It is by far the fattest — and the heaviest — book we have had to lug around at t2 and flip through, and to our satisfaction all the weight-lifting was absolutely worth it.
Prithibi Aamaarey Chaay is Uttam Kumar’s life in pictures, whose charisma as Bengali cinema’s biggest icon endures even 36 years after his death, which is also the reason why the book’s “presenters” Parimal Ray and Kazi Anirban felt this celluloid phenomenon deserved a thorough visual documentation.
Between the hard covers, what you have is a colourful page-turner — all 588 glossy pages of it — splashed with pictures of posters, lobby cards, booklets, print ads, vinyl covers, stills, family photographs, extracts from journals, handwritten letters and invites of various sorts.
“This book has taken about four years to come about, but we have been sourcing material over the years,” says Kazi Anirban, a Calcutta-based graphic designer, who has collaborated with collector Parimal Ray on the project. Anirban has previously published books on his grandfather Kazi Nazrul Islam, Swami Vivekananda and Rajshekhar Basu.
“There are 17-18 biographies on Uttam Kumar. Being an artist, I was drawn to the idea of tracing his life pictorially,” says Anirban, who has also shown a keen journalistic eye in the presentation.
The “pictorial biography” is a good way to take a measure of the Bengali superstar’s career, from his initial struggle to his steady rise as a “nayak”, peaking and then hitting a plateau, followed by a sharp fall in his fortunes, leading up to his death at the age of 54. It doesn’t overlook the lesser known of his creative side — the actor’s engagement with theatre, and as the editor of the film magazine Shilpi Sansad, a rare find that is reprinted here.
In the few words that Ray and Anirban use to introduce or provide a context to a set of pictures, they manage to capture the emotional underpinnings of what such a trailblazing life may have entailed, both professionally and personally. Like the evocative contrast brought out by the black-and-white pictures of Uttam with his wife Gouri Debi and the posters featuring him with his heroines.
This book would be of special interest to film buffs, quizzers, collectors and Uttam Kumar fans, so laden is it with information of the most unlikely sort. Like the glossary of his 41 “heroines” — leading ladies all, but not everyone played his romantic interest (gives an idea of the number of stunning women Suchitra Sen had as rivals!).
The list of Uttam Kumar’s 203 Bengali releases and nine Hindi releases is valuable (“there’s a lot of incorrect information floating online,” says Anirban), as are the ones on his incomplete and unreleased films. Some of the surprises are letters, reports and excerpts of interviews from and on Satyajit Ray, Suchitra Sen, Supriya Chowdhury and Uttam himself.
Our favourite? The pictures of the fake 1000-rupee currency notes used in Nayak, autographed by Ray!
