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Lens and sensibility

Latika Padgaonkar

It is in the nature of a book conceived as a tribute that the best be said of the person you pay tribute to, that praises flow and paeans be sung. But who can deny that in the case of Bimal Roy, the tributes paid by a galaxy of writers, scholars, film personalities and family members are most naturally deserved? Bimal Roy is a legend who steered Indian cinema in its heyday, created an aesthetic, shaped a sensibility, moved the conscience of the viewer with his choice of themes, groomed those he worked with and left abiding values for posterity. In his personal life, he was a man of few words, "simple, regular, uncomplicated" (in the words of his adoring daughter Rinki Roy Bhattacharya, who has put this volume together), "quiet, patient, introvert" (Nutan). Little wonder, then, this chorus of admiration from contributors who are in awe of his vision, his "universality of film language" (granddaughter Aneshwa Arya) and his ability to stride the worlds of art and commerce.

Bimal Roy, a collection of 38 critical essays, anecdotes, reminiscences, comes not a day too soon. This year is opportune, it marks his birth centenary and the book is a salute to him. Too little has been written on the entire body of work of a figure so tall, apart from a monograph by Feroze Rangoonwala, a Hindi anthology and its Marathi edition. Bimal Roy is a comprehensive effort and the volume will fill the gap in the assessment of his work.

Bhattacharya divides her material into three parts: "Bengal", "Bombay" and "Beyond Borders". Her own perceptive introduction speaks of how certain aspects of her father’s background helped define his work. Roy, who belonged to a zamindar family was uprooted twice in his life — from East Bengal which he left to come to Calcutta (now Kolkata), and which he left to move to Bombay (now Mumbai). In each case, the move cost him dearly. "Rootlessness and dispossession" are frequent themes in his films, she writes. "I believe exile excites the imagination of migrant artists." Witness the first period of exile — it gave us Udayer Pathe; and the second, Do Bigha Zamin. She mentions an uncle who became a "template" for the villainous Ugranarayan in Madhumati, and the short-tempered grandfather who could have spawned the authoritarian fathers in Devdas, Parineeta and Udayer Pathe. Roy’s portrayals of the landowning class as "ruthless and repressive could be construed not just as a social critique but an effort to free his spirit from its shackles."

Hosannas flow freely from the pen of contributors, many of who worked with him for long years: master, pioneer, true artist, perfectionist, a filmmaker’s filmmaker, enticing, superb. extraordinary, brilliant, sensitive and so on. Nabendu Ghosh admits he was a "Bimal Roy man before a man of films and a student of cinema." Sumit Bose "worshipped him". Tapan Sinha says that Roy realised that cinema was above all a technological medium, and lauds his keen sense of music, lens selection, camera placement and the importance of literature in his life, even though he was never an avid reader and depended on scriptwriters. And Chidananda Das Gupta calls him the "architect of cinema’s ideology of the ’50s when there was no polarity between art film and the box-office film… (when) there was valid space for Middle Cinema." This is the space Bimal Roy occupied, reconciling the opposing demands of art and the market and sticking to them.

As if to correct the balance, it is to Bhattacharya’s credit that she includes essays somewhat critical of Roy’s films. Of special interest is the analytical piece by one of India’s great actors, Naseeruddin Shah, who in passing takes a dig at Indian cinema for not having "outgrown the influence of theatre". While admiring Roy for handling issues of his day, for his choice of stories that "illustrated the deep compassion for and understanding of the plight of the less privileged…and his very modern approach to story-telling," the acting, he feels, appears "deeply flawed today". It is akin to the acting seen "in the theatre of an earlier age or in today’s worst movies." Reason? "Even Bimal Roy found it hard to counter decades of tradition that hold our screenplay writers in thrall. Scant attention was paid to minor characters, performances were falsely structured and the lack of skill in actors was "irksome". Tragedies that struck the main characters relentlessly yanked the heartstrings and were not believable even in Do Bigha Zamin which was otherwise "truthful, austere, hardhitting and astonishingly prescient in these days of farmers’ suicides", Nayantara Sehgal shares this view. The film for her is a "saga of unrelieved misery and defeat". How did such uncompromising pessimism emerge from a generally hopeful national mood, she asks.

The section "Beyond Borders" sheds lights on how Bimal Roy was/is received in the world outside. Devdas is a hot favourite of Paula H. Mayhew who teaches in New Jersey. And she chose to teach it because it explores, among other things, gender issues and violence against women. To her surprise, she discovered that her students had no love for Devdas whatsoever. They found him "selfish and sadistic", gave up on him altogether! On the other hand, for Rada Sesic from the former Yugoslavia, the films of Bimal Roy take her back to the Italian and European neo-realist films of the ’50s, they work "within the aesthetics of European cinema". It is impossible in the short review to do justice to the many discerning essays that deal with acting, cinematography, costumes, women and music (including his collaboration with the leading lights of Indian music — Vilayat Khan, Ram Narayan, Ali Akbar Khan, Hari Prasad Chaurasia, Zakir Hussain); to the astute parallels drawn with Guru Dutt; to the inspiration Roy took from literary masters — Tagore and Saratchandra Chatterjee; to the many fine analyses of sequences from some films. The beauty of the volume is that it demonstrates how open Bimal Roy’s films are to interpretation, just the way the characters in Sarat Chandra’s novels — as Roy himself writes — can be viewed from multiple perspectives.