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.
Themes
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.
But here diverge the range of their themes and their explorations. While Mukherjee’s stories, treatments, and themes varied from film to film with a stunning variety, Bhattacharya’s cinema seems to have stayed in one area but gone deeper. While one seems to have an enviable variety of styles, the other’s genius seems to lie in his wisdom of characters, human relationships and psychology.
World and World-View
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.
In the classic comedies Chupke Chupke, Golmaal, Khoobsoorat, Bawarchi where the goofball plot unfolds with a tongue firmly in the cheek, there is always a hint of a message too, giving a certain meaning to the apparent meaninglessness.
In contrast, Bhattacharya’s world inhabited more sense than sensibility and at times a heightened sensitivity in the fearlessly close look he took into exploring marital discord. His trilogy on the theme – Anubhav, Avishkar and Grihapravesh delves into understanding the complexity of the warp relationships taken on over time.
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.
Even today, the spring-time world of Hrishida and comfortingly solid world of Basuda continues to show a reality of hope and sensitivity in the world and cinema around bringing us ‘nirmal anand’ and in the words of the eponymous character, ‘anand kabhi marte nahi’. On their death anniversary, I’d like to translate it as ‘the joy of watching their films never dies.’ Long live.
(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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