100 Years of Tapan Sinha: A Filmmaker Who Lived Cinema

By Pickle November 21, 2024

Honoring the life and legacy of a filmmaker who brought honesty, depth, and social relevance to Indian cinema. By Shoma A. Chatterji

Many National Awards for Indian cinema often arrive much later than they ought to have. Filmmaker Tapan Sinha is no exception. He and his films have won 19 National Awards down the years. But the top award continued to elude him. The West Bengal Government bestowed its first Kolkata Ratna Award on the veteran filmmaker in 2004. It could not have made a better choice.

He received the V. Shantaram Award for Lifetime Contribution in Mumbai some years ago. In 2000, the Eastern India Film Directors’ Association felicitated him. He has won laurels along with his films in international film festivals like Berlin, Venice, London, Moscow, San Francisco, Locarno, and Cairo. But his humility remained intact. He maintained his impeccable gentlemanly demeanor until his final day of active life.

The Central Government conferred on him the “One Time Award for Lifetime Achievement” while commemorating the 60th anniversary of India’s Independence. The then-Information and Broadcasting Minister, the late Priya Ranjan Das Munshi, personally handed the award to the filmmaker at his residence in Kolkata because he was not able to travel.

And then came the DadasahebPhalke in 2008 for the award bestowed in 2006. Tapan Sinha stepped into New Theatres as a sound engineer from 1945 to 1949. He observed Nitin Bose and Bimal Roy at work and then did the sound independently for Satyen Bose’s Parivartan in 1949. The film was a big hit.

He received an invitation to the London Film Festival in 1950. He remained in London for a few months after receiving an invitation from Pinewood Studios to observe them at work. He has made films for more than five decades and would have gone on but for his failing health.

His auteur profile clearly displays an entire range of wholesome family entertainment offered within a shoestring budget, which does not compromise either on quality or on aesthetics. Music is a high point of his entire oeuvre. He offers what has been labelled ‘honest and purposeful entertainment.’ His debut as a director was with Ankush, based on Narayan Gangopadhyay’s Sainik. Sadly, not a single print remains of this film today.

Tapan Sinha’s name is linked to great films like Kabuliwalla (Bengali), SafedHaathi (Hindi), AadmiAurAurat (Telefilm in Hindi), Ek Doctor Ki Maut (Hindi), and scores of others. This is what audiences outside his home state of Bengal remember. These are films that have received both critical and national acclaim, with Kabuliwalla hitting the box office jackpot many years ago.

His films were massive commercial hits, and very few flops appear on his creative map. At the same time, they reached beyond mere entertainment, and besides being technically commendable, they have been enriched with beautiful songs and musical scores, dotted generously with Rabindra Sangeet, chosen and often orchestrated by the director himself.

The biggest hit in his entire career, spanning five decades, is Banchharamer Bagan (1980), adapted from a super hit Bengali play authored by theatre icon Manoj Mitra, who also did the title role of Banchharam. It is a beautiful social satire, a critique of the feudal system in Bengal, and a black comedy all rolled into one. It had surrealistic elements like a massive ghost looming over the garden (bagan) now maintained by the gardener Bancharam.

An old, unlettered, and very poor peasant, Banchharam (Manoj Mitra), inherits a patch of land from a huge garden from the landlord, and with his magic green fingers, he converts it to a beautiful garden. Chhokori, the old landlord, is so obsessively possessive of this garden that he keeps hovering over it as a ghost after he dies, trying to scare the gardener into parting with the garden. Banchharam, made of sterner stuff, is not afraid.

Ek Doctor Ki Maut, featuring Pankaj Kapoor in the title role and Shabana Azmi as his wife, was based on a Ramapada Choudhury story called Abhimanyu. It is about a very inventive, innovative, and socialist-minded doctor, Dipankar Roy, who invents a vaccine for leprosy but is hassled, heckled, insulted, and humiliated by his peers and others from the scientific community and medical fraternity for this very invention.

“I wished to explore the way society responds to talent and discovered that it is subject to ridicule at every stage that blocks success but cannot stop it. The more you excel, the more enemies you seem to have. Why this animosity towards excellence?” was the question that he wished to put across.

The film won the Rajat Kamal for the second-best feature film of the year, besides bestowing Sinha with the Best Director Award in 1991.

Tapan Sinha spans five generations of filmmaking in Bengal. Though rooted in Calcutta, he is one of a handful of bilingual filmmakers who triumphed in both Bengali and Hindi and even made a film on Odiya.

“I have directed four generations of actors, ranging from the great Chhabi Biswas through Ashok Kumar, Vyjayantimala, Dilip Kumar, Tanuja, to Uttam Kumar, Soumitra Chatterjee, Anil Chatterjee, and Sharmila Tagore, down to today’s actors Arjun Chakravarty, Pankaj Kapoor, Jaya Bacjcjan, Nandita Das, ShabanaAzmi, Deepti Naval, and Laboni Sarkar,” he said, taking a brief trip down memory lane.

“I personally think I arrived with Kabuliwallah in 1956, never mind that the film had several technical lapses. It was based on a short story by Rabindranath Tagore. The telling account of a growing relationship between a little girl and the Pathan who came to sell dry fruits at their door seemed to move audiences everywhere. It brought me my first crop of awards, including an award at the Berlin Film Festival.

The film had long runs wherever it was screened, including six weeks of morning shows at Pune—unthinkable. But I credit it to Chhabi Biswas’s great acting and, of course, the charm of the Tagore story,” reminisced Tapan-da.

Tapan Sinha’s contribution to celluloid adaptations of literature, mostly in Bengali, is unparalleled in the history of Indian cinema. “I first felt I was in complete control with some mastery—if I may say so—over the medium in Hansuli Banker Upakatha (1962), based on Tarasankar Banerjee’s epic-sized novel. It was not even a novel—it was a saga—set in rural Bengal. I had to handle a cast of more than a thousand—in difficult terrains. Looking back, I guess I managed to achieve a lot of what I had set out to do,” informed Tapan-da.

His film version of Jarasandha’s novel LouhaKapat did not do too well commercially but was a moving account of the psyche of prisoners, tracing why some of them had to land in prison. Tapan-da’s focus shifted from honest entertainment based on Bengali classics to a concern for issues of social relevance, probably from his film Ek Je ChhiloDesh in 1976.

So came Ek Doctor Ki Maut, Antardhan, Admi Aur Aurat, Adalat O Ekti Meye, Aatanka, and Wheel Chair. Sinha was probably the only filmmaker in India to have made five superhit films on the trot, each of which went on to win national awards.

“Every film of his had some message in the social context, which is what makes him such a great filmmaker,” says archivist and collector Sounak Chackraverti, who curated a beautiful exhibition on Tapan Sinha and his films in 2008. His films are typically Indian in general and Bengali in identity even when the language is different. But his career in filmmaking is rooted in Hollywood.

“I saw very few Indian films as a young student. Initially, I was focussed on the stars and would never miss any film starring Gary Cooper, Clark Gabler Norma Shearer, or Leslie Howard. Within a year, my focus shifted from the stars to the directors. I was almost in love with the directors—von Sternberg, Frank Capra, William Wyler, Gabriel Pascal, Carol Reed, Billy Wilder, Michael Powell, John Ford, Fred Zimmerman, and others. When they were making literary masterpieces, I made a point of reading up the original work so I could observe the omissions and departures and read the director’s thought processes behind them.”

Shoma A. Chatterji, 81, is a film scholar, author and freelance journalist. She has won several awards including the National Film Award for Best Film Critic in 1991 and the National Awards for Best Writing on Cinema for her study of the works of Aparna Sen. She has interviewed Tapan Sinha several times