THIS essay focuses on Suchitra Sen – the only female superstar that popular Bangla cinema has known, the ‘Mahanayika’, ‘Madam/Mrs Sen’, mapping the early period of her career. Suchitra came to the industry in the early 1950s and ruled it till 1978, after which she went into retirement and refused to appear in public ever again, earning for herself the sobriquet ‘Tollywood’s Greta Garbo’. This essay focuses on her ‘star persona’ through two of her early films and the contemporary accounts of her emergence in the industry by tracking reviews, reminiscences and some biographies. These texts offer an interesting map of the emergence of the discourse of the female star and the creation and circulation of her media text. Further, the essay discusses the cinematic tropes of femininity that foreground the emotive journeys of a middle class woman seeking love and fulfillment, and its staging and performance through Suchitra’s star figure.

It also foregrounds the non-cinematic processes by which her star persona was created and their resonances in the filmic narratives. Finally, it attempts to understand the nature and materiality that constituted the ‘star text’ of Suchitra in the early phase of her career while she was still in the process of forging her star persona.

This period of the ’50s is important as it witnesses a consolidation of the star system in the Bangla film industry and the decline of the studio era in the aftermath of the Second World War which coincides with the emergence of these two popular stars – Suchitra and Uttam. Both Suchitra and Uttam are credited with reviving the fortunes of the Bangla industry after the decline of the studio era. Though earlier period too had its fair share of popular film star duos – Pramathesh Barua and Kanan Devi, Durga Das and Jamuna – none came close to the kind of superstardom status that Uttam and Suchitra achieved. Both these stars constitute a ‘phenomenon’, individually as well as together, that has since acquired an ‘iconic’ status not only within the Bangla film industry but also within the popular imaginary of the Bengalis.

 

This essay maps two of Suchitra’s performances – Agnipariksha (Agradoot, 1954) and Sagarika (Agragaami, 1956) that catapulted her to stardom with Uttam as her romantic lead. These two films can be read within a cluster of films that Moinak Biswas refers to as the ‘new melodrama’ of the 1950s. This ‘new melodrama’ was differently constituted from the earlier feudal melodramas of the studio era. It essentially framed the emotive journeys of the middle class woman in spectacular terms by giving full expression to the star presence and charisma of Suchitra’s personality. She was persistently cast as an educated professional woman – doctor, lawyer, teacher, social worker – traversing vast social and spatial distances. Romantic love and its various possibilities – normative and transgressive – acquire interesting resonances in the articulation of the woman’s place and space in these melodramas.

In films such as Agnipariksha (Agradoot, 1954), Dhooli (Pinaki Mukhopadhaya, 1954), Shaap Mochan (Sudhir Mukhopadhaya, 1955) Sobar Upore (Agradoot, 1955), Trizama (Agradoot, 1955), Shilpi (Agragaami, 1956), Sagarika (Agragaami, 1956), Harano Sur (Ajay Kar, 1957) and many others, this female figure articulated a notion of the driven individual modern woman who negotiated varied tropes of the self and her desires to articulate the meanings of her contingent subject positions. Very often this figure inhabited these cinematic spaces without familial and constricting authoritative presences. The use of the cinematic melodramatic convention where the genre deploys the gestural or the performative to stage the conflict between the woman protagonist’s desire for her love and constricting familial or social norms is a repeated trope in these films.

 

Chronologically, Suchitra’s first film Shesh Kothaye (1951) was stopped midway and was only completed in 1974 as Shrawan Sandhya, (Samar Ray). After a string of unsuccessful films such as Kajari (Niren Lahiri, 1953) and Saat Number Kaidi (Sukumar Dasgupto, 1953), she and Uttam were cast together for the first time as the romantic pair in Saare Chuattor (Nirmal Dey, 1953). The film hit the jackpot thus beginning the era of the two stars and the subsequent consolidation of the star system. However, Suchitra’s performance in another film released in 1953, Bhagwan Srichaitanya, opposite Basanta Choudhary as Vishnupriya, brought her favourable reviews as well. Bhagwan Srichaitanya, directed by Debaki Bose, the famous New Theatres cinematographer, foregrounded Suchitra’s femininity in the role of the abandoned wife who pines for Nimai and is the epitome of female and wifely devotion and love. As Vishnupriya, Suchitra was noticed for her screen presence, her intense beauty, ‘glamour’ and ‘charisma’, all of which became her hallmark in the years to come.

To begin with I briefly discuss some tropes about the ‘star text’ by drawing on some of the key ideas Richard Dyer works with. According to him stars are social phenomena. They are images that are produced and consumed within a given social and cultural matrix and a network of relationships. They are, of course, media images, created and circulated via various media texts, publicity, advertising, promotional material, newspaper reportage, fashion and so on. These discourses evoke or construct the star for the viewers/readers as they overlap, intersect and feed into each other. The mundane, formulaic, part rumour, part gossip, part historically verifiable material that feeds these discourses are significant tools to read the star figure. While being hagiographic and deifying the star, they still provide interesting clues about the contexts of how that persona is being created for the viewers/readers and what images are being circulated in the social domain. These texts are crucial in the field of star studies, not because they give a glimpse of the ‘real’ person, but because they provide tools for decoding the image.

 

Borrowing from Dyer’s work, I track the transactions within the filmic and non-filmic narratives and attempt to map Suchitra’s acquisition of the mahanayika tag that enabled her to overshadow the ‘plain Jane’ Sabitri Chatterjee, her contemporary who too was considered an accomplished actor. Suchitra managed to create a niche for herself as the star, even if her range of acting appears to be less versatile than Sabitri’s. Her critics were of the opinion that she was only a hugely popular star and not an actor. However, it is imperative to point out a theoretical inconsistency in these criticisms about her being a non-actor. Melodramas which were her staple, are not character driven like realist films, but driven along personality and affect. Following Dyer we know that the star figure becomes the vehicle to condense those affects. This star persona is always both a character and an excess, circulating across the narratives of multiple film texts, often drawing criticism as being stereotyped images. Drawing from the theoretical discourse of stardom, we know that a star is always more than an actor, moving and circulating across a range of contexts and domains, creating a notion and map of the ‘imaginary’ of the ‘self’. This imaginary of the self operates through intertextual relays of social and cultural signification, a fluid sign of the filmic and non-filmic in the larger social matrix.

In my opinion, Suchitra’s ‘star persona’ is constituted by a certain trope of middle class ‘femininity’ that became part of her popular appeal. It is within this larger social and cultural matrix of meaning and signification that her ‘mahanayika’ (the great actress) tag needs to be located and understood. In Bangla, ‘nayika’ is considered a more respectable term, than the popular but lowly ‘taraka’. This term ‘taraka’ (mere popular star), was considered inadequate and not evoked for accommodating Suchitra’s ‘extraordinariness’ and ‘greatness’. It is almost as if the semiotics of naming had to foreground her great stature along with her immense popular appeal, in addition to her acting abilities.

 

The accounts narrating Roma Sen’s transformation into Suchitra Sen are important traces to map the discourse of stardom surrounding Suchitra. Contemporary reviews and writings on Suchitra foreground three qualities that made her the female superstar – her extraordinary personality, glamour and ‘charisma’ and also mention her independent nature, a consciousness of her status and social position, and her determination and drive to reach the top. She is constructed as a creative talented singer and dancer, a hard working middle class person, from an ordinary family who is fortunate to be the daughter-in-law of Adinath Sen, a bonedi (status, aristocratic) family.

She comes across as a very private and self-respecting person, fully conscious of her status as the daughter-in-law of the ‘sambhranto’ (status) Sen family. Her identity as a married woman and respect for family status/tradition is cited as the reason for her initial inability to accept film offers as she failed to get her father-in-law’s permission to act despite successful screen tests. The prohibition, though articulated within the paradigm of ‘respectability’, fuelled her determination to keep on trying.

 

This drive to succeed was reportedly inspired and supported by her husband. The constant codes that permeate these narratives deploy the trope of ‘respectability’, ‘moral soundness’ and ‘cool reserve’ that were commensurate with her social and familial status as a married woman. Repeated mention is also made of her impeccable grooming, smartness and elegance. Her beauty, charm, expressive eyes and photogenic face, as well as her intense creative urge to be an actor, were regarded as a key to her success, enabling her to ride the waves of popularity and superstardom.

These narratives tell of the terrible struggles and hardship that she had to undergo to realize her dream of breaking into the industry and how in the initial phase of her career, she was badly treated by producers and directors. She soon gained notoriety by getting into a well documented and publicised spat with editor Kaalish Mukherjee who ran a popular film magazine Rupmancha and was known to give photo publicity to young emerging actors, the only stipulation being that they would come to his office-cum-studio for the photo shoot. Suchitra refused to have her photo shoot and was extremely curt with him. Angry and humiliated, Mukherjee printed a scurrilous piece about her in the next issue, chiding her for being haughty and proud, ending with the lines that nati (public woman) should remain in her place: ‘We want to see her where she belongs and not try to be above her station.’ This episode and the rumour mongering unleashed by a miffed Mukherjee are often cited to justify not only her ‘difficult’ and strained relationship with the popular press but also gave valency to her ‘moody and stern personality’.

Interestingly, she was often cast as a proud and aloof young woman in many films of this period. Films such as Shaap Mochan, Dhooli, the two films under discussion, as also Shilpi, among others, all cast her as a reserved, cool, haughty urban woman conscious of her status and stature. In many ways her public tiff with Mukherjee seems to have fed into her cinematic images of this period. Her detractors cast her as this difficult prima donna figure, while her sympathizers justified her behaviour by foregrounding the practical necessity driving this respectable married woman to act in a way which would protect her status. It would have been ‘unseemly’ had she gone to Mukherjees’ studio for the shoot.

 

In many ways her performances and narratives, both cinematic and the extra filmic, all play on this intersecting trope of conforming to ‘tradition’ and middle class ‘respectability’ while struggling to create an individual professional work space for herself in the industry. She then was either projected as a victim of unjustified rumour and gossip , while all she was trying to do was protect her familial and social status as a married woman trying to make it in the industry, or a proud upper middle class rich man’s wife too snobbish and uptight for her own good.

It is not accidental that she was repeatedly cast as a dedicated professional woman in many of the films – doctor, teacher, nurse, committed to work and attempting to balance between the demands of love and romance and work. So if she is the mahanayika, then that stature is hers not because she compromised on her values and morals, but because she had the conviction to reach the top without resorting to easily available publicity stunts and compromising her position and status. The contours of this model of stardom successfully deployed a certain image of this modern young woman/star who performs and enacts both tradition and individuated desires.

 

Moving on to the two films under discussion, I focus on the enactment of a certain kind of middle class individual modernity that Suchitra performs. These two films project a woman/star who is caught in the conflict between the demands of middle class tradition, her respectable status and the question of her ‘legitimate’ desire and its enactment. As a filmic character, she has to resolve the conflict arising out of her status as a tradition bound woman, who nevertheless is motivated and driven by her desires and determination to realize her dreams and aspirations tied to the figure of her lover. I focus on these two films as they seem to have a symbiotic and fluid interconnection with the extra filmic discourse around Suchitra that I have already referred to earlier. These films showcase a number of filmic character codes that went on to consolidate her star image.

Agnipariksha, based on an Ashapurna Devi story, has been termed ‘a comedy of remarriage’ that revolves around the woman’s choice of a marriage partner. Directed by the collective, Agradoot, the film deployed the collective’s signature camerawork and used low key photography, angular shots, mood lighting and sharp editing to narrate the story of Taposhi and Kiriti. Suchitra played Taposhi, a spirited, independent young woman from an upper middle class family who had been married in her adolescence. As in the non-filmic discourses, her attributes are listed in hyperbolic terms in the film as well; she is beautiful, sings like a nightingale, (she sings on AIR) and is ‘ziddi’, ready and willing to accept all kinds of challenges, especially if she is prohibited from doing something, and that she does not shy away from anything. Unlike ‘ordinary Bengali’ women, she is extraordinary.

 

The narrative foregrounds her independent nature and free spiritedness through her solitary walk in the misty Mussoorie landscape, especially as she has been warned by her mother not to do so. The narrative and moral economy clearly frames her independence, modernity, ‘sincerity’ and ‘authenticity’, as against the false gloss of fashion and superficial modernity that her cousin aunt has, who is coquettish and a social butterfly. The framing and shot compositions unequivocally establish her superior stature as we repeatedly see her framed in medium-low angle shots standing upright, while others are sitting or standing behind her.

As the camera tracks her solitary figure venturing into the misty mountains, we know that the stage is set for the enactment of the love track. She comes across the young, suave, well-dressed Uttam and they soon strike up an easy conversation (this becomes the repeated discourse about them; their ease and comfort in each other’s presence). We see her going to Kiriti’s house at night as she wishes to see him in his own space to assess what he is like. The camera focuses on her eyes and gaze as she articulates her love and desire for this man through a song, while Uttam remains framed in diaphanous curtains.

 

Interestingly, in these two films under discussion, the melodramatic address is mounted through the figure of Suchitra, the filmic character as well as the female star while the male star/character seems inert. The woman articulates her desires and we see the male as her object of desire. In this sense the films became Suchitra’s star vehicle which enabled her to use and mobilize her ‘charisma’ to condense the filmic codes to her advantage, even if both she and Uttam were cast as the romantic couple.

The cinematic staging of Taposhi’s desire in this film draws from the off-screen codes of respect for ‘tradition’, ‘commitment’ and ‘sincerity’ associated with Suchitra’s persona. Taposhi’s adolescent marriage to Bulu engineered by her grandmother had led to family discord as her parents could not accept this outmoded marriage. Her family, especially her mother, prevented the realization of her married love by forcing her to forget her past. She, however, could not forget her young groom and felt attracted to him.

As the grown up, modern and free-spirited Taposhi meets and falls in love with Kiriti, we see her desire and love displaced on to a man who is not her husband. The narrative and moral economy clearly articulates her conflict as she feels torn by this schism in herself. The film stages the division between tradition and modernity through the figure of this woman that is enacted as the division between the legitimate and tradition bound desire of a married woman for her husband and her new found love who she has chosen for herself.

This conflict scene seems to be resonant of Suchitra’s off-screen struggle to conform to the dictates of familial prohibition articulated by her father-in-law that she was supposed to follow as a married woman from a respectable family, versus her personal desire to become an actor. As a woman/star, she has to make a choice between what her family wants/expects and what she desires for herself. What is the worth of her sincere commitment in the face of her family’s displeasure? More importantly, who should she commit herself to? The film, of course, provides an easy solution by making Kiriti and Bulu the same person.

 

In a well-shot scene with excellent camera movements and brisk editing, Bibhuti Laha frames Suchitra in angular compositions and expressionistic lighting to stage the turmoil in her mind as she grapples with the voice of tradition and her personal desires. In a fast paced sequence we witness Taposhi finally deciding to seek her unknown husband and ask him to be with her. The next shot is of Taposhi rushing out and cuts to the village home where the grandmother asks her to decide what she wants. There she meets Kiriti/Bulu. He knew all along that he was her husband, but he wanted her to make the right choice of her own volition and not something that had been inflicted on her in her childhood.

This sequence and the melodramatic address mounted through the mise en scene, uses Suchitra’s strong emotive presence through shots of her face and her eyes, which are framed angularly and with low-key expressionistic lighting. As the conflict scene rises to a crescendo, we see Taposhi resolving her conflicts within herself, as the pull of traditional middle class values that she has internalized is too strong for her to disregard. It’s a powerful sequence which gives a fantastic density to Suchitra’s performance by mobilizing specific camera angles and lighting techniques that eventually became a benchmark for her subsequent performances and was deployed by many other cinematographers working with her.

 

In Sagarika (1956) directed by Agragami, we encounter Suchitra/Sagar as a third year medical student training to be a doctor while Uttam/Arun is a young promising surgeon. They meet each other in the hospital corridor and young Uttam is smitten by this self-possessed young medical student. This film too foregrounds the tropes of firmness and moral consistency that had already been circulating about her persona. As in the non-filmic discourses, in this film we see Suchitra being projected as a stern and aloof young woman who is above ordinary pranks and youthful gags, conscious of her self-respect and status, upset and hurt by the rumour and gossip about Arun’s attraction for her.

Like her ‘victimization’ by a miffed Kaalish Mukherjee, in this film she becomes a victim of malicious sexual jealousy unleashed by Arun’s benefactor’s daughter who is attracted to him and conspires against Sagar by sending a love letter. Sagar’s complaint to the principal results in the cancellation of his state scholarship for foreign study. Arun is forced to take monetary help from Sagar’s uncle who lends him the money in return for his promise that he will marry his rural, uneducated and unsophisticated daughter Basanti. He promises to do so and goes away, and we are left with the memory of Arun singing of his dream woman, ‘amar swapne dekha rajkanya thake’, his imaginary dream woman who is like Tagore’s Sagarika (he sings only one song in the film).

 

In a narrative twist Sagar is asked by her cousin Basanti to write her love letters to her fiancé (Arun) as she is unable to correspond in elegant and polished prose befitting the fiancé of the bright and accomplished surgeon. This epistolatory exchange leads to love between Arun and Basanti (Sagar). It is interesting to note that Suchitra’s ‘elegant, well-groomed and charming personality’ is foregrounded in the film as Sagar/Suchitra is given the responsibility to groom her unsophisticated cousin to be the ‘elegant’ wife of the soon to be foreign returned doctor.

The young cousin soon acquires the necessary accoutrements of fashion and coquettish behaviour and starts flirting with a wastrel rich young man about town who is not interested in marriage but wants to compromise her honour. Within the narrative and moral economy, Basanti remains unable to be the true dream woman because she is not truly and sincerely committed to her love and cannot sacrifice herself. Here too as in Agnipariksha, the cinematic framing and shot compositions frame Suchitra in mid-shots standing upright on stairs towering over Basanti, or standing in front of her, almost overshadowing her.

Interestingly, the inert Kiriti of Agnipariksha is transformed into a blind Arun in Sagarika, enabling the staging of the woman’s love and desire. Following a lab explosion Arun is forced to come back, and his fiancé, who he thought loved him, abandons him as she cannot bring herself to be with a blind man. Suchitra steps in; all along she has been in love, but did not want to be in the way of the young engaged couple. She moves in to care for him. He is uncomfortable as they are not married and is concerned about attracting salacious gossip and rumour. In a crucial scene, Sagar tells him that she is safest with him, as her love is true and strong enough to override all societal disapprovals.

It is intriguing that the narrative does not seem to be bothered about the impropriety of the two unmarried young lovers staying together or that it is the woman who is confident enough to live with and care for her lover without being troubled by social norms. The familial figures of censure and authority, as well as cinematic tropes of conflict-ridden desire and love that we saw in the earlier film, are absent here.

In Sagarika, the woman/star seems more self-assured and confident of her desires and is willing to take on tradition that seems to come in the way of the realization of her personal fulfilment which is tied to the figure of her lover. Within the romantic convention of popular cinema, she articulates her love and desire through a song, ‘ei modhu raat shudhu tomar amar’. The song is picturised in Uttam’s bedroom; he is lying with eyes closed on the bed, asleep, while Suchitra is shot against the window with moonlight streaming in, articulating through lyrics and her gaze, the intensity of her love for this man.

 

The film ends with Uttam recovering his eyesight wanting to see Basanti, his dream woman. In the climax, Sagar leaves the room so that he can be united with Basanti, but Uttam knows by touching Basanti that she is not the woman he has been with. All through the sequence Sagar is filmed in the corridor, crying for her lost love, with shot, reverse shot and brisk editing to mount the climax and predictable union. The camera tracks her as she rushes in to embrace her lover in a passionate hug, tears streaming from her eyes, on hearing that he might lose his sight again if he is too traumatized.

This last sequence consolidated the emotive and performative codes that were to be a part of Suchitra’s repertoire for most of her acting career. Her crying and gestures as she listens in to Uttam asking for Basanti remain loud and excessive, but framed in medium shot, sobbing her heart out, they nevertheless became identified with Suchitra’s star image, an image that played on the notion of a passionate ‘modern’ love that epitomized this woman’s star persona, successfully deploying a certain model of middle class femininity.

 

Despite the predictable romantic plots, these two films are significant as they show the overlap and fluidity of discourse around the star figure of Suchitra and help decode the nature of the variety of off-screen and on-screen codes that fed her persona in the initial phase of her career. In many ways this text performs an individual modernity constantly evolving and intersecting with ‘tradition’ and inhabiting relays of an ‘imaginary self’ that pushes to achieve emotional fulfilment within certain circumscribed limits. Possibly, this explains the reason for her tremendous popularity and continued appeal. The template of love, desire and romance that Suchitra the star performed played on this curious intersection of the modern woman – active, aware of her agency, yet willing to acknowledge the limits of her social and familial location.