The emergence of directors, Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Bhattacharya in the 70s is from a singular source – Bimal Roy. Roy’s pathbreaking realism and a keen eye for exploring nuances of emotion and relationships in a time of high drama and tragedy bear its stamp in the cinema of his protégés. Both Hrishida and Basuda worked as assistant directors with him, and in the case of the former also as a writer and editor. This formative experience shaped their shared and unique perspectives of reality in their cinema.
Relationships are largely the pet theme of both the directors, however, their initial years as filmmakers saw more of a neo-realist De Sican thrust than an intimate and personal one.
Although Hrishida’s first film Musafir and Basuda’s second, the classic Teesri Kasam had a strong interpersonal relationship theme, its interplay with the social context is self-evident; an ethos that later with films like Anuradha, Anupama, Anubhav, and Avishkar matured into a more personal cinema that spoke about the independent individual than as a part of a whole for both.
A penchant for humour, an inherent belief in the goodness of man and a perceptively tender expression of human relationships has always been the hallmark that has made Mukherjee an auteur in his own right. His world, as quirky as real, had an extremely interesting play of incidents and the human emotions they triggered. This is seen as early as Anari and Mem Didi, where strangers laugh together and guardian angels abide galore, right up to Anand, Mili and Namak Haram.
With Anubhav he explores the life of a 6-year-old estranged couple coming close and overcoming misunderstandings for sustenance while with Avishkar he surveyed the entire journey from love, courtship, marriage and later years. With Grihapravesh he starts off with a jaded couple and introduces further estrangement only to chart the journey back to reconciliation, in a way coming full circle.
If the shadows of a past relationship fell on a present relationship in Anubhav, in Grihapravesh adultery is dealt with head-on. He revisited the idea and impact of adultery in his later film Aastha (1997).
Together, Mukherjee and Bhattacharya not only reflected the reality of their times, of a budding urban India but also gave shape to the idea of a better world shaped by ideas of communication, understanding, joy, mirth, goodness, sense, and sensibility.
(Fatema is a decade-long moonlighter as fiction/non-fiction writer, reviewer and currently enrolled in an adventure sports course called film editing at FTII.)
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