Director’s Special

Gulbahar Singh
I want to explore fresh apects of life
Gulbahar Singh is the only Sikh making films for the large and small screen in Tollygunje and perhaps the only director having made three feature films in Hindi from Tollywood. But this does not mean that he is distanced from the Bengali psyche, the language, the literature and the culture. He recently completed a telefilm based on the life and times of Raas Sundari Devi who was the first woman to pen her autobiography in Bengali. It was titled Amaar Jeebon. Gulbahar also made a two-part biographical telefilm in Hindi for Doordarshan on Munshi Premchand. It is one of the most deeply researched pieces of work on this great Hindi literature. His documentary on vocalist Balamuralikrishna bore proof of Gulbahar’s inclination to tackle research-centric subjects. His first Hindi feature film Sundari was a picturesquely beautiful statement on forestry and natural habitat and on wildlife which, however, did not film favour with the selectors of the Indian Panorama for the IFFI some years ago. This does not dilute the fact that the film had a highly original script, brought alive on celluloid with the help of little-known actors and technicians including one well-known actor, Sadhu Meher. His second feature film, Goal, fetched the National Award for the Best Children’s Film last year. He has just completed the shooting of his third Hindi film Dattak with four Mumbai actors having pitched in to play the major parts.
Excerpts from an interview:

What made you opt for Premchand and Balamuralikrishna, two very different people from totally different fields and backgrounds as subjects for your telefilms?
Balamuralikrishna appeals to me because of his wonderfully vibrant, widely ranged and magnetic voice over which he has perfect control in all the three octaves. With his clear enunciation of the Sahitya (lyric), the buoyant, ever fresh quality of his vocal rendition and voice modulation, Balamuralikrishna mesmerises his audience. I sought to portray Balamuralikrishna as a musical maestro and as a sensitive person with the deepest concern for human beings.
As for Munshi Premchand, I find in him a subject open to varied interpretations mainly springing from the fact of the timelessness of his literary creations. For more than fifty years after his death in 1936, Premchand remains the greatest contributor to Hindi and Urdu literature in our country. He marks the transition from exotic and soapy romances and tales of moral didacticism to a more realistic mode of narrative presentation. I felt that the present generation of Indians ought be familiarise itself with both these stalwarts of the 20th century and television is the ideal medium through which this was possible.

What about the two feature films you did before you took up Dattak?
I had high hopes about Sundari reaching a wide audience through the festival circuit. When this did not happen, I had a limited release of the film at Calcutta’s Nandan and to my surprise, everyone who saw the film seemed to like it. Sundari is the name of a beautiful young one of a deer who romps about in the forest and befriends a little boy who lives there. How the lives of the little boy, his sister, their father and a hunter change in subtle but different ways when Sundari enters their lives makes for the story. All I wished to do was to uphold the beauty of forest and forest life. The naive innocence of the people who live there, distanced from the noise and bustle of urban life, is sustained by the innocence of their surroundings. Modernisation here, would be more than an intrusion - it would be a violation of things good and beautiful, in my opinion.

Was the National Award for Goal a pleasant surprise?
Yes. It would be childish to say it wasn’t. But I do not really make films to win awards. Many like myself are interested in awards simply because it offers our films a wider reach since the cinemas might not find our works commercially very viable. If the film bags a National Award, well, then, the story is different. While making Goal, I learnt a great deal about life in small-towns of Bengal. The star of my film Tapas Dhali, who portrays the slum boy Manu, who turns to be rarely gifted with kicks and lobs and goals on the football field, illustrated that it is possible to achieve the impossible if the goal is never allowed to get out of focus. It was a strange journey for me where cinema and reality at times, blurred so much that it was different to draw the line between the one and the other. Prafulla Roy’s story appealed to me when I read it first. And looking back, I am happy the way the film turned out.

And what is Dattak all about?
Once again, it is in Hindi with wonderful actors from Mumbai who kindly agreed to give me some of their precious time to act in my film. Dattak is based on a story by Mridula Sinha with a screenplay jointly penned by Partha Banerjee and Subir Mukherjee. As the name suggests, it deals with the theme of adoption but in a sense very different from the common-sense meaning of adopting a child. A major slice of the shooting has featured a dilapidated old age home near Calcutta, where two old men, played by AK Hangal and Anjan Srivastava are inmates and get to know each other closely. Rajit Kapoor plays the son of one of them - I will not tell you which one - who comes searching for his lost father. Kruttika Desai plays the daughter. It has been shot in Benares, Calcutta and its outskirts. Sunirmal Majumdar who shot Unishe April has done the cinematography for the film. The rest consists of the team I always work with - Ujjal Nandy for editing, Chandan Roy Choudhury is scoring the music and Ashok Bose is in charge of art direction.

We notice that you have chosen all your actors from the stage. Any special reason why you chose so?
Not really save for the fact that having acted for the stage and for the large screen - all of them have done some very good television too you will have noticed - gives them a wider span of experience. Having done theatre, television and cinema, they have an edge over actors who do not have a similarly multi-layered experience in acting. It helps a director to work with such side-based actors. I have seen their work and liked very much what I saw. Besides, they were easy to approach and easy to convince. They liked what they were being asked to do and that was that. Then, I will not be left with doubts about their command over Hindi. This might not apply to all actors in Tollygunje. Each one of them have done a wonderful job. They have been extremely cooperative, specially Hangal sahab who has crossed eighty and is still going strong.

Why are you being so secretive about the story of Dattak? Is it about one of the old men being taken up for ‘adoption’ by the son of the other?
You tell me why (Smiles.) If you know the story already, why ask at all? Ask me what I am planning to do next. Several telefilms for one thing. And perhaps a teleserial on the evolution of women in India over its history to trace where our women get their strength, their shakti from.

Shoma A Chatterji