MEMOIRS
Eerie connection
AJIT DUARA
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The letters confirm that Guru Dutt was not acting when portraying suffering on screen.
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a vital addition to biographical material on Guru Dutt.
Yours Guru Dutt, Intimate Letters of a Great Indian Filmmaker; Nasreen Munni Kabir; Roli Books; 2006; Price not stated
YOURS GURU DUTT is a brief anthology of 37 letters that Guru Dutt had written to his wife, Geeta Dutt and their sons, Tarun and Arun, between 1951 and 1962. Even though Guru Dutt died in 1964, two years after the last published letter in the book, this collection gives you some idea of his state of mind.
Dutt's films we know and love. What is unsettling is the eerie connection between the way he writes to his wife and the emotions that are reflected in some of his films. As we know, Dutt died of an overdose of sleeping pills (probably combined with alcohol) on October 10, 1964, at the age of 39. At the time of his death he had separated from his wife and was living alone in an apartment on Peddar Road, Bombay. His difficult marriage and his equally complex, and ultimately broken, relationship with actress Waheeda Rahman was said to have led to this tragedy. But is that true?
Beautifully presented
If you read the letters carefully and objectively, you can clearly see that Guru Dutt had started suffering from depression way back in 1951, even before he married playback singer Geeta Dutt (nee, Roy). The letters are written in Hindi and English and are beautifully presented in this book by Nasreen Munni Kabir.
A young man of 26 writes to a young woman who has agreed to marry him in principle but cannot do so at that exact moment (they eventually married in 1953). Yet he seems to be depressed about the delay and talks about how she is making him unhappy.
Then, in 1952, Guru Dutt indicates that he is aware of his mood fluctuations though he doesn't understand its causes. Is she the cause of his unhappiness? Clearly not. This is a man with clinical depression who has some idea of what is happening to him but sees it as simply being `moody'.
Guru Dutt's friend and collaborator, the great Urdu poet and lyric writer of "Pyaasa", Sahir Ludhianvi, intuitively understood the artiste's condition and portrayed it in a couplet that translated as: "We are flowers, we brought happiness to others/ For ourselves, only the dark stain of sorrow." Guru Dutt, as Nasreen Munni Kabir points out in her Introduction, had the shortest career of any outstanding film maker in India, making films for just 13 years between 1951 and 1964, and yet made a hauntingly beautiful film in every genre of Hindi cinema: the crime thriller ("C.I.D."), the costume drama ("Baaz"), the Muslim social ("Chaudhvin ka Chand"), comedy ("Aar Paar", "Mr &Mrs 55"), social melodrama ("Pyaasa") and the period film ("Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam"). His creative inspiration in writing scripts, his versatility as an actor, his inventiveness in picturising songs, and his direction of camera are still unparalleled in Hindi cinema. Yet he was so terribly unhappy. Is that necessarily the human condition of a truthful artist?
Solcae in cinema
Probably not. But what do you say about a man in his twenties who writes to his beloved in these words: "I sometimes wish I was not born, or sometimes I wish I was dead, or sometimes I wish I am not that what I am and didn't know you. Like a madman I roam about trying to find solace, which I don't get anywhere." The solace he speaks about looking for, he found in cinema. In his hands the medium turned to poetry, consistently and eloquently in every film he made.
As audiences we are grateful for it. But reflect, for a moment, on what the effect of these letters could be on young playback singer, Geeta Roy? Unfortunately, we have no record of the letters she wrote to him. Guru Dutt evidently didn't keep them.
But we do know that just eight years after her husband's death, this talented artist who sang some of the songs that Guru Dutt is best known for picturising, died of cirrhosis of the liver. She was 42.
These letters published in the elegantly produced book, Yours Guru Dutt, are a vital addition to biographical material on Guru Dutt. They function as sub-text to his films.
They confirm that Guru Dutt was not acting when portraying suffering on screen in "Pyaasa".
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