Hamlet Of The East

Guru Dutt, the filmmaker and actor, was obsessed with Devdas, who appears in many guises in his films. When planning Pyaasa, he offered the lead role to Dilip Kumar who turned it down because it was too similar to the role he had just played in Bimal Roy’s Devdas. In Kaagaz ke Phool, the protagonist, played by Guru Dutt, is directing a film based on Devdas and dies, lonely and desolate, like his hero. In his last film, Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam, it is the lady who hits the bottle. The echoes of the novel went beyond the films and reverberated in his personal life, in his moodiness, his complicated relationships and his addiction to alcohol.

As an actor, Guru Dutt was uncertain of himself and aware of it. To see his films is to savour performances by Rehman, Geeta Bali, Waheeda Rehman or Meena Kumari but rarely by Guru Dutt himself, who instead of relaxing into the part seems worried about looking ‘expressive’ or ‘sensitive’ and often merely manages to look soulful. Nasreen Munni Kabir mentions that he would get upset with his assistants on the sets for not critiquing his performance during shooting. Yet he started off most of his films by offering the lead role to other stars and ended up by playing it himself. The cover illustration of the new edition of this book perfectly captures the contradictions in the man. It shows Guru Dutt in a close-up, looking directly at the viewer as though in anguish at his inability to escape the persistent voyeurism of the viewer. And yet the face is picked out in total darkness by a carefully angled beam of light which belies the anguish by its dramatic flourish. In many of his films, Guru Dutt, Devdas and the protagonist all get jumbled up, taking the films dangerously close to self-pity.

What saves them is the brilliant direction. Guru Dutt had a close rapport with his actors and technicians (whom he repeated and who in turn rarely let him down), his mise-en-scene is fluid and poetic, and, perhaps because he was a trained dancer, he responded with immense sensitivity to music. The slow tracking shots of a ruined haveli with which Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam opens are not just breathtaking visually: they serve as a prologue to what is to follow, an overture in a musical composition. Talking about the visual quality of his films, Kabir acutely observes that V.K. Murthy’s "imaginative lighting itself functions as another narrative thread". The photography "evokes as much emotion as dialogue or music".

Guru Dutt committed suicide: he felt his creativity was drying up, his family life was in a mess. The sudden emergence of Satyajit Ray—with his songless, glamourless neo-realism—as a filmmaker of international eminence undoubtedly contributed its share although Kabir does not dwell on it. Since Guru Dutt’s death, however, his films have received international recognition, with festivals honouring him with retrospectives. Many among the younger generation of Indian filmmakers have acknowledged him as a source of influence and inspiration.

For the students of Guru Dutt, this book is invaluable. Kabir has interviewed almost every person associated with him alive at the time of writing. She is meticulous and dispassionate, and tasteful, without being evasive, in handling the emotional complications in his private life. There are many anecdotes here, sad, informative, illuminating and even, although rarely, funny, as in Kabir’s understated account of his attempts to get Dev Anand to do something different.

What this book underlines, however, is Kabir’s passion for popular Hindi cinema. Until recently, when ‘Bollywood’ suddenly became fashionable, it was quite the done thing for a person to claim to be a scholar of popular Indian cinema while being patronising about it. But Kabir, for over a decade, has been fighting virtually single-handed to get due recognition for Indian cinema in the UK. The serials she has made for Channel Four Television—on personalities like Shahrukh Khan and A.R. Rehman as well as on other aspects of our cinema—have consistently projected the vitality of this medium. She is at present governor on the board of the British Film Institute and was among those responsible for persuading that august body to take Indian cinema seriously and publish books on its filmmakers.

Kabir’s book, elegantly produced and well-illustrated, is as much a tribute to her passion as to her infinitely convoluted subject.