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Homage

Tapan Sinha The last of the Mohicans

Paliab Bhattacharya, New Delhi
No Bengali film aficionado can forget "Kabuliwallah", "Khudhito Pashan", "Atithi", "Haatey Bajarey" and "Sagina Mahato". The list goes on. So, when the helmer of these films Tapan Sinha died in Kolkata last Thursday at the age of 84, it brought curtains down on the career of the last of the Mohicans of Bengali cinema.
For decades, the intelligentsia in Bengal never looked beyond the troika of Ritwik Ghatak, Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen but the masses have all along recognised Sinha as an equally powerful storyteller, like his favourite novelist Charles Dickens, dealing with the issues of the common man, during a career spanning over four decades and making 41 films, 19 of which won national awards and laurels in the international festival circuit in London, Venice, Moscow and Berlin.
An avid follower of American directors like William Wyler and John Ford, Sinha (born in Kolkata in 1924), was inspired by Dickens' novel "A Tale ofTwo Cities" and its film version.
After completing his M.Sc. in Physics from Calcutta University, Sinha joined the film industry as a techniciali as an assistant sound recordist in Kolkata's New Theatre in 1946. Two years later, he shifted to the Calcutta Movietone Studio and in 1950 he got the opportunity to work in the Pinewood Studio in London where he got to watch the works of greats like Federico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica and work in director Harles Cryton's unit as a sound engineer.
On return to India, Sinha
came out with his first film
"Ankush" (1954), a year before Ray's epoch-making "Pather Panchali", with an elephant belonging to a zamindar as the central character. It was a groundbreaking idea in that time. "Ankush", however, bombed at the box office.
Sinha's next two films "Upahaar" (1955) and "Tonsil" (1956) were somewhat successful, but it was "Kabuliwallah", starring legendary actor Chhabi
subject. His last film "Daughters of the Century" (2001) brought together an ensemble cast of talented actresses ranging from Jaya Bachchan to Nandita Das to Debosree Roy, addressing the discrimination against women over the centuries.
Sinha's forte was presenting the most complicated issues in the simplest possible manner. His films were quintessentially middle-class Bengali. The stories of most of his films had a solid literary
Biswas in titular role of an Afghan dry fruit vendor, in 1957 that catapulted him to fame. There was no looking
I back after that. Based-on the_ short story by Rabindranath Tagore, "Kabuliwalah" won the President's Gold Medal for the best film of the country.
The film, however, was not technically sound and Sinha was to later write that Satyajit Ray and Raj Kapoor had told him about its poor technical quality.
Like his favourite directors Wyler and Ford, Sinha had a large canvas and he never made two films on the same
base. They were often adaptations of short stories and novels of Rabindranath Tagore, Tarashankar Bandoqadh"Vajro 5a r a r
Chandra Chattapadhyay, Sharadindu Bandopadhyay, SubodhGhosh and Ramapada Chowdhury.
Sinha never failed to grapple with contemporary issues of labour unrest and politics as brought out in the Dilip Kumar-Saira Banu starrer "Sagina Mahato", which was a golden jubilee hit in 1970, and a rape victim being asked to prove the crime committed against her in "Adalat O Ekti
Meye".
One of the best films by Sinha was undoubtedly "Haatey Bajarey" which won the President's Gold Medal in late 1960s featuring sterling performances from Ashok Kumar, Vaijayanthimala and Ajitesh Banerjee.
Sinha also explored the genre of films for children through "Sabuj Dwiper Raja (1979), "Safed Haathi" (1978) and "Anokhi Moti" (2000).
Among other notable films by Sinha were "Ek Doctor Ki Maut", "Nirjan Shaikatey", "Aatanka", "Aadmi aur Aural", ‘and "Wheelchair". Language was never a barrier for him as he worked with equal dan in Bengali, Hindi and Oriya films.
It is one of the mysteries of Indian cinema that Tapan Sinha had always remained the least discussed director, compared to his peers like Ray. Sen and Ghatak. and was never placed in the category of the latter.