The Bengali master’s first film in Hindi was a minor success and sparked off a war of words with Satyajit Ray.
In 1969, Bengali director Mrinal Sen made his ninth movie, his first in Hindi. Funded by Film Finance Corporation, the predecessor to the National Film Development Corporation, Bhuvan Shome charts the encounters between a strait-jacketed bureaucrat (Utpal Dutt) and Gouri (Suhasini Mulay), whom he meets during a birding trip in Saurashtra. It is among Sen’s best-known and best-loved works. Here are edited excerpts about the making of the film and its reception from Sen’s memoir Always Being Born.
In many ways, Bhuvan Shome was new to us. It was my first film in Hindi, Utpal Dutt acted for the first time in Hindi, never before Suhasini Mulay acted in cinema, not even on stage or in her school. Vijay Raghava Rao made music for the first time in a feature film and so did KK Mahajan’s photography make its debut in a feature film. And interestingly, Amitabh Bachchan made his first earning in cinema by lending his voice for the voice-over in bits. He was most reluctant but I persuaded him to accept a cheque. The amount was 300 rupees. The total cost of the production was unbelievably low, lower than the unbelievably lowest – 2,00,000 rupees! Two lakh, just two! After all, what we were planning to make was a low-budget film and set a record! And a trend!
Given a ‘blank cheque’, answerable to no one, not even to any of the official agencies, the entire team of workers was bubbling with ‘infantile’ enthusiasm, as though a group of children had been given plenty of building blocks to play with. In a highly conformist set-up as ours, it was sheer delight on our part to rush into a world of madness. Madness, true, but we saw to it that there was method in our madness – skill and inherent discipline.
An instance. We came to a sequence – the tough bureaucrat back to his own world! Frankly, I did not quite understand how to get to grips with the scene. Back to his own world, he would be a figure of ridicule, not a figure of fun. I looked at Utpal (Dutt), I went to him and took him aside. Then, recalling my own past as a medical representative, I told him that funny story of mine at Jhansi hotel in 1951 – how I shut myself inside the hotel room, how I stood before the mirror, stripped myself, stood naked, made faces, shouted madly, and how finally I broke down, cried with convulsive sobs and why, three days later, I resigned.
