THE MASTER OF TEARS
GURU DUTT
(1925—1964)
Legendary director, producer and actor
By Nasreen Munni Kabir
The British Film Institute in London recently screened the finely restored version of Pyaasa and I was asked to introduce the film. There were about 50 people in the audience, some were strangers to Indian cinema and others were diehard fans. The lights dimmed and, as it invariably does, Pyaasa wove its magic from the very first scene where we see the poet Vijay (Guru Dutt) lying on the grass in a park, composing a poem on nature. Sahir’s verse is heard in voice-over and is really a prelude to this sad and moving film. As Vijay walks away, the poems ends with the lines:
Main doon bhi toh kya doon tumhein, ae shokh nazaaron
Le de ke mere paas kuchh aansu hain kuchh aahen
[What can I give you, oh splendid nature?
All I have are a few tears, a few sighs]
As the film ended and the houselights went up, I could tell by the faces of the uninitiated that they too had been drawn into the melancholic world of Vijay, the screen character, who has for us merged with the persona of Guru Dutt himself. Vijay is a man who does not believe he will receive love in return for love. He has a sharp disdain for the hypocrisy and the growing materialism of the world around him and questions the very point of his own life—yet in Vijay, we see virtues that make us envious. We find an unmatched and prized period of cinema in Pyaasa, while it reminds us of a glorious and perhaps romanticised past in which values and human dignity mattered above all.
In 1983, when I was researching a documentary I wanted to make on this remarkable director, I met many of his close family and colleagues. His mother, Vasanthi Padukone, in her small two-room Matunga flat from where Guru Dutt would go to work at Prabhat Film Company in Pune, talked about her adored strong-willed and inquisitive child. His sister, the well-known painter Lalitha Lajmi, remembered her young loving brother entertaining his siblings in the Calcutta of their childhood. His uncle B.B. Benegal was reminded of his 17-yearold nephew’s determination to learn dance under Uday Shankar; his brother Atmaram recalled how Guru Dutt tried repeatedly to cast another actor before facing the camera himself (Shammi Kapoor was approached for Aar Paar, Sunil Dutt for the shelved Raaz, Dilip Kumar for Pyaasa and Shashi Kapoor for the role of Bhoothnath in Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam). Abrar Alvi laughed as he remembered Guru Dutt’s ears would go red if he told a lie. Waheeda Rehman spoke of the day they first met in Hyderabad when he asked her in a quiet tone whether she was a Muslim and if she spoke Urdu.
Reflecting on Guru Dutt’s passionate yet stormy marriage to the hugely talented Geeta Dutt, Kaifi Azmi described his confused state of mind when making Kaagaz ke Phool. Reminded of a passing comment, Raj Khosla said: “Dev Anand was a friend of mine. One fine day he told me that he’s giving a picture to direct to a friend called Guru Dutt, and would I be an assistant? I agreed, but we never knew ‘a friend called Guru Dutt’ was going to be a world famous director.” And V.K. Murthy’s memory was that of a gentle, mild man, adding with a wicked smile: “But he was a tiger on the set.” There were as many Guru Dutts as interviewees. Their anecdotes and observations were like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that perhaps no one could ever solve.