has been answering that compulsively since July 1980, when he died. The extra fascinating query is what Bengal was ready to just accept from him, and what it was not.From Flop Grasp Basic to MahanayakStart with the acceptance, as a result of it was neither prompt nor free.Arun Kumar Chattopadhyay was born on 3 September 1926 at his maternal residence on Ahiritola Avenue, in north Kolkata, the son of a person who ran the projector on the Metro cinema, which is to say that he got here to the cinema by means of the again of the corridor.He matriculated within the second division, took a clerk’s job on the Port Commissioners on 2 hundred and seventy-five rupees a month, modified his display title 3 times earlier than one lastly caught, and by twenty-six had accrued sufficient failure for the commerce to nickname him the Flop Grasp Basic, a joke reportedly carried out to his face on studio flooring. Then got here Nirmal Dey’s Basu Paribar in 1952 and Sharey Chuattor in 1953, then Agni Pariksha in 1954, and a Bengal that had laughed at him for 4 years determined, inside two, that he was the one face it wished to have a look at.What it had determined to have a look at was itself, improved.The Bengali Uttam Kumar performed was city, salaried, educated, courteous and emotionally contained, a person who could possibly be poor with out being coarse and affluent with out turning into a boor, and he arrived precisely when a post-Partition center class, remade by the 1947 division of Bengal and the refugees it drove west, wanted proof that such a person might nonetheless exist in Calcutta.The Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema places it extra exactly than most tributes will this week, noting that his early romances revived the humanist custom of the bhadralok, Bengal’s respectable, educated center class, whereas quietly discarding a few of its extra conservative furnishings. He was a lover who didn’t chase; he waited, in Saptapadi, and returned a lot later to the wreckage, in Jatugriha. He made room for his heroines as an alternative of rescuing them. Bengal accepted him as a result of he flattered it in a register it recognised nearly as good style, which is the one type of flattery the bhadralok has ever accepted.Three issues Bengal withheldHaving granted him that, it started withholding different issues.First, the unusual latitude it may need prolonged to a personal citizen. In 1963 he left the home he shared with Gauri Devi, whom he had married in 1948 and by no means divorced, and lived for the following seventeen years with the actress Supriya Devi. The viewers that had constructed a cult round his on-screen restraint then performed a operating commentary on the association for the remainder of his life and an excellent whereas after it. Bengal was blissful to look at him play a assassin in Kuhak, a rotting landlord in Stree, a purchased politician in Bagh Bondi Khela. What it could not do was permit the person something the character may need received away with.Second, it withheld the nationwide profession.He turned down Bees Saal Baad, turned down the second lead in Sangam, after which, in 1967, produced his personal Hindi debut, Chhoti Si Mulaqat, a remake of Agni Pariksha with Vyjayanthimala rather than Suchitra Sen, his associate within the authentic and the opposite half of Bengali cinema’s definitive display couple. It failed so spectacularly that it left him near chapter. Bombay took him correctly solely as soon as, with Shakti Samanta’s Amanush in 1975, shot in Bengali and Hindi on the identical time, which ran for the higher a part of two years and have become the largest hit of his profession; when the identical workforce tried once more with Ananda Ashram, the Bengali model ran for months and the Hindi one died.There is no such thing as a proof that Bengal mourned any of this. A Mahanayak who belonged equally to Bombay would have stopped being fairly so fully Bengal’s property, and one of many makes use of of Uttam Kumar was exactly that he proved Bengal didn’t want Bombay’s permission to supply a star.Third, and most instructively, Bengal withheld the appropriate to be anyone else.On 23 September 1976, All India Radio dropped Birendra Krishna Bhadra’s Mahishasuramardini, the recital that had woken Bengal earlier than daybreak each Mahalaya because the Nineteen Thirties, on the day that opens the Durga Puja season. As a replacement got here a brand new programme narrated by Uttam Kumar and scored by Hemanta Mukherjee, recognized exterior Bengal as Hemant Kumar, which is to say by the 2 most beloved voices within the province. Listeners stoned Akashvani Bhavan, All India Radio’s Kolkata headquarters. The switchboard was overwhelmed, demonstrations have been held in Calcutta and elsewhere, the ministry was compelled to climb down, Bhadra was restored, and the brand new model was exiled to Sashthi, the sixth day of the Puja, the place it has survived ever since as a curiosity. It took Bengal roughly a fortnight to reject the preferred man it had ever produced, on the one event he stepped exterior the body it had constructed for him. He apologised. He didn’t attempt once more.Worshipped, however not learnEssentially the most consequential withholding, nonetheless, got here from his personal constituency’s clerisy.Bengal in his lifetime had a vital institution that handled well-liked cinema as a humiliation to be tolerated within the pursuits of the field workplace. The consequence was that the primary actor in India to win the Nationwide Award for Greatest Actor, given to him in 1968, the primary yr of the class, for Antony Firingee and Ray’s Chiriyakhana, generated a fantasy and remarkably little scholarship. Sayandeb Chowdhury, whose 2021 ebook stays the one severe vital biography, describes a star stored in a type of solitary confinement by his personal fame, and notes how little Bengal’s discovered circles bothered to know his vary, his manufacturing work or his stewardship of a whole trade.Ray, who wrote Nayak for him and about him, had no such issue and stated plainly that there wouldn’t be one other like him. It’s a peculiar association by which the director is canonised, the star is worshipped, and solely one in all them will get learn.The trade’s steadiness sheetThat stewardship is the a part of the legend the garlands hardly ever attain.Uttam Kumar produced movies from 1957, directed from 1966, composed music for Kal Tumi Aleya, and in 1968 left the present actors’ physique to arrange Shilpi Sangshad, a welfare organisation for technicians and small artistes, operating it till his dying. When the fund ran dry, he made a movie to replenish it: Bon Palashir Padabali in 1973, which he directed himself whereas persuading a number of the trade’s largest names to work for nothing. It went on to turn into the yr’s highest earner.He was not merely the decoration of Bengali cinema. For thirty years he was, to a rare extent, its steadiness sheet, which is why the trade didn’t merely mourn him in 1980 however visibly started to falter with out him, and why Anandabazar Patrika, Bengal’s largest Bengali each day, might compress the occasion into two phrases: Cholochitre Indrapatan, the autumn of Indra within the cinema, which is Bengali for the toppling of a colossus.Why governments desire birthdaysWhich brings us to the current negotiation, and to what’s being accepted this week.For 4 many years, remembering Uttam Kumar was centred on 24 July, the anniversary of his dying, and came about largely in a folks register: Shilpi Sangshad’s personal competition at Nandan, the retrospectives, the tv reruns, the Mahanayak Samman that the earlier authorities instituted in 2012 and handed out each July at Uttam Mancha, the south Kolkata auditorium named after him. The centenary completes a migration that has been beneath approach for some years, from the day he died to the day he was born, which is to say from a mourning that belonged to the viewers to an anniversary that may belong to the state.Governments desire birthdays. Birthdays are about arrival.Each authorities has taken its flip. The Left Entrance, then in energy in West Bengal, put up the Tollygunge statue in 1993. The metro station was renamed and the primary stamp issued in 2009. The Trinamool Congress authorities created the award in 2012. A BJP authorities 4 months previous in Bengal, searching for a Bengali inheritance no person can moderately contest, has now given him a yr, a board, a stamp, three acres and a padayatra, with the Prime Minister supplying the ethical.No one on this sequence must be insincere, which is exactly the issue. Uttam Kumar is liked virtually with out exception, and a determine liked with out exception is offered to all people. Standing subsequent to that smile has by no means value a politician a single vote.The vaults no person has openedWhat none of them has accepted is custody.In 2018, when the Movie Heritage Basis introduced its restoration workshop to the Kolkata Worldwide Movie Pageant, its founder, the archivist and filmmaker Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, identified that Bengal had misplaced each silent movie it made between 1918 and the early thirties and that his basis had recognized greater than 100 Bengali titles in want of pressing rescue. On that record sits Harano Sur, the 1957 movie Uttam Kumar produced himself, the yr’s largest earner, whose title interprets because the misplaced tune.Soumitra Chatterjee, Ray’s different nice main man and the one severe rival Uttam Kumar had for the Bengali viewers, was requested about the identical disaster and stated he doubted whether or not the classics of Barua, the Devdas director P.C. Barua, or Uttam Kumar, and even his personal early work, might nonetheless be saved. Eight years later, the state’s personal info secretary describes Uttam Mancha as dilapidated, the movie directorate’s transient already consists of restoration of the holdings in authorities vaults, and but essentially the most fundamental public query stays unanswered: which of Uttam Kumar’s 2 hundred and eleven movies survive as negatives, which survive as scratched prints, which exist solely in some distributor’s household cabinet, and that are merely gone?In the meantime, the state says the aim of all that is to introduce him to a era that missed him.That era’s precise entry too typically consists of YouTube uploads mastered from video cassettes, and Oti Uttam, the Bengali director Srijit Mukherji’s 2024 movie by which the Mahanayak seems as a ghost assembled from footage drawn from fifty-four of his personal movies, along with his voice cloned by an American AI firm as a result of there was no different approach left to make him converse a brand new line. The train value a couple of crore and a half.Sit with that for a second: a era that has hardly ever had the possibility to see a clear print of Chowringhee has already paid to look at an artificial reconstruction of the person who was in it.The urge for food is confirmed. The provision is a coverage failure.The take a look at is 2036So let the padayatra proceed, and let the inspiration stone be laid. The take a look at of this centenary won’t be what will get unveiled between now and subsequent September, however whether or not, in 2036, a nineteen-year-old in Barrackpore can watch a correctly restored Jatugriha on a authorized platform, in a good switch, subtitled by any individual who is aware of Bengali.Publish the vault stock. Fund restoration earlier than building. Clear the rights, that are scattered throughout heirs and defunct distributors and develop more durable to hint yearly.Bengal has spent a century deciding what it could and wouldn’t settle for from Uttam Kumar. The one factor he really wants from us now’s the one obligation we now have nonetheless not accepted.The misplaced tune (harano sur) stays misplaced, cutout however.
