Bimalda’s unparalleled cinema showed his distaste for zamindars

HYDERABAD: Long before Jana Gana Mana was adopted as the national anthem in 1950, legendary director Bimal Roy immortalised the Rabindranath Tagore composition in his 1944 debut movie Udayer Pathey in Bengali. A pioneer of parallel cinema much like Satyajit Ray, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Mrinal Sen, Bimalda, as he was lovingly called, was born in East Bengal in a ‘zamindar’ family.


Long before Indian cinema entered the global map, Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen showed ‘it can’ at the Cannes Film Festival, and became the second Indian movie after

Neecha Nagar

to win an international award.

Nearly 52 years after he lost the battle to lung cancer, his daughter Aparajita Roy Sinha, who made Hyderabad her home 30 years ago, recalls her father’s distinguished body of work.

Do Bigha Zameen and Devdas are iconic films that stood the test of time, but her favourites are Sujata, Parineeta and Bandini. “Sujata is every woman’s tale. It remains relevant even now as women continue to be marginalised,” says Aparajita.

The characters in Bimalda’s cinema are drawn from his own experiences. The daughter of the master storyteller thinks the character played by Pran in Madhumati was based on her father’s “philandering uncle”. In 1958, Roy’s Madhumati won nine

Filmfare Awards

, a record of sorts.

“My father was against violence against women. He avoided subjects such as rape. He saw that women were badly treated in feudal societies, and witnessed a lot of injustice in his youth,” Aparajita says.

Do Bigha Zameen was a paradox. Bimal Roy, himself a ‘zamindar’ (landlord), was anti-feudal. This was reflected in the classic, which showed the saga of farmer Shambu Mahato (Balraj Sahini) struggling to repay his debt to a zamindar to reclaim his two bighas. The film shows Mahato lose his ‘two bighas’, and Roy had lost his zamindari in real life. “Although my father was a zamindar, he rejected that life, having lost his inheritance because of his unscrupulous cousins. He portrayed zamindars in poor light in all his films. He was inspired by the novels of Sarat Chandra Chatterjee, who held zamindars in distaste,” says Aparajita.

Three of Bimal Roy’s biggest influences were books, his mother Kironmoyee and wife Manobina, says Aparajita. “Tagore,

Premendra Mitra

and Subodh Ghose were a major influence, too,” she says.

Long before Aparajita made Hyderabad her home, her illustrious father, along with his family, visited the city on a holiday. Bimal Roy, according to Aparajita, was an intensely private man, and “hardly had time for family”. “It was a magical holiday in Hyderabad,” she recalls.

Bimalda passed away on January 8, 1966, leaving behind an unparalleled body of work and a lasting legacy.

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