Book excerpt: How Uttam Kumar's films held a mirror up to postcolonial Bengal

For years, serious cinema or only those demonstratively inviting in critical attention were taken up for ‘studies’. Gradually, critical attention grew to include popular cinema too. In recent years, Bombay (now Mumbai) as a site of silent and studio cinema and Bollywood — as a protean term of cultural and economic transportability — has attracted insightful studies, using materialist, space, reception and even affect theory. But work on vernacular cinema remains pitifully less. Even within that small number, studies by formidable scholars on Tamil, Telugu and Kannada cinema have tapped into the complex network of cinema-meets-politics-meets-mythology. Bengali cinema has remained comparatively untapped. Even when Bengali film scholarship crawled outside the sovereignty of Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak or Mrinal Sen, it has occupied itself with early cinema — an engagement that has recently produced rather good work. But still, not much on Uttam. Has the star’s glaring ubiquity deterred serious studies? There are just three books in English on Uttam. Nipabithi Ghosh’s Uttam Kumar: The Ultimate Hero is a bare-bones biography. Veteran film critic Swapan Mullik’s Mahanayak Revisited is a quickly rendered review of Uttam’s work with five of his co-actors, with an additional chapter on Uttam and Ray. The book is less about Uttam than about Mr Mullick’s misgivings about popular cinema. The last, Maitreyee Chowdhury’s Bengali Cinema’s First Couple is a gushing homage to Uttam and Suchitra Sen. These works provide scant insight into Uttam beyond what is known. Sharmistha Gooptu’s Bengali Cinema: An Other Nation is notable, but covers much wider ground than just Uttam or his cinema. So, there continues to be precious little on Uttam in the learned circles: his range of style and performance; the attractions and problems of his cinema; his roles as director, actor and producer; or his persona, stardom, and talismanic legacy.

To encompass the range and scale of Uttam’s standing and stardom, adoration and impact, a cultural biography of Uttam Kumar’s cinema seems fitting. An abecedarian biography — the necessary framing of life–work–death progression of an actor — runs the danger of underestimating his reach beyond his orbit; while an iconography will overestimate them. This book embodies both these endowments, and abandons them equally. Moreover, this book tracks the moving image in Bengal for almost a century, of which three decades and over 100 films receive close attention. To that end, the book eschews any constricted film theory that would consign cinema practice to pattern. Moreover, one cannot talk about any one set of films in Uttam’s oeuvre without taking into account a complex screen persona and the contextual basis of a unique stardom. Hence, the book moves through a series of queries that are spread, in no necessary order, across the span of the subject. What exactly accounts for Uttam’s undying popularity? How could Uttam be a product of a quicksilver world and yet so effortlessly be beyond its power of erasure? To what extent did his cinema typify the imagination of a community in a postcolonial state that was under tremendous social, ethical and historical flux? To what extent did his cinema embody its people, who were mutating with mordant anger at one moment and waiting with cultured hope the next? Is Uttam’s cinema a template of collective aspiration or an escape from it? Did his stardom hurt Bengali cinema’s intellectual ambitions or did it add to it? How could he give himself such a long afterlife? Is Uttam’s stardom a major asset for Bengali cinema or was it, in the final assessment, a massive liability? To answer these questions, the book, among other things, tries to engage meaningfully with Uttam’s life, harps back to his cultural importance as ‘matinee idol’ and pushes forth the social and cultural figuration in his cinema.

Excerpted with permission from Uttam Kumar: A Life in Cinema, Sayandeb Chowdhury, Bloomsbury India. Click to buy your copy.