The Matinee Idol

Abba (my father) bought us a black-and-white 24-inch Philips television in 1980, when he was Principal of Khulna Engineering College (now KUET) in Bangladesh. On the roof, a bamboo pole was fixed tightly with rope to the water tank, with an antenna at the top. A few aluminum pots and pans were tied to the antenna as well. The objective, every time, was the same: catch the Doordarshan Kolkata signal, some 145 kilometers away. It was a substantial effort - a three-way communication was involved in the whole process. Someone had to stand in front of the television to consistently check the picture quality and shout it out to the person standing outside, who then relayed it to whoever was up on the roof, trying to adjust the antenna!

Every Sunday, 7:00 pm. The more accurately the antenna was positioned, the better the picture - though most of the time it stayed hazy. But you could make it out, the hazy picture and the broken voice, enough to follow what was going on. Doordarshan Kolkata aired classic Bengali films every Sunday, and many of those days it was an Uttam Kumar film. For the uninitiated: Uttam Kumar is the legendary Bengali film actor from Kolkata, and his pairing with the equally popular Suchitra Sen reached cult status in the Bengali film landscape. Since we speak the same language, Bengali, on both sides of the border, Indian film personalities have always been just as popular in Bangladesh.

This was before satellite connections existed. Waiting eagerly for those Sunday evenings became a household ritual. The fanatic effort of angling a bamboo antenna toward a signal from across a border is a memory I carry with me forever.

Uttam Kumar and the Big Screen

In 1982, after Abba's transfer to Dhaka Engineering College (now DUET) as Principal, watching Kolkata Bengali cinema took a different turn. The ritual of setting up the antenna for the Sunday movie was gone - Dhaka is too far from Kolkata to catch any signal across the border. But other things took its place. Special screenings of Kolkata Bengali films, and sometimes Hollywood films, were arranged in selected cinema halls across the city.

So began the era of watching cinema on the big screen, with far better picture quality. I remember sitting on my mother's lap on a rickshaw, with my sisters and my aunt, to watch an Uttam Kumar–Suchitra Sen film - a matinee show, Sagorika - at BDR Pilkhana Hall in 1983. I liked it. My cousin, Khukumony, who was my age, and I were always told to stay quiet. When the lights went out and the national anthem played, the whole hall turned serious. We watched religiously, because a trip to the cinema hall was a rare occasion for us. Another draw was the interval - cold drinks and potato chips, when hawkers briefly got the chance to enter the hall. We would pinch our noses with two fingers to sip the Coke, because it was so strong back then, and the chips tasted heavenly.

My maternal grandfather held a Bachelor of Science and a Bachelor of Teaching degree from the British era, and worked in the Customs department (Land). Because of his transferable job, my mother and her elder sister lived with their maternal grandmother for a few years, so their schooling wouldn't be interrupted. That grandmother was a movie buff and used to watch Hindi and Bengali films at the nearby cinema hall in Bogra district. She took my mother and her elder sister along every time she went. Enjoying films and music is a passion that was passed down to my siblings and me through generations. I learnt to enjoy the charm of old black-and-white classics at a very young age.

Jyoti Cinema Hall

Around 1984–85, a cinema hall opened in Gulshan-1. I tried to trace its exact history, but oddly, there's almost nothing about Jyoti Cinema Hall online. Khukumony - my partner in crime - and I were thrilled - it was just a short walk from our grandmother's home on Road 136. Watching cinema suddenly became much easier. I remember watching the Uttam–Suchitra films Shap Mochan and Pothey Holo Deri at Jyoti Cinema Hall with my mother and aunt. There were a few other Bengali films that Khukumony and I watched on our own, secretly, without anyone knowing - scraping together whatever money we could and rushing to the hall. Since it was only a five-minute walk, our three-hour absence went unnoticed; everyone assumed we were busy playing on the roof or somewhere outside.

One of those secret trips still makes me laugh. We reached the ticket counter late. The film was about to start, and there were no tickets left. A "blacker" - someone who sold tickets at a higher price whenever the demand was high - took the twenty-seven taka we had, all of it, and told us he'd get us seats. He told us to follow him into the cinema hall. The movie had already started. We tiptoed in with him. He removed someone he knew from an aisle seat and gave it to us. Khukumony got furious - where would the other one of us sit? He then went outside and managed a stool, and set it up right beside that seat, in the middle of the walking aisle. We knew we'd been fooled, and we didn't mind at all - we were in, and that was enough. The movie we watched, one of us on the seat and the other on the stool in the aisle, robbed of every last taka we had, was a Bangladeshi film called The Lady Smuggler!

The Video Cassette Player

From the big screen, we came back to the small screen again in 1986–87. My maternal uncle got a VCP (a Video Cassette Player - more affordable than a VCR back then), and we would rent movies and watch them together. Every visit to my grandmother's home at Gulshan turned into a nightly gathering. After dinner, we'd settle in to watch old Bengali classics and English movies together - uncles, aunts, grandmother, cousins, all of us. The screen had shrunk from cinema-hall size to a small television at home, but the joy of it only multiplied.

Those days are gone now, but Uttam Kumar isn't. I still watch his films - they're on YouTube these days. The old charm of watching him on the big screen belongs to the past, but my admiration for him hasn't faded at all. Critics often say Suchitra Sen is overrated. I understand the argument. Even so, I believe the appeal of Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen together will always be eternal.

Why He Still Matters

There has already been enough analysis by others on why Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen have stayed so celebrated, so long after their films were made. I won't venture far down that road myself. But a few things stand out to me.

The cinema hall was the lone channel of weekend family recreation in those days, and against that backdrop came the impossibly popular pairing of Uttam and Suchitra. It was not simply two actors who happened to share a screen. The pairing became a shorthand for a certain kind of romance. In the conservative Bengali society of the time, the hero and heroine rarely touched on screen; almost every Uttam-Suchitra film ended in a single close embrace, and that restraint is exactly what made audiences go wild for it. It felt like the cherry on top of everything that came before.

Apart from the pairing itself, Uttam Kumar's naturalism stood apart from the theatrical, old-style of his time. He underplayed where others overplayed, and that restraint seems as modern even now. Hollywood's influence, the natural, graceful style of actors like Gregory Peck, was somewhat evident in his acting too. Moviegoers found someone who talked like them, felt like them, a man next door, except they could never actually reach him. He was known to everyone, yet unreachable, the ultimate hero, a superstar Bengali cinema hasn't produced since. And none of it was a solo effort. These films were built by a generation of skilled directors, writers, cinematographers, and technicians, all hungry and passionate to produce real craft.

The music mattered just as much. Bengali film songs of that era were extraordinary in their own right, composed and sung by artists whose work has outlasted the films themselves. Many people who have never seen the film can still hum the song, "Ei Path Jodi Na Sesh Hoy."

And finally, the enigma. Uttam Kumar became larger than any single role. The mystique around him, the "Mahanayak," was built by public memory, the films, and by myth. There isn't a single video interview of him available online. He died early, in 1980, before satellite television had matured. Most of his contemporaries lived on for decades, and we can watch their interviews today, but there is none of Uttam's. So he remains only what we can see of him in his films and read of him in old magazines. He never speaks for himself, on camera, about himself or his private life. Much the same with Suchitra Sen. Though she lived far longer, she withdrew into self-imposed exile from the early 1980s onward. Between the two of them, they built an enigma that no one since has quite managed to recreate.

For me, though, none of that theory explains it as well as the bamboo antenna on the roof of a Principal's bungalow in Khulna, or a rickshaw ride on my mother's lap to Pilkhana Hall. It doesn't explain, either, why he still fascinates me today. Was it his mannerisms, the way he held a cigarette between his lips while delivering a line, the way he smiled, the depth in his eyes? Uttam Kumar, for my generation of Bengali households, was not just an actor. He was a reason to climb onto a roof, tie pots and pans to an antenna, and wait.

July 24th was Uttam Kumar's 46th death anniversary. This is my tribute to the matinee idol.