Sujata [1959] : Bimal Roy
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“Neech jati ki ladaki aur naam rakha diya Sujata”
-Charu, foster mother of Sujata
As soon as I heard this dialogue from Bimal Roy’s cult-classic film Sujata [1959], I felt a butterfly has just whirling around my throat in the midst of dark night. It is one of the overstated punchlines we used to say during any gossips, debates and chatting but this one echoed a supple tone and mood that I can’t just deny but pause the laptop screen and thinking an analogous temperament in Rabindranath’s novel Gora written in 1910 on the backbiting caste rituals in Hinduism.
The spiteful sequence of Sujata after the revelation of her identity as a Dalit [the untouchable], she goes to the river ghat, may for taking life herself. Before that she has taken shelter under the foot of a wall moral of Gandhi ji and when she initiates the step forward and her sari jammed with rough surface of the moral and when she relief herself she noticed the quotation of Gandhi imprinted on the wall & the gliding rain drops through the Gandhi’s terracotta eyes and she made a reconciliation about the living a dignified life in spite of being lower class. The dropping water from leaves and up streams in the river are the recurrent motifs that applied cinematically. This sequence is one of the best montages I have seen on screen.
The two distinct refurnish and renovation of cinematic features I have seen in Sujata, maybe they were added previously, but Bimal Roy had made these feature with stunning height. The first one when the baby Sujata imagined the fairy world through animation. The second the aesthetical illustrations of exposing Sujata’s romantic mood and emotions with parallel montage of the nature. These trends had been imitating in the films since then. I was wondering the child artist in Roy’s films are masterfully directed and the children acted so naturally that very few film showed that kind of artfulness in the film.
As soon as I have heard S.D. Burman’s songs “Suno Mere Bandhu Re” I have rewind the similar malleable music he sung “O Mere Majhi” in Bandini [1963]. Both are the greatly influenced and originated from riverine Bengal. I have got a bit nostalgic and recalled an incident from my adolescence when I was spending a long vacation and leisure time because of a heavy flood. At one noon I was hearing a Bangladesh radio music program with Q&A where a listener asked when one can be called a lyricist. The anchor answered when one write successfully 25 songs and the one album can be composed out of them then he can be proclaimed as a lyricist. I have a good ear to tune and lyrical language therefore I decided to be a lyricist and had written 17 songs comprising of country songs, romantic songs and folk lyrics but had to make a halt as my school reopened and I had to sit for the final exam. Unfortunately, I lost all of them during shifting the appliance after the flood. Very recently after repeated listening of S.D. Burman and Salil Chowdhury’s composition and Bimal Roy’s beautiful picturization in films, a spark of composing song has just ignited in me.
Lastly, I was not so engrossed in acting skills in any other actress besides Nutan after observing her cinematic expressions in Bimal Roy’s Bandini [1963] & Sujata [1959]. The same kind of feeling I have in Toshiro Mifune in Akira Kurosawa’s films till now.
🎥Sujata [1959]
Bimal Roy
Hindi, India
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