The legend and his smile lives on…

24th July, marked permanently in the crowded annals of Kolkata as a day when its greatest screen actor breathed his last, is also a day of reckoning for the Bengali film industry. Uttam Kumar died at 53, leaving behind an army of admirers, a whole industry that was bent in a bow and entire demography that froze on its humble legs, unable to believe that he could die, leave alone die at an age that most would consider middle age. But he did die of a fatal cardiac failure on the night of July 24, 1980. Next day, July 25, saw Calcutta on the streets. The Nayak was dead. The unrivalled, inimitable matinee idol was no more. His favourite city, which had lined up every week for over three decades to see him immortalize a wide gallery of roles on screen with consummate ease, had assembled to see him one last time. Calcutta came to a complete halt to say adieu to its hero… This is the part of the script we know well… 

But the script does not end here. Any great actor would want his act to extend beyond the screen into the continuum, into the great open, into the giant void that forms collective memory. For similar reasons, Uttam did not die. Rather he could not die. Like the great acts that made him the iconic actor that he was, inside and outside the celluloid, Uttam stood tall in death, whose purported shadow grew bigger and bigger with each passing day. Now, thirty years into his afterlife, Uttam Kumar, for reasons both explicable and inexplicable, remains what he died as – the greatest icon ever to have graced Bengali cinema. Uttam Kumar has defined one of the most curious cases of ‘increasing utility of posthumous value’ in any film culture across the globe, a case that must be looked at with as much interest as the calibration that goes into celebrating what he was in his lifetime. 

Kumar, born in September 1926, made his debut in 1948 and worked till his death in 1980 in over 200 films, having almost a dozen releases every year between 1956 and 1960. Also, rather early in his career, he went into production and later into directing. He couldn’t completely eschew his mannerisms, so typical of acting cultures he inherited, but he could put all his performances into neatly divided and appreciable identities and with enormous dedication and hard work created a repertoire, which despite the similarity of the context of much of his cinema, was uniquely classifiable, spanning every aspect of Bengali middle-class life. 

In a similar vein and much to what could have been a detriment to his phenomenal popularity, he made, in more recent years before his death, a resilient shift towards playing more ‘character roles’, in which he appeared visibly un-heroic. With his leading ladies, he could also create independent prospects, notwithstanding his legendary pairing with Suchitra Sen. Together it meant that no single entity in the history of Bengali culture had sought to embody with such clarity, both the limits and illusions of the middle class. It is his raison d’être. 

Bengali cinema’s coming of age saw two distinct narrative and aesthetic practices. If one, embodied by the likes of Ray, Ghatak and Sen created the cult of ‘new cinema’, the other saw itself lodging behind the appeal of Kumar. His cultural importance, his cult, his phenomenal popularity, his lording over an industry with unquestioned power and his total colonisation of popular imagination are hence unrefutable and non-negotiable parts of cultural history. This iconic cult is just not a deliberate consequence of a self-assuaging economy, which is at operation say in Bollywood. In the case of Uttam Kumar, the popular celluloid imagination and aspiration of the Bengali population was transported entirely upon an actor and his repertoire. 

Uttam Kumar also successfully represented the crossover genre in Bengali cinema. The black-white romance, often considered the art-de rigueur of stardom of the 50s and the 60s, was true also for Kumar but post-colonial Bengali cinema found itself in need of serious reconstruction and it is in this context that Kumar’s promotion of a self-conscious crossover genre can be best appreciated. Uttam helped evolve a new storytelling ethic, a new mode of characterization, a new reception culture and a new definition of stardom. In the process, he stood at the forefront of a new tradition, a new popular cinema. He personified this genre of filmmaking to such an extent that the genre vanished after his death, leaving Bengali cinema into deeply divided categories: mostly gaudy, sickening melodrama and morbid art-house cinema. 

And here is why Bengali cinema must look at itself closely every July, because it is as much about the greatness of the actor as much it is about the inadequacy of the industry that came after him. No wonder Bengali cinema remains permanently chained to Kumar’s legacy, however great and glorious it may have been. And this is why Kumar, while giving his industry a cult, will always remind Bengali cinema of its spectacular failure to remain even a remotely sensible projection of popular imagination after his departure. 

Two more things must be noted. Kumar never played a mythical character in a film, which is a common platform to sustain extra-cinematic popularity, the best examples being MGR and NTR. This signifies a conscious engagement with Bhadrolok ethic, reformation and urban middle-class ethos on part of Kumar, though it never, and here is a fantastic conundrum for a sociologist, alienated the non-urban audience. 

The second is Uttam Kumar’s ready acceptance to play his own alter ego in the complex narrative of Ray’s Nayak. Nayak was the vantage point for how stardom defined and was defined by Kumar. He was, according to many popular actors of his time, the superstar of an era when superstardom was not even born in India. But then, Kumar was deeply aware and careful to note that his stardom is never a binding factor in his acting ambition. Otherwise, a man at the peak of his career (Nayak, 1966, was made halfway in Kumar’s career) would not let the best-known Indian director to have a peek into the inner life of stardom, knowing that this film could disrupt the carefully conjured and manufactured mysticality for the audience who would line up every week to see his cinema. Nayak was hence not just a film. It was an act of courage, a bold enquiry of a supremely confident star into the nuances of his own stardom. Kumar’s audience, which was greying with him and survived his death and at least three new generations after him, still want to see him on screen, big or small, as long as they could see him smile. Because he smiled like a benign, adoring, youthful God. And now we understand his smile, or the absence of it, more profoundly than ever. Because it was the gentlest laughter in the culture industry, the laughter of a keenly imbibed and deeply felt modernity.