Excerpted with permission from Uttam Kumar: A Life in Cinema (Bloomsbury) by Sayandeb Chowdhury.

If one reads Uttam’s interviews or his occasional columns; or manages to extricate an unguarded moment or two in the numerous profiles of him, one is immediately conscious of being in the company of a generous soul. Here Uttam comes across as a man of conscience and empathy; probing the riches of his own success one moment only to stop and reflect on its limits in the next; is cautious about his image and appearance but at the same time tries hard to not be obsessed with it.

He never lost sight of his middle-class origins and remained conscious of his many deficiencies—be it his lack of formal education; or his inability to speak English fluently; or even the more personal fact of having publicly strayed away from his legal wife. There was also the usual retinue of annals, anecdotes, popular gossip and industry prattle that perpetually and perilously surrounds a public figure like him. Uttam did have his share of personal controversies, though he was not a man comfortable with lending his name to wanton sleaze and tangle. A degree of personal overreach though, in the end, accentuated his aura, transcending boundaries of economic, cultural and gender groups within his audience. But that was more in keeping with his outstanding work and the cult that grew around him rather than any sustained dependence on skulduggery.

Uttam Kumar: A Life in Cinema
Sayandeb Chowdhury
Bloomsbury Publishing (September 2021)

Uttam did not realise the transformative effect he had on the history of Bengali cinema. He had, therefore, harked on the struggle of his early years and the rejections that had piled on for about six years—between 1947 and 1952—when he was reprimanded if not rejected. But when he mused about them, he did not blame individuals but rather the state of things. “Those days the typical characters were not very real. They were staid, artificial, puppet-like. I felt helpless till Sukhen of Bosu Poribar came my way. He was real; tactile.” His conscious dissociation from the prison-house of image is most thoroughly intelligible in Uttam’s reflections on acting, something that one barely comes across in the laudatory assessments. In his part-autobiography, he says “I never took acting loosely, just as a livelihood. It was always a craving, an emotion. I did not have much training and from each of my early directors—Nirmal De, Devaki Basu, Naresh Mitra, Tapan Sinha— I learned a lot. When I worked with Manikda (Satyajit Ray), I saw him from close quarters. He is scientific and methodical. He would never intrude into a scene unless he had to. He gave me, any actor for that matter, a free range.” Uttam noticed Ray’s habit of holding his handkerchief between his teeth when he was lost in thought. During Chiriakhana, he rehearsed a scene imitating that gesture. Ray stopped him and asked if he was keeping that in the actual take. “If you permit, I will, I said. Do that. It makes a lot of sense, Manikda assured”, Uttam later recalled.

But Uttam learnt much more than a gesture or two from the directors he admired. He gradually mastered the art of silent acting; of passive performance; of pregnant pauses and deliberate delays; of breaking long dialogues into meaningful parts; of importing almost undetectable changes on his facial muscles to indicate a change in mood; of using the cinematographer’s lens to his advantage. There are several testimonials to his continuing interest in the craft of cinema: the functionality of anamorphic lenses for example, or the intricacies of production design, the technology of colorization and projection; the habitual commercial servitude of mainstream cinema; and of course the minutiae of performance: where does the person end and the performer begin. It is to the last query, often philosophical in bent, that he owed his stiff resistance to playing real/historical figures on screen. Uttam later cited Bhrantibilash, a proficient adaptation of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors as a test case. “Everything about the two brothers were similar, even their dress and gait”, said Uttam. “So, how does one communicate the difference, which will be palpable to the audience and invisible to the characters in the film? It had to be as imperceptible a variation as possible, but variation nevertheless. For example, the married brother would be more confident with women, his taking the nose puff would show that. The bachelor brother—a smoker—would on the other hand smoke nervously in front of women. Slight changes such as these make all the difference. One does not need to be loud in such matters.”

Also read: Stardust Memories: The Cosmopolitanism of Uttam Kumar and His Era-Defining Cinema

This was the performance part, but what about cinema in general? “I have come to agree with Ingmar Bergman that cinema is a completely different template. Theatre needs the actor to keep the mood sustained for a given period in front of an observant audience. That is one way. But cinema needs an actor to stay in part through the thick and thin of the general chaos that prevails around. An intense scene needs a light change. That’s an hour in between two shots which must come out with the same intensity. So how does one retain the mood? One word: concentration.” Uttam had earned the good words of Ray for ruthlessly practising the art of staying insulated through the thick and thin of a typical day at shoot. For Uttam though, the actor’s preparation was not just what he did on the sets. He said, “An actor has to be a life-long learner and an observer of his world. The world is our textbook. He should read—newspapers, books, journals. And he should watch good movies, preferably from Hollywood and the west. Cinema after all is an art with strong roots in the west. So they adapt, change and grow much faster than us.

As a star Uttam found himself at the summit early and with the unpleasant job of sustaining it for more than the next two decades. Through the 1960s, he managed the same with aplomb, but by the early 1970s, the cracks started to show. Except a set of distinguished performances in 1974 /1975, his last hurrah, bad films piled on top of each other. They managed to box Uttam’s boundless talent into a sort of rusted, stuffy conformity. It was a decline that was inevitable after having reached a summit. It was also a decline that was collateral and conditional to the general degeneration of a vernacular cinema culture which refused to grow with time and technology. Moreover, unlike stars elsewhere, Uttam refused to be drawn to the wages of garrulous politics. In several interviews he had said, repeatedly, that he found politics corruptible and stardom alienating. In his later years Uttam drew attention, again and again, to his being without any support; to the lack of good plots and directors; to the abysmal physical architecture of the industry. He also had a clear sense of seeing his acting life coming to an end. “I would soon like to move out of acting into directing and then I want to fade out. Before that, I would want to see a Pune-like film school in Calcutta; a board to decide and veto on scripts; a training school for actors; and uninterrupted power supply to the studios.”

Ironically, in this late period Uttam not only felt isolated because of his stardom but also from it, while continuing to act in movie after movie that fell way below his standards. “Frankly, no one has ever listened to me. The cacophony of silvery adulation and the blank noise of fandom has always drowned my voice”, he had rued in a conversation not long before his death. Uttam, then, was the primary witness to the levity of his own stardom, which was both precarious and phenomenal at the same time.

The idea of Uttam Kumar, then, is a complex one — his longevity giving his stardom the multifarious tensions that are found, if ever, in an entire system and rarely in a singular trajectory of an actor’s life. The complexity of his stardom also helps to comprehend why Uttam’s fame stands distinctly separated from the politics of stardom in Tamil or Telugu cinema; or that of the cyclical and industrial nature of stardom in Bombay. This complexity was beyond the reach of most during his lifetime; when any consensus on his performative range was obfuscated by the sheer quantity of movies and the habitual ubiquity of his presence. But, as Ray has said in Uttam’s context, an actor should finally be measured against his best work and in the ensuing years, Uttam’s remarkable work has managed to extricate his name from the tyranny of numbers and the muddle of mediocrity.

Sayandeb Chowdhury teaches in the School of Letters at Ambedkar University Delhi. More about his work can be found at www.sayandeb.in.