The Unbearable Sorrow of Being

GURU DUTT’S BIRTH CENTENARY falls this year. Although he struggled with failure and personal unhappiness, today his place among the major Hindi film directors is uncontested, and his Pyaasa (1957) widely held to be one of the greatest films of all time in India and beyond.

Guru Dutt did not radically change the Hindi film but he showed that the form that was established in the 1940s/50s––of melodrama, song and dance, grand dialogues––could be regarded as art as well as entertainment. He imaginatively used its features so that they were not hindrances to the development of the story or its characters, nor were they merely entertainment but they were part and parcel of what made the films art.

Guru Dutt’s earlier films have largely been overshadowed by his two great movies, Pyaasa (1957) and Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959) and I too am going to concentrate on these two as, although the others were good, these were exceptional. His first two films as a director, Baazi (1951) and Jaal (1952) starring Dev Anand and Geeta Bali, were hits and form an important part of the “Bombay noir” genre, which is most closely associated with the work of Raj Khosla, who began his career with Guru Dutt. These films were followed by the unsuccessful Baaz (1953), in which Guru Dutt also acted.

Guru Dutt acted in his next two films which were also popular. They, too, were also about modern life in Bombay: Aar-Paar (1954) which can be described as “noirish”, where he plays a taxi driver in Bombay, a film remembered for its songs and realistic dialogues; and Mr and Mrs 55 (1955), in which he plays a cartoonist in Bombay with Madhubala as the “Mrs”. This film was a comedy around divorce, following the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955.

Pyaasa and Kaagaz Ke Phool are his masterpieces but the box-office failure of the latter meant he didn’t direct any more films (though some say he took part in the role of directing), although he acted in the Muslim Social, Chaudhvin Ka Chand (1960, dir M Sadiq), and one of my all-time favourites, Sahib, Bibi Aur Ghulam (1962, dir Abrar Alvi), again starring with Waheeda Rehman, alongside Meena Kumari. The latter was a remake of the Bengali film based on Bimal Mitra’s novel. Both of these films are highly acclaimed but, although his team worked on them, they are not (officially at least) ‘his’.

As actor, producer and star, Guru Dutt is unquestionably one of the major auteurs of Hindi film but although he undoubtedly deserves this status, he worked closely with a team in many of his films who also made an important contribution: Johnny Walker, VK Murthy, Abrar Alvi, and Raj Khosla, and his later films starred Waheeda Rehman. His music directors were SD Burman and OP Nayyar and together with poets, lyricists, singers, including Guru Dutt’s wife, Geeta, and others, making the films not the unique product of one man, although they were guided by his vision.

Guru Dutt’s two major films, Pyaasa and Kaagaz Ke Phool, are often interpreted as being autobiographical. Both films show a man devoted to his art and who loses his love and his family, though Pyaasa’s ending was changed to show the poet not on his own but with Gulabo, a streetwalker, while the film director, Suresh, dies a broken man in Kaagaz Ke Phool. The characters Guru Dutt plays, Vijay and Suresh Sinha, may also be interpreted as characters based on the figure of Devdas (who originally appears in Sarat Chandra’s novel of 1917), though Vijay is also said to be based on the film’s lyricist, Sahir Ludhianvi, while Suresh resembles the director of the 1935 film of PC Barua, Devdas. In Pyaasa, Vijay abandons high society where his former lover has rejected him for a rich publisher, while in Kaagaz Ke Phool, Suresh has left his wife but cannot be with his beloved Shanti as his wife will not divorce. The latter story has often been interpreted as based on Guru Dutt’s love for Waheeda Rehman although he never divorced Geeta Dutt.

However, it is Guru Dutt’s suicide and its reading onto the depressive elements of the films, with their obsession with rejection, misunderstanding, cruelty and mentions of death––Vijay ‘dies’ in the film in a case of mistaken identity only to return at his memorial, while Suresh dies in his director’s chair––that remain inescapably associated with him.

Kaagaz Ke Phool shows Suresh making a film on Devdas, the timeframe linking him to PC Barua, who himself was closely identified as Devdas. The film has the director searching for his Paro, and Suresh, who has seen Shanti before but almost ignored her, only takes notice of her when she is seen through his camera lens. She is presented as an icon of female stardom, and the film itself laments the rise of the star and the independent producer and the resulting demise of the director as auteur.

In Kaagaz Ke Phool, Suresh finds his Paro but it is unclear who is his Devdas. The famous staging of the song ‘Waqt ne kiya’ with the beams of light and the “souls” of Suresh and Shanti leaving their bodies may suggest him as his own Devdas.

In Pyaasa, Guru Dutt drew on Christian imagery of the crucified Christ and its song lyrics referenced the Gospels (Matthew 16.26: “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?; the crown of thorns”). Perhaps he can also be seen as embodying the dying form of Urdu poetry itself, as what does modern Calcutta want with Urdu poetry (Indeed, the film lyric removes much of the formal Urdu from Sahir’s poem, ‘Chakle’ for ‘Jinhe naaz hai Hind par’, presumably to make it more accessible), his poems on sheets of paper being blown away by the wind, with the only person to pick them up being Gulabo?

It is significant that Guru Dutt’s greatest films have a strong Bengali connection, although he himself was not Bengali. Perhaps he longed for the cultural world of the Calcutta in which he grew up, the world where a “hero” could be a failure like Devdas but poetry and cinema were valued.

Guru Dutt was only a few months younger than Raj Kapoor, another producer/director/star whom he greatly admired. If Guru Dutt was part of the Bengali cultural world, Raj Kapoor, though he was influenced by his life in Calcutta too, was from a Punjabi world. He was the Indian everyman, Mr Raj, an Awaara who had come from somewhere unspecified to the city. He was the innocent boy-man who would be tempted but would eventually follow the right path, his sorrows being temporary, helped by a good woman.

These two very different worldviews have created a dynamic tension in Hindi cinema. Although the robust positive attitude has perhaps prevailed, the figure of Devdas has remained a constant, featuring in Amitabh Bachchan’s characters who had to live with unbearable sorrow before dying, as well as in the romantic poet. Both have left us with some of the best songs of all time as well as some of India’s greatest films.

Baazibirth centenaryGuru DuttJaalKaagaz Ke PhoolPyaasa