The release of Sujata in 1959 marked the end of director Bimal Roy’s most prolific and creative period. Beginning with Do Bigha Zamin in 1953, Roy’s output in the fifties rivalled only that of Guru Dutt, Mehboob Khan and Raj Kapoor. However, the major difference between Roy and his contemporaries of the time was his relative status as an outsider. Whilst his cultural identity was firmly Bengali, his socialist sensibilities and response to growing commercial demands constructed an authorial position in which he was able to address the current social issues of the time through the populist mode of Hindi melodrama. Throughout the fifties Bimal Roy visited many of the social ills that continued to concern Indian society including poverty, capitalism, class, caste, marriage and of course, family. Cinematographer Kamal Bose who was largely responsible for the semi realist visual look of earlier films including Do Bigha Zamin and Devdas (1955), became a Roy regular and his aesthetic contribution to Sujata is readily apparent in many of the expressionist sequences. Ideologically, Roy’s cinema runs parallel with that of Rossellini and whilst De Sica’s work was both political and emotional, the stark humanism of Rossellini’s post war sentiments finds it fullest expression in the overtly symbolic figure of Sujata (played by Indian actress Nutan). Similarly like Do Bigha Zamin which debates the politics of poverty and rural exploitation through the wider metaphor of a family’s urban odyssey, Sujata scrutinizes the politics of caste and gender in the milieu of middle India.
My final point really comes out of the Keynote lecture given by British director Ken Loach at the London Film Festival in which he criticises the loss of craftsmanship in the British film industry. One of the major strengths of the Hollywood studio system was most of the writers, cinematographers and directors got regular work so they naturally developed their particular craft. Film makers like Bimal Roy got good at what they did because they were given the chance to develop their particular craft – this does not seem to be the case today as a lot of film makers attempting to come at film from a different angle struggle to find financing. In many cases, the second feature film can become allusive and for British film makers craftsmanship is no longer considered an aspiration or a realistic possibility in the current state of American screen monopolisation and British television’s descent into empty reality shows.
Movie Mahal 