Book Review

He gave new sensibility to Indian Cinema

By

Randeep Wadehra 

The man who spoke in pictures: Bimal Roy edited by Rinki Roy Bhattacharya
Penguin/Viking. Pages: xxxiv+250. Price: Rs. 499/-

“The tale of peasant suffering and sacrifice is not new. It has been told before, and its black-and-white portrayal of good and evil, virtue against vice is familiar… the characters perennial… In Do Bigha Zamin, however, it becomes a saga of unrelieved misery and defeat…” Says, Nayantara Sahgal, who had watched only two of Bimal Roy’s movies – the other being Devdas – decades after they were made.

I am starting with this quote from Sahgal’s piece in this collection because it stands out as an example of uninformed criticism that fails to notice the inosculated perspectives and contexts. Her article also reveals the mindsets of the newly independent India’s rich classes who had no idea of what real India actually was like. This is what the Daily Worker, a British newspaper, had to say of Do Bigha Zamin, “Bimal Roy, the director, sometimes has an almost Dickensian touch, using pathos directly and unaffectedly, finding humour and kindliness amongst pickpockets and street urchins and mocking the pomposity and thoughtlessness of the wealthy…”

Born in a landed aristocratic family of a village in what is now Bangladesh, Bimal Roy is counted among independent India’s pioneer filmmakers who ushered in the “New Wave” cinema during 1950s which was a harbinger of social-realism (some call it “socialist” realism or neo-realism). He had made his mark both in Bengali as well as Hindi movies. His first film, Udayer Pathe, revolutionized Indian cinema as he was the first filmmaker to introduce shades of grey into what was till then a “black and white” cinema. Thus we see him coming up with such classics as Devdas, Sujata, Parineeta and Madhumati. Who can forget the “rickshaw race” in Do Bigha Zameen? Its protagonist, Shambhu that was played by Balraj Sahni, became a template for the underdog “hero” in Indian cinema – a poor villager caught in the struggle for survival in the soulless urban milieu. And Bandini’s Kalyani, played by Nutan, remains an enduring part of cine buffs’ collective memory even today. Most of his cinematic oeuvre deals with the major themes of his times, viz., dispossession and rootlessness – which have not lost relevance even in the 21st century India. Sujata is a trenchant critique of upper-class hypocrisy. Another film, Pehla Aadmi, is a tragic love story set against the background of Subhash Chandra Bose’s INA movement. And, Madhumati is an engaging entertainer, while Yahudi, supposedly a historical, flopped both at the box office and in the estimate of film-critics.

Bimal Roy had started his career as a still photographer, graduated to become a cinematographer and eventually film director. He, right from his apprenticeship days onwards, had been getting acquainted with every aspect of cinema. This knowledge stood him in good stead during his later years. Tapan Sinha points out that Bimal Roy’s camerawork and camera placing were innovative. He could make ordinary looking actresses appear ravishing on the screen with his portraiture skills and could enhance the effect of a situation by merely tilting a camera or placing it in a manner nobody else had even thought of. He, like Nitin Bose, looked upon cinema as a technological medium. He brought about radical change in the approach to film-making in Do Bigha Zamin. He used the light camera – Arriflex (then a novelty in India) – to shoot the movie in the streets of Kolkat

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