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Hindustan Times

Guru Dutt at 100: A Wknd tribute to a tortured artist and his enduring art

On the morning of October 10, 1964, Guru Dutt was found dead in his flat in Bombay, lying on his bed in a crumpled kurta-pyjama. He had drunk a glass of pink liquid, sleeping pills crushed and dissolved in water. He had turned 39 in July. This was his third suicide attempt. His first was at the peak of his career, while directing and starring in Pyaasa (1957), a classic that is considered his greatest film. What was it that haunted this young man? Biographers have been trying to answer that question for decades. It was as if success drew him deeper into himself. In her book Guru Dutt: A Life in Cinema, Nasreen Munni Kabir quotes his brother, the filmmaker Atma Ram, as saying: 'He was quite social in his early days… had a very pleasant nature… Whether it was the success or his filmmaking, he became increasingly enclosed, more and more cut off.' His movies changed too. After early light-hearted releases such as Aar Paar (1954) and Mr & Mrs '55 (1955), both romantic comedies, came Pyaasa, a dark masterpiece about a poet rejected at every turn, who finds solace with a prostitute. This was followed by the even bleaker Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959), about a successful film director whose anguished personal life leads to his ruin. Stills from Dutt's first film, Baazi (1951; above) and his dark masterpiece, Pyaasa (1957; below). . The melancholy of his movies made him something of an outlier in the world of 1950s Hindi cinema, when directors such as Raj Kapoor and Mehboob Khan were telling hopeful stories that reflected the exuberance-amid-hardship of a newly independent India. Filmmakers such as Bimal Roy spotlit the darker side, with tales of systemic injustice, exploitation and caste. But Guru Dutt's stories didn't fit in here either. Because the despair he sketched with such artistry wasn't systemic, it was deeply personal. The descents into insomnia, depression and drink were the story of his life, told in real time. *** Guru Dutt was born in 1925, into a family from Mangalore. His father, Shivashankar Padukone, moved cities and jobs frequently, before settling in Calcutta in 1929, where he found work as a clerk. (Incidentally, Dutt's given name was Vasanth Padukone. His parents changed it, after a childhood accident, hoping to accord him better luck.) After his matriculation exam, Dutt stopped studying and began to work, to help keep the family afloat. At 16, he found a job as a telephone operator. The following year, hope dawned. Knowing how much he loved to dance, a relative helped him join Uday Shankar's academy, in 1942. Two years later, when the school shut, the relative, BB Benegal, an artist and his mother's cousin, stepped in again. He took Dutt to Poona and introduced him to Baburao Pai, chief executive at the pioneering Prabhat Film Company. Dutt was hired as a dance director. A still from Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959). It is hard to tell if fate was smiling or scheming at this point, but this is where he met Dev Anand, who was acting in the Prabhat film Hum Ek Hain in 1945. A dhobi mixed up their shirts, which is how the two met and became friends, the story goes. They grew so close that they made a promise to each other: Dev Anand would take Guru Dutt on as director in the first film he produced, and Dutt would sign the actor for the first movie he directed. Both would keep these promises. As Dev Anand wrote in his autobiography, Romancing with Life (2007): 'Guru Dutt and I were on the same wavelength. He wanted to make some great films, and I wanted to be a great actor, a great star... We saw masterpieces of outstanding filmmakers together… We were inseparable. Together we tramped and cycled the streets of Poona…' *** When his contract with Pai ended, in 1947, Dutt moved to Bombay. He would find no work of significance for almost a year. In those difficult days, he began to write a story titled Kashmakash (Conflict). This would later become Pyaasa. In 1950, he finally got a break, as filmmaker Gyan Mukherjee's assistant on the crime thriller Sangram (1950). In Mukherjee, an educated, talented man, Dutt also found a mentor. He would eventually dedicate Pyaasa to Mukherjee, who had died aged 47, the year before its release. Meanwhile, Dev Anand had not forgotten his promise. He invited his friend to direct a movie for his banner, Navketan. Dutt's first film, Baazi (1951) — starring Dev Anand, Kalpana Kartik and Geeta Bali, in a tale about an expert card player embroiled in the murky dealings of a nightclub that runs an illegal gambling den — was a hit. In his cap, scarf and cigarette, Dev Anand cut a rakish figure. As he wrote in his autobiography: 'I became a phenomenon after the release of Baazi…' In his next movie, Jaal (1952), true to his word, he signed Dev Anand to play the lead role: that of a ruthless smuggler who ensnares a perky young woman in Goa. Baaz (1953), Dutt's third film as director, was interesting for three reasons. It was his first starring role (he would go on to star in all his own films, and was in demand by other directors too). It was his first and only period drama. Set in 16th-century Malabar, he played a young prince who falls in love with a daring anti-Portuguese rebel (Geeta Bali). The film was also his first box-office failure; he never attempted the genre again. Instead, he stuck to urban stories about crime and love in Bombay. His next two, Aar Paar (1954) and Mr & Mrs '55 (1955), were runaway hits. A year later came CID, produced by Guru Dutt but helmed by his former assistant director, Raj Khosla. That too was a hit. With these three films, he and Khosla more or less invented Bombay noir, a genre in which the action shifts from plush nightclubs with cabaret dancers and cigarette girls to lamplit city streets and dingy eating houses. Crime is everywhere. The heroes are rakish rogues; the heroines are luminously beautiful. The sultry 'other woman' propels the plot: Geeta Bali as a club dancer in Baazi, Shakila in Aar Paar, and Waheeda Rehman as a gangster's moll in her first Hindi film, CID. *** Based on his later films, Dutt is perhaps the only filmmaker of his generation who can be called an auteur. His distinctive personal style reflected in his stories of unhappy and troubled artists, and in the intense visuals he created onscreen. These included the stunning shots of the Ajanta Studios, dominated by the towering garuda, in Kaagaz Ke Phool; and the black-and-white frames of Pyaasa, particularly the haunting Christ-like pose of the poet in the song Yeh Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaye. From the start, Dutt did marvellous and unexpected things with music too. Think of Waqt Ne Kiya from Kaagaz Ke Phool, with its panoramic shots of a studio floor complete with cranes, catwalks and cameras; the sequence remains a landmark in Hindi cinema. The songs in his films were used unusually, often as an extension of the dialogue, beginning without prelude or introductory music (as with Johnny Walker's Jane Kahan Mera Jigar Gaya Ji in Mr & Mrs '55). They moved the story forward, lifted the mood, and reflected sweeping emotion. Yet not even Mohammed Rafi's Sar Jo Tera Chakraye could lift the mood of Pyaasa. Dutt played Vijay, a disillusioned poet belittled by his brothers, spurned by publishers and cast aside by the woman he loves in favour of a rich husband. Perennially broke, he wanders the city aimlessly, finally finding solace in the love of a prostitute named Gulabo (Waheeda Rehman) who never stops believing in him. If the poet was devastated by failure, Dutt seemed living proof that success wasn't the answer either. The filmmaker was well-off, had moved into a larger flat in Bombay and bought farm land in Lonavala. None of it made him happy. A turbulent personal life may have contributed to his despondency. In 1953, he married the beautiful singer Geeta Roy, whom he met during the making of Baazi. By all accounts they were very much in love, but their marriage soon soured. She hated the rumours of a great love between him and Waheeda Rehman, and hated even more the idea that they might be true. *** Amid the turmoil, Dutt's next film, Kaagaz Ke Phool, with its tale of a successful film director's self-destructive slide into penury and alcoholism, was so dark and defeatist, it crashed at the box office. Even Waheeda Rehman didn't believe in it. In an interview with Nasreen Munni Kabir, she said: 'I thought the film was too sad… too heavy… I know there are many good moments in Kaagaz Ke Phool, but as a whole I don't think it worked.' Dutt, who set great store by commercial success, lost a little more of himself with this failure. He never directed a film again. *** Still, he had great hits. His production company, Guru Dutt Films, produced Chaudhvin Ka Chand in 1960, directed by M Sadiq. Set in Lucknow, it was a story of misunderstandings, sacrifice, duty and love, set in Muslim households. It swept the box office and was, by the numbers, the biggest hit of Dutt's career. Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (1962), the last major film he produced, was directed by his long-time writer Abrar Alvi and, for many Guru Dutt fans, is second only to Pyaasa. The tale of the decay of a feudal zamindari family in turn-of-the-century Bengal features Dutt alongside Meena Kumari, who is magnificent in the role of a chhoti bahu who turns to alcohol in an attempt to win over her indifferent husband (Rehman). In 1963-64 alone, he played the lead in three family dramas made by other production houses: Bharosa, Bahurani and Sanjh Aur Savera. He had already tried to kill himself a second time by this point, swallowing 38 sleeping pills during the making of Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam in 1962. *** Through it all, he continued to love movie-making. Even after he stopped directing, in films such as Chaudhvin Ka Chand and Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, he shot the songs. Waheeda Rehman has never been filmed more beautifully than in the song Chaudhvin Ka Chand Ho. *** What was it that haunted this young man? All these years on, his tormented genius remains an enigma. As Yasser Usman, author of the 2020 biography Guru Dutt: An Unfinished Story, puts it, 'He never gave interviews. No magazines ran cover stories on him. Whatever we know about him is through what others have said.' And yet, in a way, he had been telling his story all along; he had built his life, legacy and fandom around it. One can't help but think of Vijay's words in Pyaasa: 'Yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaye toh kya hai?' (Poonam Saxena is a writer and translator whose works include Dharmvir Bharati's iconic Gunahon ka Devta, Rahi Masoom Raza's Scene: 75 and Aleph's Greatest Hindi Stories Ever Told)