Secondsaturn's Blog

I seem to find Soumita Bhattacharya, on my list of Facebook friends, an interesting person. When she invited me to view some of her creations showcased in a modern dance form, I agreed readily. Soumita’s husband is called Soumit, a rarity to find namesakes in a married couple, and they are dedicated photographers who specialize in shooting various kinds of dance forms. Soumit is more inclined towards classical dance while Soumita has a penchant for modern and improvized dances. Sadhya, a group based in Delhi was the subject of their still photos and it was to a live show of Sadhya’s dance that I went to.

Modern dances are not always easy to follow and especially when they are so highly stylized as in the avant garde. Sadhya’s creation called Chaitanya is a modernized version of the Chhau dance of Mayurbhanj area and strongly resembles all dances that are basically born out of forms of martial art, including the Tai Chi. I happened to visit Sri Lanka, thanks to Mahalakshmi, an associate professor of ancient history in JNU, where I saw the Kandy dance. Tagore wrote about the Kandy dance decrying it as being excessively physical and lacking in finer sublimities as perhaps his favourite form, the Manipuri has.

I saw deep similarities between the Chhau and the Kandy dance and why not because the present population of Lanka are migrants from eastern and central India. A look at Soumita and Soumit’s photos helped me to understand why the two forms of dances seemed so similar to me because both essentially evoked sensations of watching birds in flight. The flying bird was the central motif in these dances and dancers jumped, fell, rolled over, glided and slided all across the stage with violence, I noticed how silently they raised and released their weight. Such a vigorous movements and yet so noiseless !!! It is easy to see the level of control that the dancers have over their bodies.

The still photos by Soumita and Soumit, under their brand Art Imagerie are astounding. Rarely have I seen stills that convey so much of movement and flight. Usually photos of dance forms are of motions that have come to a standstill and appear as frozen moments. But these photos produce a strange feeling of a state of frozenness from which action will emanate at any moment of time and creates an eager anticipation of movement. Each pose has a sense of levitation, floatation and totally detached from any kind of centre or origin. I was wondering how the actual performance of these dances would look on stage and I realized that I was in for a rather different experience.

To viewers like me who tend to classify all kinds of visual experiences into neat categories, this particular dance of Sadhya fell neither into the classical nor into the folk form. I tend to look at classical dance as one in which the performer, usually a lone one, centres herself on the stage and brings into her location the forces of the Universe floating around her. In case of a folk dance, usually conducted in a group, the dancers move around the centre invoking the laws of the Universe into this empty space. In either case, whether through the body of the dancer or through the empty space created as being surrounded by a group of dancers, the forces of the Universe descend on to and anchor themselves on the earth. The movement is therefore from the ether to the earth and sometimes, in the very intense forms, into the nether. The interesting variation of the improvised dance forms wherever they are performed, is that the movement is from the earth into the ether, into floatation, levitating in the empty space defying and eventually free from gravity. Sadhya’s performance was in this vein.

The dancers moved sometimes swiftly, sometimes idly, sometimes in slow motion and sometimes cracked with the speed of lightening, but always noiselessly in utter silence. The movements were irregular as if the bodies were free floating particles in the vast space of nothingness. The dancers moved about with deadpan expressions seeing nothing, feeling nothing, as if they were souls of persons released from the world and floating about homelessly sometimes coming together and sometime drifting away, without a pattern or a design as if in a kaleidoscope and totally without any bodily sensations. The dissociation of movement from rhythm ensured that the dance had nothing to do with the world of the living or with Existence at large. I wondered why the production was called Chaitanya because all the while the creation wanted to move past anything that had to do with the human body and surely consciousness was not a feature of a disembodied soul.

The appeal of Sadhya’s production lies in its utter dissociation from anything to do with our existence. It is not even transcendence because it has no reckoning of what is to be transcended. It is the darkness of the space, the nothingness before creation and the emptiness after it. Sadhya is thus a total darkness, gravity-lessness, beyond light, beyond sound, beyond life and beyond Creation. The black and white costumes heighten this sense of emptiness and with a music and lighting to go with it; one moves into a world of extra ethereal senselessness, much of what is described as Brahma, or Time, or the Darkness of origin stories.

Last evening I attended a book launch because I had to. It was a family affair as the author is my first cousin nineteen years younger to me. I usually enjoy family gatherings and events such as this gives me an opportunity to see my people once again and have some tea with them. But the author and his books, I do not seem to follow. My nephews and nieces who are closer in age to the author in question were squealing with excitement as he made a video presentation of his work and they clapped loudly as the show ended. I was sad because I could not partake in the joy of the ceremony. This extraction of bits and pieces from the embeddedness of their context and using them as ingredients for something quite different is anathema to me. I always get repulsed whenever such re-mixes happen. Hence with much sorrow I realized that I was old, pretty old, and in fact very old.

I have always bought books of this young author and I have tried reading them in all sincerity and always have read through them. But I have not been able to absorb a single sense of the book, never understood why the story was being told at all. I seemed to be drawn into a world where everything is present. There are our epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, familiar children’s novels like Thakurmar Jhuli, pirate tales, jungle stories, old classics of Robert Louis Stevenson, mixed with Sherlock Holmes, Barbara Cartland, some familiar Hollywood Classics and popular American television shows, some war of worlds stuff, some disasters like the Titanic and of course with Sukumar Ray’s imageries of deadly demons used as batter in the single space of the novel. These diverse cuisines are hurriedly swallowed in an anxiety that someone else may grab them before he does and then thrown up in a violent bout of indigestion. The entrails of the regurgitation reveal chunks of undigested food, which is what I feel, whenever I read the author. But for the younger readers this seems to be the formula.

As I emerged out of the launch I had to walk a large part of the distance back home because the autos were running full capacity and had no space to accommodate me. I relished this brief break from transport and used the walk to ruminate on myself. The problem lay in me and not the author; he belonged to the era, I was past it. The crux of the difference between me and the author rested in the way he and I seemed to have consumed our literature. For me the world of epics or the terrible tribulations of helpless children of Thakurmar Jhuli, the tales of Alice’s wonderland, the never ending braids of Rapunzel, and later Sherlock Holmes, the pirates and prisoners were all self contained worlds. The protagonists of these stories remained set permanently in their contexts and hence when I read of Kim, or Tarzan, I belonged to the jungle; when I read Homer, I lived in Greece, when I wept with Arun, Barun and Kiranmala, I too had a relative who would become a blood drinking demoness by night; I was an Englishman walking through gas lit dark roads in London when I read Sherlock Holmes and with Byomkesh Bakshi, I came to live in a Keyatola flat. Were Alice to meet Cinderall, or Tarzan come home to Ulysses, it would be a catastrophe, no less than were it to snow in Delhi or the ice caps of the poles grow the cacti of Sahara Desert. For me, the world had to be tidy and tied to geography, and later to its politics, history and society. This is why I read books not only as a chain of events, or for its characters but also for its context. During my childhood, we all were like this; our spaces were fixed, time was finite, and story forms regular. Not so for this author. The question to ask is why.

When the author was a child and wrote his first essay in school, his mother proudly told my mother that he had reversed the hare and tortoise story because in his story the hare won and not the tortoise. I gasped, but what is the purpose of the story then? The tortoise had to win because that way the premise of the story is nullified. If the hare which is the favourite also wins in the end, then what is the point? I thought that such a story that opposes the well known myth is an attention attracting strategy that children forget when they turn into adults. But now that the cousin is a celebrated author for children he seems to have emerged out of the same tortoise hare story with the reverse end !!! Throughout his works, familiar myths are broken, their closures prized open, elements snatched from their locations in narratives and presented randomly. The effect of it all is something similar to the one that one gets by continuously switching television channels. I suddenly seemed to know why I never got any sense from the books the author wrote, because what sense can a person derive from channel switching?

I thought of myself when on some evenings I need to switch off. In the pre-television days I would take a book, read or unread, on any subject it may be, and follow its lines as it flowed logically sentence after sentence. My mind would relax because it would cohere. For the same reason, our people watch so much of the formula film; it is as relaxing as going to the gym, entertaining because of the exhaustive experience and which in turn is so because of the logical closure. The closure is the form, its formula. It has anticipation because it must always close; it is new because it closes new kinds of content. Books were our preferred source of entertainment because of the strong logicality and which in turn was so because the subjective elements of the agent moved in reckoning with the objective constraints, removing these obstacles towards a grand equilibrium.

In the works of this author, there is no equilibrium to be attained; the movement is from chaos to chaos and into a final chaos that no individual can plan to control. Universe is saved by some Providence through the accident of unplanned and uncoordinated actions. The characters just move about following instructions robotically of a very powerful individual who plans to take control of the entire world. This individual, who seems like Osama Bin Laden is not necessarily the villain; he is just a contender for a fetish that could be a stone, which is the source of real power. The characters are not interested in the ideology of their mission; they seem to only work for a job. This dissolves the importance of a goal and consequently of goal-directed actions. Hence there is no direction to their actions and the fights, chases or shoot-outs look like some frenzied activities rather than genuine actions for goal-fulfillment. It is not an accident that all the characters in the author’s books are children of celebrities, or recruits of some very large, albeit secret order. When individuals have little scope to achieve things through talents and actions, all they can do is to launch themselves in the right pads and preserve their social class. In the works of the author, the characters are thus running very hard only to preserve themselves, as any slip may cost them their lives in the highly exaggerated world of the fiction and their social statuses and positions in the empirical reality they inhabit. This expresses a secret fear of loss, loss of livelihood, loss of social status and loss of lifestyle. This fear makes the generation of the author contemptuous of anything which is certain; no wonder then he breaks all forms of certainties that emerge in his life as myths, epics, tales, fables, and even poetry. There is a sense of irreverence, which is to manage his own sense of foreboding of things to come, which the author knows will not work to his advantage.

What kind of reader then are my nieces and nephews who love their young uncle so much? These children too suffer from the same sense of uncertainty about their lives and unfortunately the little experiences they have had of their lives, they cannot be otherwise. I looked back on my childhood in which security and certainty were never wanting. Our grandparents and parents had steady jobs that they were in no fear of losing and we knew that success could be ours if we worked hard. But today’s generation needs neither intelligence nor diligence but smartness. This smartness is not to go past obstacles but to hoodwink the opposition by disturbing cognitive coordinates. Language and publicity are the two instruments to do this. This is why mixing and confusing of established categories of thought is the instrument of this generation. Shah Rukh Khan’s performance as Devdas and Don were mimicry of the doyens of cinema who had performed these feats; the author also tries to mimic a whole set of classics so as to alter our recall them. Just like Shah Rukh Khan’s remakes, the author’s categories also destroy our recall of classics. At the core of this perversion lies a death wish, an uncomfortable realization.

At the launch function my cousin introduced us to a rather young adult, an authoress at eighteen. She sat there in shorts lifting her fat legs across a chair trying to exhibit her thighs and hoping people ogle at her shapeless pile of flesh. When I asked her about her work she said that her protagonist was a young nerd, a girl who suddenly realizes that she always wanted to kill people. Death, and murder are the attributes of the protagonist !!

I think that we should urgently look into this generation, generation that produces more terror strikers than inventors, many more hackers than computer programmers, it produces amazing performers but little. Much of the creativity in this generation is only to duck and pass the buck rather than to take on the obstacles with a sense of an agency. No wonder then that this generation is so ahistorical, reading history as a costume drama and not as the premise of our thought categories and institutions.

As I walked down past some bookstores on my way home I peeped in to see their collection. I could see shelves still full of those works that used to circulate among us in our childhood as best sellers. These authors and such works were not all lost then and when the younger generation wanted their fill of genuine entertainment they probably read these classics. But when the younger generation wanted their own politics of supercilious positioning against all things certain and hence against them, they probably went to authors like my cousin.

The IPL has got me into a state of confusion. I belong to a world where things are in their place; for instance politics is where it should be, cinema, media, cricket and my everyday life, each one of them are securely in the place that belongs to them. But the IPL seems to be too many things, all mired up and messed up into one big media event- it is the final victory of the cinema over cricket. Films and cricket have been distinct and parallel, both are star producing discourses and both have had huge popular support and following. But each has been autonomous, self contained world, complementing and non competitive. Of late both cricket and the cinema had been losing audiences. Kerry Packer in the early 1980’s was an attempt at rediscovering cricket to help it live through changing times, to help it survive the forces of dismemberment into history.
Cricket was a colonial affair that reached its peak with the most intense moment of colonialism, namely the movement towards decolonization. In the world of the post colonial, cricket had to lose its sheen to football and hockey. It survived in South Asia and the West Indies and South Africa, the Commonwealth countries because of a continued process of internal colonialism of a selected elite ruling the rest of us in the name of democracy. In the lands of the juntas, cricket never had a chance. Today as democracy all over the world, especially in the Commonwealth countries is facing a challenge to various non democratic ways of life and governance, cricket faces the imminent threat of losing its popularity. The cinema, whose history is aligned to cricket, has met the same fate. Both need to survive. The IPL was the cinema’s appropriation of cricket for survival.
Meanwhile cinema underwent two important transformations; one was the abandonment of ideology and the other was to become friendly towards television, its one time contender. In both such cases the cinema created celebrities, though it no longer had the monopoly to do so. With such changes within itself, it stretched its arms towards cricket and grabbing it by the waist brought it close enough to crush it, albeit in the name of dancing together in amity. The crux of cricket, the nation collapsed and cricketers who were individuals playing in a team was reduced to simple corporate entities who were mere employers being assigned into a team. The teams were better known by their owners, who were invariably celebrities from outside cricket. Similarly, a match betweem Royal Challengers and Kolkata Knight Riders was more of a battle of Vijay Mallya and Shah Rukh Khan. The teams were put together, much like the hockey team in Chak De India to fulfill the wishes and whims of their clelebrity owners. Cricket came to be owned by a few zamindars rather than by nations, zamindars, not the native ones but something like the various East India Companies, multinational and private. This recolonization of cricket was also its corporatization.
The teams were named after cities but did not contain the organic spirit of the city, much like the real estate development zones, or the SEZs that use the mere physical location of the city but refuse to integrate with its moisture and air, its mud and concrete, its vegetation and rubbish, its history and its future. If it were so, then the IPL could have raised tempers like the Manchester Union, or Liverpool as in the football league in the UK. Cricket under the IPL was ripped off its essential continuity; there was no history to a team, no memories to compare, and no discourses around it. Players performed very well, all matches were equally pitched and all outcomes were with baited breath, yet there was boredom, a boredom that the IPL tried to overcome by scantily clad, furred women, DJs, folk drummers and bright clothes of players. The serene stretches of green grass in the cricket grounds were replaced by tacky ads painted on the grounds and everywhere the calmness of cricket was interrupted by advertisements by sponsors. The image of the IPL refers thus only to itself, a spectacle that does not have a resonance beyond the immediate gratification, much like a firework that erupts suddenly and dies just as suddenly, dazzling us while it lasts but only that much…….

Shiv Sena Vs Shah Rukh

This piece is written at the behest of Ritwick Mallik, a best selling debutant author of school romance. Ritwick has himself put up an excellent piece against the Sena on the FB and the present note is a kind of counter point to that. Naturally to a civilized world, the stamping and charging of the Shiv Sena or the raging and ranting of the MNS against a SRK or Amitabh Bachchan would set our blood to boil because such show of uncivil defiance is not part of legitimate political behaviour in the world’s largest democracy. Indeed, this vigilantism, this impolite vandalism is not what we expect in a civilized nation and least of all in a cosmopolitan city to which we head in search of a fortune. Mumbai cannot be in the control of hooligans because it means so much in terms of the opportunities for the best among us. Besides, India is a democracy that allows a person to reside and work anywhere in the country irrespective of his state of his linguistic nativity. Looked at from this perspective, the Shiv Sena is not only vandalous but scandalous for the Indian Constitution.
But there is a counterpoint and which is necessary because whether we like the Sena or not, or agree with its politics, we need to know the phenomenon and understand why things should be the way they are. The Shiv Sena was born way back in the 1970’s and shared its birth time with various kinds of Naxal movements in the eastern parts of India, namely Bengal and Bihar. The extreme right politics of the Sena did not differ in terms of its ends with the extreme left politics of the Naxals. Both wanted to attack systems and institutions that did not help them in securing opportunities. In the early 1970’s, the Sena imagined that the poor south Indian migrants mainly working in wayside restaurants were a block for the natives of the state, namely Maharashtra. Hence they attacked the south Indians. In those days, the Sena did not affect us and so we were not worried about them, the affair remained an internal matter of Maharashtra. Today, the Sena and its ilk have attacked again and this time it is national news because the ones they attacked are doyens from the Hindi film industry, inseparably associated with the city of Mumbai. For most of us Mumbai, the erstwhile Bombay means the home of filmstars; Bollywood is what we call our Hindi film industry after Hollywood. Though the Sena must be condemned for its despicable act yet there are forces at work that need to be delved into.
I spend one night at Mumbai and immediately understood that for the ordinary Mumbaikar, the cinema was no longer the prime entertainment. Events in the reality like the 26/11 shoot out, Pramod Mahajan’s assassination, Noor Haveliwallah’s drunken driving, student suicide, kidnap of the infant daughter of the Telugu liquor baron were events that far superseded the drama of the K-k-k-iran in SRK films. Somehow the issues covered in the Hindi film can no longer match the drama of the real life events. It seems that the Hindi commercial cinema has fallen behind the more happening reality of Mumbai. This loss of power of cinema reveals itself in the growing audacity of the Shiv Sena to attack the Badshah of Bollywood, Shah Rukh Khan.
The Hindi cinema ever since the middle of the 1990’s is increasingly catering to a class of people who are removed from the concerns of the large majority of us, huffing, puffing, sweating and struggling to get on with life. The increasing income inequality, the growing divide between the English speaking and the vernacular medium and the rapidly widening split between the metropolis and its hinterland have given rise to dramas that the Hindi cinema has little interest in. Bollywood is increasingly communicating hunky dory tales of human conditions in India that are truths for a selected Page 3 but lies for those who must inhabit the crowded and muggy planet yet remain invisible to the typeset of newspapers or in the beams of the channel TV. The sanitization of the Indian life in order to create a designer palette for the NRI who must show-off a world back home that has no reason for her to leave it in the first place, has earned for the new Bollywood a definite contempt of the masses. The masses respond to the growing indifference of Bollywood towards them by a counter indifference sending off films to look for expensive multiplexes with ever rising rentals or pursue intelligent commerce with various kinds of “rights” and copyrights. If people have to watch a film then pirates are tapped; and cinema despite spinning moola mainly through pursuing high value currency in overseas territory is steadily failing to remain that singular moral force that guides nations and creates citizenship. The Shiv Sena’s defiance of Shah Rukh reflects the waning power of the cinema and the masses indifference to film stars who at one point of time were the Gods and Goddesses of Mumbai in straight competition with Siddhi Vinayak and Hajji Ali. No one will vote for the Shiv Sena for attacking Shah Rukh but no one will hold it against them either. This is a serious matter, not for the Sena, but for Shah Rukh and the Hindi film industry in general.

6th February 2010.

The austerity debate has preoccupied our national consciousness. We all know that austerity drives save no money. But then that’s not the real point of such austerity measures. What is important is that austerity as a life style that now is being suggested by the top politicians and with such a suggestion, the culture of austerity acquires some interesting discourses of social power. There is a certain politics about being austere as there is a certain politics of being ostentatious.
The austere says that I give back more than I take; the ostentatious says why should I give at all when I can take. The austere says that we should not take in proportion to what we give because the privileged must help the less privileged to survive. The ostentatious says that no, I want to be paid for all that I have invested, after all I also have the desire to be like the very best. The austere says that use your time to think harder, the ostentatious says is philosophy any sexy? The austere says leave resources for the future generations, the ostentatious says, who has seen tomorrow?
The ostentatious is a new entrant in our politics. She never existed before the economic liberalization of 1991. She was freed from our inner most secret desires so that the acquisitive instincts would help all us accumulate more riches. The then Finance Minister and the present Prime Minister said how could we ever expect the slices of the pie to increase if the overall pie did not do so? So the capitalists, the speculators and the scamsters were let loose to create wealth that would trickle down to the rest of us. What naivety !!
Income inequality increased, divide in access to education and health widened and the growth path left out many more to include only a few. The slices shrank despite the increase in the size of the pie. How could that happen?
The selfish, obscene culture of being rich created the category of the ostentatious. This category thought nothing of the fact that the speculators were hoarding food, that Satyam walked off with sharholders’ money and the society’s jobs, saw nothing wrong in taking away farmers’ lands in a failing food economy and thought these to be actually smart. This category is the Ravana of the modern age, who the Congress desperately wants to contain by invoking the austere. Lets see who wins this Dussherah, the austere or the ostentatious!

Raj Thackeray is wrong and Karan Johar is right. Bombay is Bombay and not Mumbai. At least, it is definitely so for Aisha Banerjee, the female protagonist of Wake Up Sid, the film which Raj Thackeray is responding to. Raj says that Bombay must be referred to as Mumbai because Bombay was a mispronounced version of the original Marathi name, Mumbai, and also now that Bombay is officially Mumbai. But it is not as simple as that because Shobhaa De had written a rather longish article in which she mentioned categorically that Mumbai and Bombay are two very different levels of culture, one the site of the new upstart vernacular middle class produced out of a deepening of democracy, and the former, i.e. Bombay, of cultured aesthetes who were cosmopolitan and also rich. For most Bengalis, Mumbai is still Bombay and hence when a Bengali girl writes back to her parents in Kolkata, she refers to the city as Bombay and not Mumbai, because it is Bombay with which she is familiar.
Bengalis have a long association with Bombay. The Bengalis came into Delhi roughly around 1911 when the capital shifted to New Delhi from Calcutta. In case of Bombay, the Bengalis moved in here in the 1930’s with the film industry and with the growing Indian corporate business houses that required highly skilled managers and corporate leaders. Bengalis had moved elsewhere as well, mostly as doctors, teachers, bureaucrats and lawyers. Such cities were Lucknow and Allahabad in UP, Dehradun in Uttaranchal, Lahore in West Punjab, Surat and Baroda in Gujarat and Pune, Satara and Kolhapur in Maharashtra and Nagpur, then in the Central Provinces. The Bengali bhadralok diaspora in all the above cities were work related transfers when families settled in them because they continued to live there even after retirement from employment. The Partition also meant that many such bhadraloks lost their homes forever to Pakistan and having nowhere else to go made their homes in the “pravas”.
Bombay was an exception to all the above cities for Bengalis came here in search of their dreams. This is why, the Bengalis of Bombay are different because the Bengalis who dared to come to Bombay were different from their rather middle class brethrens who were contend to commute between office and work between 9 am and 5 pm and spend their lives in just doing this. The Bengalis of Bombay were adventurous. As film industry persons they were chasing their own dreams and manufacturing and peddling the same for the millions of the rest of us. As the top echelons of the corporate world, they were highly paid white collars, straddling board rooms and the top clubs of the city. Such Bengalis were in the league of the early generations who found favour with the British and occupied India’s creamiest layers. Hence, when a Bengali moves to Bombay, we generally look upon such an individual as belonging to a higher echelon of the society.
But as Bombay became Mumbai, it dawned upon the Bengalis that Bombay was being reclaimed by its “natives” and pulled into a kind of a culture that would be local, vernacular and monochromic. Such a Mumbai would no longer be conducive for their dreams, nor would Mumbai be able to support the scale of civilization that hosted the Bengalis in the city. Thus when Bengalis want to make space for themselves in the city they say Bombay, the plural, the large scale, the cosmopolitan and the ever expanding city that can host them and fulfill their dreams. When Raj Thackeray says Mumbai he wants the conservative, the protectionist, the mean, the miserly city that draws limits to keep time and space out. Mumbai is all about the losing, closeted, cloistered local, Bombay is about the successful, expansive, victorious and prosperous individual. For the Bengali it is Bombay, and Bombay every time. The Bong kamineys of Kaminey also said so, Aisha Banerjee or Mumbai Beats said it and we Bengalis would also say the same, Bombay. Mumbai of Raj Thackeray is another city, not really worth visiting or exploring. As Bengalis, we will let it pass and give it the miss

When Tehaai asked me to do a piece on Uttam Kumar, the doyen of Bengali cinema and imagination, I realized that this is a territory I hardly know. People in Bengal knew far too much and I, far too little about the icon who has defined the Bengali culture almost single-handedly after Rabindranath Tagore. My strongest impression of Uttam Kumar is the procession that accompanied his corpse to the crematorium. The sheer swell of the crowd reminded me of the photos I saw of Rabindranath Tagore’s funeral procession. My cousin’s wife who is a Punjabi and never seen a single film of the deceased star stood for two hours with her infant child in arms and precariously holding up an umbrella against the monsoon drizzle to have a last glimpse of the doyen. Many homes, my friends reported, did not light kitchen fires on the day of the funeral and my mother tells me that the last time that happened in Bengal was on the day Gandhi was assassinated. These instances were enough to prove that Uttam Kumar was no less a defining force of the Bengali culture, ethos and ideology than Tagore or Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.
As I worked on the stardom of Amitabh Bachchan, I realized that Uttam Kumar was a very different image, the difference being due to the way a Hindi film and a Bengali film was structured. The Hindi film stars usually represent a single strong image to which the diverse roles add attributes to make it more wholistic, inclusive and perhaps also exhaustive. This peculiar feature of the star in popular cinema makes many scholars denounce their appeal as being ideologically hegemonistic and politically manipulative. The viewer of such cinema identifies herself with the star and the point of view of the film is usually that of the stars. But in regional cinema, the star is not the one with who the audience typically identifies with but the character who becomes the star’s significant other. The appeal of Uttam Kumar is not in his persona, in which his millions of viewers would imagine themselves as being the star, but rather whenever in their lives they would require a significant other, they would find him. Hence he appears as son to the mother, older brother to the younger sibling, lover to a lonely woman, a doctor to the patient, teacher to the student, justice seeker to the wronged, and judge to the accused. Even in his negative roles, Uttam Kumar seems to be committing those sins that the Bengali urban professional middle class was guilty of and hence served as a way of purging our souls. Uttam Kumar emerged as Bengal’s conscience creator and its cleanser.
I have watched Uttam Kumar in Satyajit Ray’s film Nayak, a film that seems to be about the star, my senses have revolted. The popular film star is seen as a greedy, Mammon worshipping soulless person. Were Uttam Kumar to really be a soulless professional who prostituted his talents by playing up to the gallery, he would not have been the huge banyan tree for the Bengali cinema industry. The reminiscences of all and sundry in the Bengali film industry implied that he was there for the technician, the junior artist, the new heroine, the elderly editor, the experienced cameraman and the nervous journalist very much in the same manner as he was for the best of producers and the greatest of directors. I guess that such a persona also had a personality to match with it and the on-screen charisma was very much a part of the off-screen one. This and not as Ray has shown was the reason why Uttam Kumar was the institution that he became for the Bengali film industry without actually being a producer or a distributor or even a director of any significance.
It is difficult to understand the stardom of Uttam Kumar without appreciating the deep changes in the Bengali society of the 1950’s and the 1960’s and why did the star persona mean so much to the people of Bengal? Broadly we could suggest that Uttam Kumar was a comforting image in a society that had its own anxieties and anger after the Partition of Bengal in 1947.
1947 for the Bengalis means Partition rather than Independence. As the territory was Partitioned and so was the economy. Both sides lost money, property, business, occupation, social contacts and human capital. Both sides also lost homes, neighbours, land, rivers, ponds, familiar paths to the bazaar, the walks by the water bodies, the hills of Chittagong, the purple evenings of Jibananda’s poetry, the blue monsoons of Chandidas, the village fairs, the local schools, the pot bellied school master, the boatswain, the phaeton puller, the fisherman and the vegetable vendor. In other words, for the Bengali bhadralok not only the familiar world collapsed but it was as if the entire middle class intelligentsia came to be located in the city of Kolkata. Many came in as refugees who the native population had to accommodate. Slums and make shift residential colonies came up overnight with little attention to civic amenities or the basic properties of town planning. People lived in cramped spaces often accommodating many others, perhaps of their own social class but otherwise unknown persons. A strange concept of the “paara” or the locality as a space for significant others emerged in Kolkata, a phenomenon which still persists in contemporary times. Inside homes not only strangers and faint acquaintances lived together but many who had some kind of a home in Kolkata had to accommodate brethrens and kins into their household. This made many Bengalis live with large families of extended ties but also give up living spaces and the privacy of a nuclear family. The dream of a neat and compact flat with a small family of husband, wife and infant children continues to be the dream of most Bengali men and women just in order to overcome this huge lack of privacy in the domestic space. Uttam Kumar inhabited this constricted city space, often negotiating for larger hearts that grew self-centred in the search of personal space by emerging in roles of the significant other.
In terms of public spaces the influence that Bengal had waned after the Partition. Not only Bengal’s economic dominance got a jolt but its political ideology too waned because politics of Independence led not to the establishment of the nation but to its Partition. In the land of the Renaissance, the country had been divided; Bengal had to become apologetic about this blasphemy and this kinked the intelligentsia’s confidence. The middle class became so absorbed in its own resettlement and in the management of its relations and reproductive economy that quite unknown to itself, its civic life came to revolve around the concerns of the home, relationships, and insecurities of the middle class rather than about the wider society. The Bengali cinema, which like any other commercial cinema represents the partisan interests of the middle classes everywhere in India and perhaps of the world, came to reflect the narrow interests mentioned above. I think that Uttam Kumar’s roles by bringing in romance and softer sentiments made us cushion partisan interests in kinder and more generous terms.
Post Partition Bengal did not consolidate its capitalist or the entrepreneur class. While on the one hand assets were lost and much of access to credit wiped out for the Bengali businessman, for those capitalists from non-Bengali communities had theirs intact. This was the beginning of a Marwari dominance of Bengal when this community came in to fill the space of the productive economy. As the Bengali bhadralok came to be relegated into a job seeking person who was contended only to do a regular employment in an “office” and return home so that he could attend to his household duties, he came to regard his home as the end of the world. Associations outside the homestead was looked upon with suspicion and he turned away from clubs and other civil gatherings treating these as immoral or bachhanalian. The bhadralok was far more concerned with the politics at home, the control of sexuality of young persons, the containment of unfamiliar persons into some structure of the domestic space and also most importantly to make the limited incomes work for ever increasing claimants. Uttam Kumar’s presence was inside this kind of a home, but one who was also in large hotels, at clubs and elite gatherings, spanning two worlds comfortably and without offending any.
This withdrawal of the middle class Bengali from the public space created a wedge between itself and the rest of the society. The communist movement of the 1960’s had very strong strains of an ethnic struggle in which the capitalists, who were overwhelmingly non-Bengalis were attacked instead of negotiated with. The bhadralok also developed a consciousness vis-à-vis the “chhotolok” that contained all the negative categories that the bhadralok feared and loathed to become. The “chhotolok” could be anybody from a peasant to a worker to a shop keeper and even a servant or a municipality sweeper. The politics of egalitarianism was only against the rich but not to include the less fortunate. To the best of my understanding, Uttam Kumar emerged as a comfort zone in this kind of a cultural stress of the Bengali middle class. His demeanour of a quintessential Bengali bhadralok was sufficiently distanced from the old aristocracy of Chhobi Biswas and Pahari Sanyal and yet he was clearly identifiable as one who could never be very low down in the social ladder. He lived in the new spaces of a “mess baari” or in a compact Kolkata flat. He was unknown, sometimes with a past not too fine, but one who came in and won all hearts. It is here that we find the most outstanding attribute of the star – his ability to emerge not as the self of the viewer but as her significant other. He was a stranger who became a friend, a relative, a confidante and a succour. The endearing smile had an assurance that smoothened rifts and healed wounded memories. He was perhaps not a swash buckling hero, and which later generations construed as being effeminate, but his softer qualities came in as the core of the new Bengali culture that had suffered the politics of violence of communal riots. Any assertion of masculinity in the aftermath of rape, loot, arson and murder would have been lethal for Bengal of its times. Uttam Kumar seemed to have appropriated a resentful, vengeful conscience of the Bengali into an interesting, lovable and attractive new neighbour of the next door flat in Kolkata. His was an image of absorption – the loss, the violence, the separation, the displacement, the dishonour and the defeat that Bengalis suffered all through the Partition.
Scholars often say that while the wave of fascism made Europe reflect upon its thought categories from the Enlightenment, the Partition did not appear to have created commensurate reflections on the Indian side. This is far from true and our commercial cinema will prove this. The Indians have tried to recover principles that could have averted the Partition. The Hindi film harped on equality, plurality, freedom of speech, choice and movement, law and order and tried to fight the communal politics by distracting the viewers mind into discourses of liberal and sometimes harder socialist politics; the Bengali cinema harped on kindness, compassion, sentiments, relationships, romance, love, trust and faith, all of which were compromised during the bitter communal riots that preceded the Partition.
Uttam Kumar is mostly remembered as a duo with heroines, especially with Suchitra Sen, Supriya and Sabitri. These women represent not only three faces of the Bengali society but also three rather distinct moments of the state and its people. Suchitra Sen, the beauty, arrogant, confident woman of Bengal who could have had everything had not circumstances totally beyond her control constrained her. Uttam Kumar emerged as the man in who she could find comfort and solace if not shelter. Uttam Kumar appeared the most romantic with Suchitra and it was with her that his appeal soared. Suchitra Sen was Bengal’s sense of ultimate beauty that had to be nurtured by a caring, considerate and soft gloved person, very different from the hard hearted cynics who lost Bengal to Partition.
Supriya Chaudhuri was far more ordinary than Suchitra, more submissive than arrogant, somewhere more giving than seeking, more at home than being forced being at home and committed to her relations than seeking subservience and surrender. Such an image demanded more of a complete man and not merely the romantic hero. Uttam Kumar was far more settled as a person in his films with Supriya. Personally, he stayed with Supriya forming a lasting relationship with her even though they were not legally married.
Sabitri Chatterjee’s image was distinctly different from the above two heroines. She was more middle class, more of a housewife with rather simplistic and straight-jacketed views on life, limited in her thoughts. When Uttam Kumar romanced Sabitri, he romanced a middle class that was already getting entrenched into a far narrower wedge of partisan concerns and despite their strong presence on stage, the Uttam Sabitri duo did more for the image of Uttam Kumar as a solo performer rather than as a profiling star. The engagement with Sabitri established Uttam more in his masculinity than in his romantic image and indeed in many comic films, Sabitri got to work opposite the star.
Indeed Uttam Kumar’s films opposite the three heroines seemed to trace not only the star but the Bengali middle class’s journey from a more elitist to a plebian but more inclusive social category. One of the biggest challenges to Uttam Kumar’s monopoly was Soumitro Chatterjee, a star who had been nurtured by Satyajit Ray. Soumitro was quintessentially masculine, who wooed women in his own terms, and who focused more on himself, his sentiments, his feelings rather than absorb the others. Soumitro Chatterjee was the emergence of the selfhood of the Bengali rather than be merged inseparably with the identity of the significant other. This probably explains why Uttam Kumar was always the bad guy in films in which Soumitro was his co-star, often playing the effete zamindar, a class that had to totally disappear to make way for the post-Partition middle class.

To conclude, to the best of my understanding, Uttam Kumar seemed to have lent an emotional support to the Bengali middle class that had overwhelmingly been displaced out of communal politics and bloody riots and therefore had every chance to slip back into anxiety, violence and depression. He also seemed to have created once more a space in which the middle class morals and ethos and finally its hopes and aspirations were defined and refined and thus lending a shape to class that had lost itself in the frenzy of the Partition, both territorially and culturally. Uttam Kumar was a crucial element in returning a divided Bengal into the normalcy of everyday life and integrating it slowly into the mainstream of national politics.