Tribute to Uttam Kumar

"যার গান শুনে একদিন কণ্ঠে পরালে মালা, আজ তোমাদের সভা হতে তার বিদায় নেবার পালা" 

The lines above from "Deya Neya" are one of Uttam Kumar's many Goosebumb inducing lines. He as Arindam Mukherjee declares in Ray's Nayak: "I will go to the top.. the top.. the top". And Uttam Kumar did. Neither anyone had any doubt over that. It's one thing to reach the top, but it is even harder to stay there. And to stay at the top in everyone's memory even a few decades after one's death is sheer Uttam Enigma. From the restrained Bhodrolok acts to the exuberant adorations- his artistry cuts across generations, borders and equivocally Bengalis have chosen Uttam Kumar as the Matinee Idol, the Mahanayak. But it's saddening that Bengalis are more emotional about than critical. His name brings nostalgia in Addas and you will see people singing a few couplets from these movies, but rarely you would find his artistry discussed and dissected in Intellectual circles. Edward Wagenknecht once said that "Marilyn Monroe played the best game with the worst hand of anybody I know". This perfectly sums up Uttam Kumar's Career as well. In the quest of entertaining people and keep the money wheel running in the Tollygunge industry, he had always been a subject of neglect from the Elite Art-Cinema audience and critics. It's quite amusing how Uttam Kumar is considered to be the most charming presence on screen while he was not traditionally more handsome than his contemporaries(i.e Soumitra Chatterjee) or predecessors(i.e Pramathesh Barua). I was recently reading Roland Barthes' "Mythologies" and came across a fascinating passage: "Viewed as a transition the face of Garbo reconciles two iconographic ages, it assures the passage  from awe to charm...the face of Audrey  Hepburn, for instance, is individualized, not  only because of its peculiar thematics  (woman as child, woman as kitten) but also  because of her person, of an almost unique specification of the face, which has nothing  of the essence left in it, but is constituted  by an infinite complexity of morphological functions....The face of Garbo is an Idea,  that of Hepburn, an Event." Thus maybe Uttam Kumar's face was an Empty Canvas where any small movement registers a multitude of emotions. He didn't look divine, he looked earthen. That passage of his parted lips effectively emotes all his happiness, dilemma, love as he stares at his heroines or breaks into a song. Dignified, graceful, charismatic are mere futile words to describe a person of such a stature who not only embodied those, but defined those for a generation and taught the world to associated Bengalis with an intellectual presence. His stardom shaped the architectonics of changing landscape of Bengali popular cinema's chequered years in the young man’s ordinariness, trace the hapless new citizen, the displaced refugee, the troubling aspirations of an artiste or the youth hopelessly in love. The social commemoration of Uttam Kumar as a "star" than an "artist" seems unfair, but it shouldn't really matter if we put due value to the term "star" and don't perceive every other people's success as stardom. He knew the pulse of the Bengali middle class and never stepped too far from the taste of his target audience even when he was playing a character that exercises things that don't conform to middle-class moralities.

That's what made him Uttam Kumar. Truly the Mahanayak. Happy Birthday Guru.