Controversys of womanhood revisited
Bimal Roy was one of the last iconoclasts Indian cinema has ever produced. His birth anniversary, which fell on July 12, is being celebrated by the Oxford Bookstore and Gallery, Calcutta, in collaboration with Nandan with three unique programmes conceived around the works of one of the greatest filmmakers India has ever produced...

The Bimal Roy festival will begin with a rare exhibition of still photographs taken by Bimal Roy himself during his days as director, in stark black-and-white, light and shadow playing tricks with the viewer’s eye, his imagination as filmmaker spilling over onto his photography and vice versa. It may be recalled that Roy began his career in films as cinematographer at New Theatres in Calcutta. He then migrated to Mumbai and began independent work as a filmmaker. Every single Bimal Roy film directed by Roy himself, had a social message interwoven into the script, or, the storyline itself was chosen on the basis of its social relevance. It was also chosen for the significance of the narrative itself. Thus, we find him banking again and again on literary classics of the country. From Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay to Munshi Premchand to Rabindranath Tagore, Roy’s films stand testimony to a celluloid transliteration of some of the immortal classics of Indian literature. I choose to label them ’transliterations’ because Roy remained fiercely faithful to the original literary source and did not seem to believe in celluloid ’interpretations’ of literary works. His films were low-key, subtle and intense. They are also remembered for the low-key performances of the key actors, lilting music and scintillating cinematography in Black-and-White, not to talk of the seamless editing by Hrishikesh Mukherjee, who later established himself as a director in his own right.

The week beginning from July 12, will also showcase a retrospective of films directed by Bimal Roy, beginning with Madhumati, followed by Do Bigha Zamin and Udayer Pathey, Devdas and closing with Parakh, as a tribute to its main actor, Vasanta Chowdhury, who passed away recently in the city. The Controversy will conclude with a panel discussion on Bimal Roy and his films, moderated by Samik Bandopadhyay, which will be telecast on TARA, the Bengali channel of Star Plus. The women in Bimal Roy’s films had an identity of their own and their stature was unimpeachable. They were emotionally ’independent’ in the sense that they were not mere foils to the men or to the other characters in the film. They created a niche for themselves in the mind of the audience. Their images continue to make their presence felt long after the film was over. In Do Bigha Zamin (1953) portrays Nirupa Roy as a peasant wife. She is left behind to cope with her small family of a small son and a sick father-in-law. She is realistic and credible in her naivete and her earthiness.

She takes her husband’s letters to an educated lady (Meena Kumari in a guest role) to be read out to her. When the woman reads these letters out to her, Nirupa smiles like a coy bride. She keeps count of the days her husband has been away by making chalk marks on the wall, displaying the natural anxiety of an unlettered peasant wife. In the city, she demonstrates her gullibility to be conned into an attempted rape by Tiwari. While escaping from his clutches, she is run over by a car and lands in hospital. Though totally dependent on her husband, she has a mind of her own. The story was penned by Salil Choudhury who adapted it from a famous poem of the same name composed by Tagore. One of the songs in the film, a peasant song, Mausam beeta jaaye was inspired by the Red March score from the Communist Party of the USSR.

The film is said to have been strongly inspired by the Italian neo-realist school of films and remains a textbook for new filmmakers inclined towards this style.
Madhumati will open the retrospective in Nandan. Madhumati, an all-out commercial film on reincarnation, is perhaps, the biggest box-office hit among all his films. The reason why this film is chosen as the opening film, is that it forms one of the most unique triumvirate of cinema talents in the history of Indian cinema. The script was penned by Ritwik Ghatak, the beautiful musical compositions were by Salil Choudhury, and the film was produced and directed by Bimal Roy himself. Though the film had too many commercial ingredients when compared with other Roy films, Madhumati still evokes an aura of romance that has disappeared from the Indian mainstream many years ago.

Vyjayantimala in the title role, dances away against the backdrop of the hilly landscape, her ethereal beauty immortalised in black-and-white, her performance first, as the love-struck hilly maiden, and then, as the ghost who comes back to invite her lover to a union beyond death, matches the delicate nuances of Dilip Kumar as her city-bred lover. In her double role as the city girl who is asked to play Madhumati’s ghost, Vyjayantimala changes her body language, her style of emoting and line delivery, and above all, her interaction with the hero who is just an acquaintance asking her to help. The music and songs of the film have been immortalised through time.

Devdas has two principal woman characters. The Devdas of the title has become synonymous with any pining, alcoholic lover in India through Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s popular novel of the same name. The film has had several earlier versions, the most famous being the Pramathesh Barua-directed double version in Bengali (with Barua himself playing the title role) and Hindi (with KL Saigal playing Devdas). Interestingly, these New Theatres’ productions were cinematographed by the young Bimal Roy himself. The two woman characters in the film and the novel, Parvati (Suchitra Sen) and Chandramukhi (Vyjayantimala) are dynamic. They grow over the cinematographic narrative of the film. Parvati, Devdas’s childhood sweetheart who he cannot marry and for whose love he meets with a tragic death, has two dimensions to her growth. As a child and a teenager, she is her childish, innocent self, a sweet girl prancing about in the woods with the boy she falls in love with. When she gets married to a much older man, a zamindar who has grownup children from a previous marriage, Parvati has compromised with her new responsibility as wife and mother within a new family. Devdas for her, is part of a sweet memory from her past, which she begins to relive with shock, as she discovers the ruined figure of a dying Devdas on her doorstep in the climax. The latter part of Parvati’s character, the mature, mellow responsible and understanding wife, is stronger and more memorable than the former one. Parvati throws caution to the winds and breaks down completely the minute she hears that the dead man at her door is none other than her own Devdas.

Chandramukhi, the singing girl who Devdas begins to visit only to have his drinking bouts in peace and quiet, falls in love with him and is so influenced by his aloofness and attitude towards her, that she gives up her profession for good. Knowing fully well that her love is totally one-sided, Chandramukhi slowly and surely metamorphoses from a woman of easy virtue to a woman of quiet dignity, presented with more richness than in the novel.

Vyjayantimala was nominated for the best supporting actress of the year by Filmfare for her performance in the film. But she turned down the award on the grounds that it was not a ’supporting’ role but the female lead. All said and done however, the actress who ideally portrayed the characters Roy conceived for her in two films was Nutan, who performed the role of the untouchable girl in and as Sujata, and then, after some years, in Bandini. Sujata was based on a novelette by Subodh Ghosh. Roy took some liberties with the original. But these celluloid improvisations enhanced the richness of the film’s texture. It is one of the most beautiful celluloid representations of romanticism that evolved into a strong social statement against untouchability, spreading the message of the universality of love that extends not only beyond caste, class and status but also beyond blood.

Bandini was based on a novel, called Tamasi penned by Jarasandha, the only author to date to have documented the lives of prisoners through fiction. Nutan did the role of Kalyani, a prisoner sentenced for a life term for having poisoned her lover’s wife. The film follows a telescopic structure, moving backwards and forwards into and through time, tracing the strange emotional bonds Kalyani develops with the two men in her life, one, as a young maiden smitten by a revolutionary Vikas (Ashok Kumar) and the other as the silent, reserved prisoner who the young prison doctor Devtosh (Dharmendra) falls in love with and decides to rescue from a life in prison. The girl’s uncompromising stance reaches a climax when, instead of marrying the doctor, she runs to nurse her dying lover in his dying days. Not once does Roy try to rationalise his heroine’s act of murder. Yet, in the ultimate analysis, Kalyani is discovered to have been a tragic victim of sad circumstances.

Bandini, in the opinion of this writer, is Bimal Roy’s most complete film in the sense that it has eloquently depicted the ’complete’ woman with an appeal that transcends the personal to enter the political, a significance that is more universal than individual.

Had Bimal Roy not passed away of lung cancer as early as he did (1967), women on the Indian screen would have probably reached a higher degree of maturity, strength and realism than they have today.

Shoma A Chatterji