4-5 years back I was writing some stuff on 50s Bollywood possibly inspired by Manto’s Meenabazar. I never finished it, but after Sadhna’s death I just re-read it and couldn’t figure out what I was writing about. Anyway, here it is. Sadhna makes a small appearance in it along with Gulzar, Bimal Roy, and Salil Chowdhury.

Few days before he died, Bimal da was smoking cigarettes late into night. He had been diagnosed with lung cancer months some months back. He was reading the movie script he had asked Gulzar bhai to finish. It was about a man who wants to see the Maha Kumbh at Prayag for he believes it will bring him good health; Bimal da and Gulzar were contemplating when should the man die. Gulzar bhai wanted to kill the man as soon as he gets to the Prayag station, but Bimal da was not happy that the man should die without actually seeing the mela. He wanted the man to die on the day of Jog Snan. Bimal da himself died on 8th January, the day of Jog Snan.

I was a struggling nobody in the 50s. Delightful era. I still remember when Bimal da came to Bombay, everyone was censuring him for leaving the Bengali film industry for money.

Sold himself to capitalism.

Chutiyas. This, after he had single handed lifted Bengali film industry with Udayer Pathe. Even in Bombay there was a schism, people who had seen Udayer Pathe and people who didn’t understand Bengali.

So when Bimay da came here, I was already aware of his genius, and just wanted to work with him. I had by then reconciled with the fact that I’ll never make it big in my life and was fine with it. I just wanted to watch cinema and write prose. You don’t get money from doing either here in India, so I just made friends. Friends who were artsy and had enough money to buy me the tickets for my kind of cinema. Bimal da was one of those. He had a fucking projector to himself. It was with him that I first saw The Bicycle Thieves. Da was probably watching it for 20th time. As usual, he was fretting over the kind of cinema we were making in Bombay.

“Disappointing stories with either Raja-Rani or poor man loves rich girl type garbage.”

A couple of years later he made Do Bigha Zameen (1953). It was just 6 years after independence and we were still a country brimming with hope and dreams and all those naive chutiya things. Bimay da killed that romanticism of the nation with a sledgehammer. A farmer (Balraj Sahni) moves to the city to earn enough money to be able to payback to the local Zamindaar, a debt he thinks he had already paid. He works as a rickshaw puller and almost loses his leg. His son leaves school and starts polishing shoes. They work very hard for months to earn the money needed but when they come back, their land is gone to the evil corporations. A new India is shining in place of his farm. After watching it, the first thing I asked Bimal da was is it based on a Premchand story?

“I don’t know, man, you will have to ask Salil. Salil, did you get this story from …Premchand?”

Salil da didn’t reply, just pulled another cigarette from his box and smoked. Salil da was fascinating. We all had heard about this Mozart-esque genius that Bimal da had got for Bombay.

If he was in mood he would tell you one of those ‘Anti-establishment’ stories. Often repeated one was how his father once punched a British manager in the face and made him eat his own 3 teeth because he called him ‘dirty nigger’ or something. Salilda probably knew more about Western music than anyone in India around that time. During the 50s Salil da was a rage, the man could write poetry, compose brilliant songs, knew everything there was to know of European and Russian music and wrote films like Do Bigha Zameen and Parakh.

Talking of Parakh, I think that was Bimal da’s most underrated movie. It’s a brilliant satire on the election procedure and how the prospect of getting of power / wealth can change one’s morality. During its filming while I was loitering away on the sets I was attracted to the female lead Sadhna. Sadhna was a splitting image of the girl I was running after in high school. Sadhna herself was around 17-18 at that time and looked very school girlish. She was in love with Nayyar and wanted to run away from home to marry him. Which she eventually did – to the disappointment of hundreds.

I never got an opportunity to discuss the script of Parakh with Salil da, the movie ends with the big industrialist as the messiah of the downtrodden. The one who is just and kind is ready to mingle with the poor to help them. I doubted that this was Salil da’s idea.

I had a bitter fight with Vasant Chaudhuri one night over this. He recalled that during the making of Parakh, da told him

“We know we can make much better films than these, but once I begin to think of the fourteen thousand feet for the south Indian territory, or whether my film will run in Bengal or Bihar, everything changes and I cannot make what I want to.”

[This is where I left the story, maybe someday I will pick it back, if I remember where I was planning to go with it. Most of the material was sourced from the excellent book Bimal Roy: The Man who Spoke in Pictures and salilda.com]