The incomparable legacy of Bimal Roy

How many times have you seen Bimal Roy ’s Devdas and Bandini ? These are the go-to movies when we begin to lose faith in mainstream Hindi cinema.

Coincidentally, Sanjay Leela Bhansali ’s Devdas was released on the same day (July 12) as Bimal Roy’s birth anniversary. “It was planned that way,” recalls Bhansali. “I was very keen to dedicate my Devdas to Bimal Roy’s Devdas, not because I was inspired by it in any direct way, but because I don’t think my Devdas would have been possible without the Bimal Roy version of the story.”

Bhansali says he made a concerted effort to keep his interpretation of the Saratchandra classic very different from Bimal Roy’s.

Recalls Bhansali, “When my Devdas was released there was a huge uproar from the so-called purists about how I had tampered with the original novel. How could I make Chandramukhi and Paro dance together when they never met in Saratchandra’s novel? They didn’t meet in Bimal Roy’s Devdas either. But I was very clear on what I wanted my Devdas to be, and not to be. Bimal Roy’s version is much closer to the book. I was walking a different path. In my Devdas there would be songs dances drama and opera. This was a world far removed from Bimal Roy’s universe. The only way Devdas made sense in 2002 was to reinterpret the story. If I had done what Bimal Roy did to Devdas, I’d have been lynched. No one can make Devdas the way Bimal Roy did.”

Or Do Bigha Zameen . It is to this day the classic paean on proletarian suffering. As the emaciated rickshaw puller Balraj Sahni actually plied the rickshaw on the streets of Kolkata, unrecognizable in his dirty dhoti and unkempt appearance. When Om Puri played a rickshawallah in Roland Joffe’s The City Of Joy he modelled his performance on Sahni’s method acting. Some think Sahni was greater in M S Sathyu’s Garm Hawa . I think the performance in Do Bigha Zameen is incomparable.

I remember Om Puri telling me how inspired he was by Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen. “While shooting for Roland Joffe’s The City Of Joy I would repeatedly return to Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen. It is a film of endless inspiration for an actor and a filmmaker.”

Every actor and actress who worked with Bimal Roy gave their career’s best performance in this poetic visionary vista. Nutan ’s Kalyani in Bimal Roy’s Bandini remains her best ever. After their triumphant togetherness in Sujata , Bimal Roy and Nutan were destined to come together for this, the director’s finest film ever. But Nutan had gotten married and decided to quit films. Apparently, it was her husband who persuaded her to return. We shall remain eternally indebted to him. To imagine Bandini without Nutan is to imagine Agra without the Taj Mahal. Or Parakh without Sadhana . But that’s another story. She can do anything for love. Even kill her beloved’s toxic wife and go to jail. And when a chance to rebuild her life offers itself to Kalyani she shuns it and runs back to the same man who unintentionally ruined her life.

Love has never been a blinder and the on-screen heroine has never been more resolute and passionate. Nutan’s dilemma as Sachin Dev Burman sings Mere saajan hain uss paar endures to this day for every woman who is in love. Who can forget the wordless sequence in Bandini when Kalyani mixes poison in her tormentor’s tea? Or the sequence in Sujata where the Harijan girl seeks inadequate shelter during pouring rain under Mahatma Gandhi ’s statue? Or the long singular song sequence when Sunil Dutt sings, ‘Jalte hain jiske liye’ to Nutan over the phone? As tears fall silently over the receiver, you can hear the sound of the breaking heart over the line. The enormous eloquence of Nutan’s silences was on par with that of Meryl Streep and Katherine Hepburn . Nutan reified the cultivated charm and the muted grace of a westernised Indian woman whose values have been inculcated to the Indian ethos.

Nutan’s portrayal of the Harijan woman is so filled with an unexpressed angst your heart breaks just watching Nutan’s vulnerable face, yearning to be loved by the family that has adopted her but not her identity. The performance to this day is a marvel of smothered emotions. Kamal Bose brilliant black-and-white photography captures the unspoken pain in Nutan’s eyes. The performance got Nutan her second Filmfare award. Nutan had two other hit releases the same year Anari and Kanhaiya both with Raj Kapoor as her co-star. She was the hero of Sujata.

Is it a coincidence that incomparable actors like Nutan, Balraj Sahni and Dilip Kumar gave their career’s best performances in Bimal Roy’s cinema?

Dilip Kumar wanted to work with Bimal Roy again after Devdas. But he didn’t. He couldn’t. There was nothing they could do after Devdas that could match up.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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