In 1951, a cartoon called ‘Bengal’s Hero’ appeared in the satirical Bengali periodical Achalpotro (roughly, ‘Useless Papers’), showing a waddling baby with the face of a struggling actor, who, holding within his embrace the neck of his much-older beloved, was uttering, ‘Dear, do you love me?’ The baby’s face was that of a rookie actor called Uttam Kumar Chattopadhyay, about 25 at that time.
A clerk at the office of Calcutta Port Commissioner, Uttam was moonlighting as a straggler in cinema, and was found generally wanting in credentials of both natural rearing and institutional training. His films came a cropper, and if anything came his way, they were rebuffs, sneers and snubs, like the cartoon, which infantilised him.
Cut to just six years later. The romantic melodrama Harano Sur (‘The Lost Tune’, based partly on Mervin LeRoy-directed Random Harvest) had a phenomenal box office response, and also won a Certificate of Merit from the Indian government. So the lead actor of the film, who was also the co-producer, had to travel to Delhi to collect the award. The fact is that on the day of his travel, the local police chief showed up and requested that the trip be cancelled, because Howrah Station was choked to its last inch, the crowds having gone wild in expectation of his arrival.
Uttam Kumar in a still from ‘Nayak.’
After much deliberation, it was decided that the star’s car was to be ushered in through the station’s exit gate, from which a couple of policemen, wrestling with the crowd, managed to huddle him into the train as waves of cheer in his name echoed through the portals of the humongous station. The name of this actor? Uttam Kumar. He was by then Bengali cinema’s top movie star, on his way to becoming the biggest ever.
Such dazzling, epochal success from a state of nameless toil is not very rare in cinema, even if it is not de rigueur. Most of them shape into memoirs, biographies, remembrances, urban legends at best. Some are all of these, and then also become the basis of an arthouse movie. Satyajit Ray’s Nayak (The Hero, 1966) is among the last. It chronicles a screen rags-to-riches theme, broadly based on the real life of a cine heartthrob. And Ray invited none other than that very star, Uttam Kumar, to enact a phenomenal story of stardom that was tantalisingly close to his very own life
The Hero has had a re-release this week across the country, thanks to the film’s original producer R.D. Bansal’s family, who have restored the 35mm print to a pristine 2k digitised version. The release is in anticipation of the film completing 60 years next year, which is to coincide with the centenary of Uttam Kumar.
Nayak is about the suave and charming matinee idol Arindam Mukherjee, who is headed for New Delhi on a train from Calcutta to accept a prestigious award. The enclosed space of the first-class journey muzzles and liberates him in equal measure, till, accosted by the probing of a woman journalist named Aditi, Arindam begins to open up about his deepest fears. In a span of a night’s journey, escaping his usual routine, and yet caught within the confines of the train, the always-on-the-verge-of-being mobbed screen icon battles gossip, entrenched loneliness, and severe self-doubt to be able to emerge into a state of better contemplation of his frailties. As the train arrives in Delhi, Aditi disembarks and walks away stoically, while the hero vanishes into the ecstatic cry of assembled adulation.
Uttam Kumar and Sharmila Tagore in a still from ‘Nayak.’
Foregrounded by a real-life star at the peak of his popularity, Ray turned the script into a film-length deconstruction of the idea of the celluloid hero, his script digging deeper and deeper into the grey zone of the unconscious where the man and the persona, the actor and star, the real life and the reel image were in a state of perpetual encounter with each other. In almost every frame and through each gaze of his camera, Ray teases, torments, cajoles, pampers and provokes the not-so-fictional star. Uttam, beckoned by an author-backed role and Ray’s witty, polished script, played along, layers his flawless enactment with pitch-perfect sophistication.
In that sense, the film barely remains a general story of any heartthrob who must conquer self-doubt and the seductions of solicitous attention. In fact, in the course of the film it becomes evident that a couple of minor differences aside, Arindam Mukherjee is Uttam. We certainly know that whether in his public poise or in his private agony, whether in his charismatic finesse or in his alcoholic stupor, Uttam’s Arindam is matchless and marvellous. And at each such point Arindam is none other than Uttam Kumar. Effectively, what Ray’s script was doing was daring the actor in Uttam to deconstruct the star. This meant that the better Uttam played the troubled hero, the more the fictional star (and in extension, the real star) would find himself diminished.
And Uttam, the real-life star, manages to wade through all this with astonishing confidence. It must have been very daring for Uttam to perform a clinical surgery on his own stardom, unperturbed by the possibility of perforating the carefully-constructed mythos that surround a star figure. No less weighty a presence is Sharmila Tagore’s Aditi, and the host of cameos that populate the script, each of them with varying degrees of interest in, or disregard for, the star.
Federico Fellini’s 8 &1/2 and Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries were long considered to be references for Ray in this film, but it must be noted that the leads in them – Marcello Mastroianni and Victor Sjöström – were not playing themselves. Uttam’s Arindam Mukherjee gave Nayak very atypical tensions, which were not only limited to the diegetic world of the film but spilled over into a refined contest between a celebrated auteur of art-house realism, and the Hollywood-like hero of a popular, crowd-pleasing industry. Both Uttam and Ray were conscious of this contest, making Nayak repository of tensions that stalk both cinema-making and cinema-stardom. That it involved two titans of Bengali cinema from two purported ‘schools’ of filmmaking cemented the film’s overall reputation as an homage to cinema itself. Apart from the sensational performances, this is precisely why the re-released film should appeal to anyone who is interested in both the craft and philosophy of cinema in the 20th century.
Uttam Kumar in a still from ‘Nayak.’
Nayak is also notable for being the last Ray film with his original and much-feted cinematographer Subrata Mitra. It remains one of the latter’s most accomplished works, especially the way the train sequences could make astonishing use of ‘back projection’, other scenes making use of bounced light, and the ‘Iris In’ for cutting between long shots and close ups.
There are detailed notes by Ray in various articles about ways in which the measured effect of a moving train was to be mimicked, say in the shaking of a glass of water on the table, or mirror pinned to the bathroom wall. And then came the tight, formidable close ups. Editing wise, Ray has revealed about the use of ‘cuts’ instead of dissolve, for he and his editor Dulal Dutta wanted to keep abreast ‘with the changing vocabulary of filmmaking’. No less praise was reserved for Banshi Chandragupta, Ray’s art and production designer, who had been able to make an exact replica of a vestibule coach in the studio with actual parts, inviting technicians from the Railway Coach Factory close to Calcutta.
The set itself became a cause celebre during the shoot of the film, and among others Uttam recounted how his jaw fell when he first encountered the exact interiors of a train that seem to have been conjured magically inside the dank empty space of a familiarly drab studio. Many of the train sounds were recorded as sync sound separately by Ray and Mitra, which Ray used along with what he calls the overall ‘jazz idiom’ of the soundtrack. Much of these technical finesse could not be enjoyed in the various other formats Nayak had so far been seen in its afterlife – television and DVD. The restored version released on the big screen, which I saw, made one realize and revel anew at the film’s consummate technical artistry.
Realising how the film bored into Uttam’s own life, Ray dedicated a substantive homage to Uttam Kumar after his very untimely death at 53, in 1980. Among other encomiums, he wrote in an article in Sunday magazine, “Some days ago I saw my film Nayak after a gap of ten or maybe twelve years. Many of you must have seen it too. I saw the film with rapt attention and have detected a few issues with my direction… But did you see Uttam Kumar? In a two-hour film that centres around him, he is perfect from every angle, in every scene. The story, the script, the making is mine. But Uttam made it his own with the charisma and effortlessness that only an actor of his calibre could do. Discerning viewers of cinema can identify the difference between good performance extolled by the filmmaker, and performance that is endowed with the gifts intrinsic to the performer. And I can vouch for the fact that Uttam excelled in the second. I find no fault with him as an actor… There is none like him and there will be no one to ever replace him. He was and is unparalleled in Bengali, even Indian cinema”. And Nayak remains the best testimonial of a top actor in top form.
Sayandeb Chowdhury teaches literature and cinema at Krea University, AP. He is the author of Uttam Kumar, A Life in Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2021).
This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.