Basu Chatterjee
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A brief biography
In the life of middle-class India in the 1970s, joys were clean and uncomplicated — being the first in queue before the ration shop or reading a letter that says your salary has gone up by Rs 50. Watching a Basu Chatterjee movie with the whole family gave that same feeling.
The Ajmer-born filmmaker was a master of middle-class minutiae.
The best of Basu da — as everyone called him — movies were snug social sketchbooks of ordinary lives. They told stories of trade unionists, office clerks, Sanskrit teachers, overseers and private secretaries; their gentle struggles in Bombay locals, their endeavours to find love and togetherness in crowded, space-crunched homes. Rajnigandha, Chhoti Si Baat, Chitchor, Baton Baton Mein, Khatta Meetha are celluloid registers of times when money was always in short supply but happiness found a way to bypass it.
They called it, middle of the road cinema, a feelgood halfway house between the two extremes of art and commerce. Basu da and the late Hrishikesh Mukherjee were two of its tallest exponents in the 1970s.
The producerdirector, who once worked for the tabloid Blitz as a cartoonist, gave Amol Palekar the films (Rajnigandha, Chhoti Si Baat, among others) he is popularly remembered by. He didn’t deliver blockbusters but stars loved to work with him because he added something meaningful and different to their resume: Jeetendra (Priyatama), Rakesh Roshan (Khatta Meetha), Dharmendra (Dillagi) and Amitabh Bachchan (Manzil).
Things changed in the 1980s, when cheap pirated videos, expansion of TV’s footprint and rise of commercial programming on DD, lured the middle-class away from the theatres. Shaukeen (1982), a comedy of aging men in search of adult fun, was an exception.
Like many other filmmakers, Basu da too found a degree of comfort in television. The small screen expanded his range. The protagonist of Rajani, which promoted consumer rights, became a symbol of the conscientious middle-class homemaker. Darpan unveiled gems from regional literature. Kakkaji Kahin was a masterly portrait of a canny small-time politician. Byomkesh Bakshi became a benchmark for detective shows.
He kept making movies too; sometimes as a temperate activist without being preachy. He addressed caste in Chameli Ki Shaadi and sexual harassment at workplace in the incisive Sheesha. Sadly, neither of them worked at the box-office.
Basu da’s interest in filmmaking was nourished by the film society movement. “I got deeply involved with Film Forum during the 1960s. I used to read foreign film magazines like Sight and Sound, Film & Filming, Film Quarterly. I soon developed a taste for creative films made throughout Europe,” he told this reporter in an email response in 2011.
He started as an assistant director; Basu Bhattacharya’s Teesri Kasam (1966) being part of his bio-data before producing and directing Sara Akash (1969). Film Finance Corporation (now NFDC) funded the movie which cost Rs 1.6 lakh. Mostly filmed at writer Rajendra Yadav’s ancestral residence in Agra, Sara Akash was a nuanced study of patriarchy and how it crushes young love. Encyclopaedia of Indian cinema by Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen said, “Together with Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome and Mani Kaul’s Uski Roti, made in the same year, this film set the pattern for what the media described as New Indian Cinema.”
The movie inaugurated a long cinematic association with literature. Us Paar adapted Czech writer Fratisek Hrubin’s novel, Romance for the Bugle (also a film). Like Us Paar, several other films by him had their roots abroad.
His films
SANTOSH DESAI, June 8, 2020: The Times of India
His films were heart-warming for sure, but always a little more. He is often bracketed with Hrishikesh Mukherjee, as both focused their cinematic efforts on the everyday lives of India’s self-described middle-class.
While there are good reasons why the work of these two blurs into each other’s, there are elements in Basu Chatterjee’s work that set him apart. His key characters stepped outside comfortable middle-class stereotypes more easily than Mukherjee’s, even as both created some memorable and well-loved characters on screen. As it turns out, most of these strong portrayals were those of women. What is fascinating is that virtually in every film, his female protagonists come through as strong independentlyminded women, but each of them does so in unique ways. A fitting way to remember is through some of his most interesting characters.
Rajnigandha is one of those rare films that is not only ‘woman-oriented’, a category which also has many dubious entrants, but this is one film that is entirely about the world as seen from her perspective. Few films have explored a woman’s interiority in the way that this one does. At a time when few films presented women with any choices; romance was always seen as being inevitable once the hero took interest in a woman, Deepa, played by Vidya Sinha, quite matter-of-factly explores both her options and arrives at a considered decision. Her choice is not only of a partner, but of the kind of life she wishes to lead. What is significant is that the choice is not presented as being between two culturally familiar archetypes, but between two perfectly viable suitors. Zareena Wahab’s character Geeta in Chitchor is again a highly unusual one. At one level, it follows a well-trodden “innocent young girl who comes of age as a woman while falling in love” template. But Geeta, though not emotionally expressive, is someone who completely knows her own mind. A case of mistaken identity throws the lead pair together with the approval of her parents. The pair bonds over music, as Amol Palekar’s gentle ways win her over. When the crunch time comes and the mistake is revealed, and her parents try to reverse it, the young girl has none of it. In an extraordinary sequence, as much for its unusualness as its restraint, the young Geeta marches off with her young sidekick Raju by her side off to the railway station to go and find her chosen beau. No melodrama, no sense of being torn between her desires and the wishes of her family, just direct action.
Perhaps the most boisterous slaphappy female lead imagined in cinema was Chameli in Chameli ki Shaadi. Amrita Singh lives and breathes ofthe dilphenkh protagonist, who makes no bones about her desire to fall in love and to do whatever it takes, including stepping into a wrestling ring for her chosen man. Interestingly, this film is not set in brahminical middle-class setting that most other films of that genre are. Chameli’s father is a coal merchant, embedded strongly in his biradari and its politics. The world of a pipe-dreaming transistor hugging girl with a mind of her own is a deliciously fresh portrayal that bears no resemblance to any other character of its kind. Chameli is in many ways the opposite of Geeta, in that she wears her heart singingly on her sleeve, but both share a rock-solid confidence in the choices that they make. Perhaps the most outspoken character created by Chatterjee was Rajani, from the TV serial of the same name. Priya Tendulkar was the strident crusader against any and every injustice, and had no hesitation in stepping into any issue around that needed intervention. While some would argue that Rajani lacked the nuance of some of his other characters, and it is true that her depiction was a single-note one, perhaps the whole point was precisely that. Instead of trying to soften Rajani with more socially acceptable attributes, Chatterjee chose to amplify her singleminded pursuit of correcting injustices, small and large. That her character became as iconic as it did is testimony to the fact the uncompromising nature of depiction struck a chord.
The notion of individuality has been largely missing from the way in which characters are fleshed out in Hindi cinema. The films tend to be crammed full of archetypes, templates that performers effortlessly slip into. This is particularly true of female characters, who if they are lucky, get endowed with some mannerisms that pass for a fully developed sense of self. Heroines can be bubbly (chulbuli), carefree (alhad), arrogant (proudy type), demure (sharmilee), fiery (phooljhadi), but rarely can they be thoughtful or analytical in the way they make their choices. The prerogative of actively making choices was denied to most film characters, but much more so for its female leads. In Basu Chatterjee’s work, not only are these choices made, they are made as if that were the natural thing in the world. In an almost invisible way, his characters brush aside the confines of the many roles that women were expected to play and do what they think is right.
This is perhaps why his films feel so real. In Rajnigandha, Deepa chooses the everyday and the tangible over the headier option open to her, telling herself“ Yahi sach hai”(also the title of the Mannoo Bhandari story on which it is based). It is possible to say the same of Basu Chatterjee’s work.
