My Uttam Kumar story is merely a second-hand one.
Apparently the great Bengali movie star once came to the house next door. The son-in-law of that house knew him and had produced one of his films. My mother said she and our domestic help peeked into our neighbour’s room from our living room, while discreetly hiding behind our curtains.
With Uttam Kumar’s centenary on 3 September, the media has been awash with stories about him. Several Durga Puja committees in Kolkata have announced Uttam Kumar themes this year. One will have hand-painted posters of his greatest films. Another will recreate his make-up room. His niece and daughter-in-law have appeared at events and panel discussions. Even the Prime Minister devoted his last Mann ki Baat address to the superstar. Some 45 years after his death at the age of 53, Uttam Kumar seems to still be a way to win hearts and minds in Bengal.
“His life offers another great lesson: Never give up,” the Prime Minister said, reminding audiences that his early films flopped. But that’s not really the secret to his enduring appeal. Uttam Kumar is inspiring but more importantly he is beloved.
Cultural Zeitgeist
Many cultural figures have had their centenaries in the last few years—Bhupen Hazarika, Laxman Pai, Mukesh, Mahashweta Devi, Ritwik Ghatak, to name a few. Hazarika was posthumously awarded the Bharat Ratna. Uttam Kumar got no such honour in his lifetime or after his death. He didn’t even get the Dadasaheb Phalke though he was the Best Actor recipient at the first National Film Awards in 1967 for his roles in Chiriyakhana and Antony Firingee. But this is not a story about wounded Bengali pride.
When an actor becomes part of the cultural zeitgeist, awards do not really matter much. He had already won the hearts and minds of millions of Bengalis. That’s why he is still on T-shirts, he is still the subject of memes, he is still part of popular culture. He was the right man at the right time. Though one could say his meteoric rise really happened after the Uttam Kumar-Suchitra Sen duo clicked at the box-office.
Indian films have many legendary pairings—Raj Kapoor and Nargis, Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol, M. G. Ramachandran and Jayalalithaa. But Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen remain the gold standard. In her book Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen—Bengali Cinema’s First Couple (2013), Maitreyee B. Chowdhury writes that onscreen “even when they immersed themselves in their characters, they managed to retain their individual magnetic presence”. They were never not Uttam-Suchitra, so much so that the director had to change the original tragic ending for the 1961 film Saptapadi. The producer had come to Uttam Kumar with folded hands and pleaded that if Sen died in the film, he would be ruined.
In the 1950s, bhadralok Bengali society was “still awkward with issues of romance and intimacy”, writes Chowdhury. At a time when public expression of love was still frowned upon, when the two actors gazed deep into each other’s eyes or rode a scooter into the horizon, they “represented what young lovers sought from their love lives, but could not attain.”
If Sen was the face that launched a thousand ships, Uttam Kumar had the smile that did the same. At the Kolkata launch of Sanghamitra Chakraborty’s biography Soumitra Chatterjee and his World at the Kolkata Literary Meet in 2025, Chatterjee’s daughter Poulami said her father and Uttam Kumar were close friends but very different as actors. Uttam Kumar advised Chatterjee to not mix so easily with the regular public, walking into petrol pumps like an aam aadmi and instead maintain his aura as a star. Chatterjee demurred, saying, “I’m an actor first, not a star.” But his own wife remained a diehard Uttam Kumar fan, saying “Aar kaar erokom bhuban bholano hashi aachhe? (Who else has a such smile that makes you forget the world?)”. Chatterjee would tease, “Don’t I have a beautiful smile?” His wife would respond, “Just shut up. You don’t even come close.”
That Smile
Uttam Kumar was an actor, director, producer, even composer and a colossus of the Bengali film industry. It might seem trivial to remember his smile on his centenary. Like Sen’s beauty, Uttam Kumar’s smile was god-given. It was not exactly a talent cultivated through hard work and study. We tend to dismiss the power of beauty though we lead lives in thrall of beauty. Uttam Kumar-Suchitra Sen are a reminder of how sometimes true stardom is ineffable, something we cannot capture through dissection and analysis.
In his lifetime, Uttam Kumar was caught in the face-off between art and popular culture. Satyajit Ray did write the film Nayak (1966) with Uttam Kumar in mind but in the book Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye (1989), his biographer Andrew Robinson calls him “fairly disdainful” about Uttam Kumar as an actor. But he knew he was a star. In a scene Ray shot with Uttam Kumar at Howrah station, he said thousands of people turned up to watch, and even the police who were there for crowd control were watching the superstar. Ray likened Uttam to Gregory Peck, “an actor with no acting skills, who was propelled into stardom on the strength of the fan mail he received after his first film opened.” But Uttam Kumar, Ray wrote in an obituary for the star in Sunday magazine, “even in the most inconsequential of parts exuded confidence which Peck never did.”
Now it sounds rather condescending especially when one reads the fulsome centenary tributes to his acting talent. But it is a fact that when he died, the communist government under Jyoti Basu did not allow his body to be taken to Rabindra Sadan for public viewing allegedly because he was a star of commercial “bourgeoisie” cinema. Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee used that story to accuse the Left Front government of a great disconnect with the masses.
My parents too went to the Rashbehari crossing in south Kolkata to watch his funeral cortege. I said I didn’t really have an Uttam Kumar story. I cannot even claim to have been his No.1 fan. But I realise the man turns up in a cameo in both books I’ve written. In my novel Don’t Let Him Know, middle-aged Romola steals out of the house to try and see the body of a matinee idol superstar. Though the film star is named Subir Kumar, the scene is clearly based on the death of Uttam Kumar. Like Romola, my mother too had a little diary tucked away among her saris, where she wrote down the name of every Uttam Kumar film she had seen. She maintained that list diligently as if it was a connection to the man himself.
And when I interviewed the jatra star and female impersonator Chapal Bhaduri while writing his biography, he told me about the time Uttam Kumar came to see a jatra where he was playing the mother. Moved by the scene, he asked to see the actress and was annoyed when a man, now in shirt and trousers, was brought before him. When someone explained that Chapal had played the mother, Uttam Kumar stared at him in disbelief and then hugged him to his chest. Chapal said all he could think was that this was the chest where Suchitra Sen had once rested her head. “I have no photograph of that night, no autograph. All I can say is I will never receive a greater award for my acting.”
I remember how Bhaduri’s face lit up when he told me that story. Just as my mother’s did when she stumbled upon an Uttam Kumar film on television while browsing channels. He was an incandescent actor of extraordinary talent but he also lit up very ordinary lives with that smile. And continues to do so long after death. A smile that makes you forget the world is not a smile to be laughed away.
Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.
Sandip Roy (@sandipr) is a writer, journalist and radio host.