In the 1970s, the same decade that the angry young man prevailed as the prototypical protagonist in Bollywood, another model of masculinity was being scripted in the movies by Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterji. This young man was typically a city-dweller who didn’t challenge authority as much as quietly bemoan it. Mousy and good-natured, he was more concerned with domesticity and matters of the heart.
National Award-winning writer Anirudh Bhattacharjee’s book Basu Chatterji: and Middle-of-the-Road Cinema is a wide and close shot of a director whose films entrenched this kind of male protagonist while capturing a semblance of middle-class life and anxieties in the 1970s and ‘80s.
Born in Ajmer in 1927, Chatterji grew up in a well-educated Bengali family living in Mathura. He moved to Bombay in 1948 and worked for over a decade as a political cartoonist for the weeklies The Current and Blitz. In his thirties, Chatterji, a cinephile, began his film career by assisting his more famous namesake at the time, Basu Bhattacharya, on the National Award-winning Teesri Kasam (1966). Over the next decade, Chatterji became one of Bollywood’s most prolific directors, making 18 films that typified middle-of-the-road cinema including Sara Aakash (1969), Rajnigandha (1974) and Chhoti Si Baat (1976). For a viewer today one of the many reasons Chatterji’s films retain a timelessness is because of their unhurried rhythms and depictions of 1970s Bombay.
{{/usCountry}}Born in Ajmer in 1927, Chatterji grew up in a well-educated Bengali family living in Mathura. He moved to Bombay in 1948 and worked for over a decade as a political cartoonist for the weeklies The Current and Blitz. In his thirties, Chatterji, a cinephile, began his film career by assisting his more famous namesake at the time, Basu Bhattacharya, on the National Award-winning Teesri Kasam (1966). Over the next decade, Chatterji became one of Bollywood’s most prolific directors, making 18 films that typified middle-of-the-road cinema including Sara Aakash (1969), Rajnigandha (1974) and Chhoti Si Baat (1976). For a viewer today one of the many reasons Chatterji’s films retain a timelessness is because of their unhurried rhythms and depictions of 1970s Bombay.
{{/usCountry}}Bhattacharjee’s book is built on interviews with Chatterji before his death in 2020 and with a slew of people familiar with his work including family members and actors like Shabana Azmi, Bindiya Goswami and Rakesh Pandey. Impressively, the book is not only an ode to Chatterji’s filmmaking but also to his key collaborators like cinematographer KK Mahajan, art director Bansi Chandragupta and music director Salil Chowdhury. The book is filled with anecdotes about the film crew’s efforts to craft lived-in movie worlds from KK Mahajan using double bedsheets stitched together to avoid shadows during a long tracking shot to Bansi Chandragupta buying used furniture from people in a chawl in Dadar. The warmth with which Bhattacharjee lays out the unlikely coming together of several new and earnest artists and artistes on Chatterji’s debut film Sara Aakash almost has the air of a Basu Chatterji film itself (It is waiting to be adapted into a movie or a Netflix show). Bhattacharjee fills out the book with uninterrupted blocks of transcribed quotes with interviewees, a choice that manages to make it feel both polyphonic and intimate.
Even when driven by contagious affection for Chatterji, Bhattacharjee doesn’t hesitate in calling out the auteur’s weaker efforts and continuity errors in several of his films. Us Paar (1974), a remake of the 1967 Czech romantic drama Romance for Bugle transposed to 1940s India is described as a “staid narrative”. Bhattacharjee amusingly notes the temporal incongruities in the film: While taking the story 30 years back in time, Basu had forgotten to consider factors like inflation. And dress designs.” The writer who has co-authored RD Burman: The Man, The Music and Kishore Kumar: The Ultimate Biography is also impressively attuned to the ways in which music is employed in Chatterji’s oeuvre. As he notes of SD Burman’s song in Us Paar, “Tumne Piya was an atypical SD composition. Contrary to his free-flowing style, it was heavy, but at the same time spontaneous. The song had the touch of a couple of morning raags (Todi, Lalit, Bhairavi) in the mukhra while the antara would dovetail into folk, caringly heartfelt.”
However, there are moments where one wishes Bhattacharjee went a step further. I had hoped he would unpack Chatterji’s ideological and political affinities but it never happens. The book does not critically examine the upper caste world view integral to his films and the emergence of middle cinema. Bhattacharjee writes, “Characters in Rajnigandha did not oscillate between extremes. They would not break into a song at the slightest provocation. There was little or no indication about the artistic abilities of any of them. Their romantic faculties too were limited, and their anger subsided once they were out of college. And most importantly they spoke in a language the average educated man on the street used.” Yet he fails to unpack the “average educated man” who saw himself in Chatterji’s middle-class melodramas – welcome respite for savarna gentility from the angry, politicised cinema of the 1970s that railed against authority and widespread inequality. As scholar Satish Poduval has noted, Chatterji’s films were a “counterpoint to the theme of subaltern anger and public unrest that had emerged within the masala-Social during the 1970s”.
Of course, one book can’t do everything. Bhattacharjee has crafted a substantive and wonderful tribute to an indefatigable director who was involved in movie making till the age of 78. Nothing describes Chatterji’s unwavering commitment to the viewers as his quote in a Washington Post article about the success of his 1985 TV show Rajani: “She must deliver the goods. That is the wish-fulfillment of the viewers. I’m tired too, but the nation has taken us up.”
Karthik Shankar is a writer and editor from Chennai.