Meet Dadamoni - Baba, Nana, Gangoly

KOLKATA: What did you see in this bloke?" Ashok Kumar had asked Moushumi Chatterjee at her wedding reception. "I've been waiting here for years to marry the Balika Bodhu!" he jested. "Really! Why didn't you tell me?" - the actress was quick to match wits with him. "Then I would have got married a long time ago!"
Anooradha Patel, grand-daughter of the legend we all love to address as Dadamoni, "always wanted to marry Nana who called me Nani," she revealed the special bonding at the inauguration of Ashok Kumar: His Light Years on March 27.The centenary celebration by Nandan and Tapan Sinha Foundation also brought to Kolkata the thespian's eldest daughter, Bharati Jaffrey and his co-actor Amol Palekar. Their reminiscences brought to light not only his sense of humour but his dedication to work, his eye for spotting talent, his ways of getting over glitches... In short, Dadamoni
the multifaceted personality of the master of behavioural acting who - as the driving force of Bombay Talkies in the late 1940s - gave shape to the industry we love to denote as Bollywood.
"Initially I did not know what to do with my hands!" Dadamoni says in Anmol Ratan, a docufeature directed by Nabendu Ghosh for Doordarshan. "But he devised ways to get over the awkwardness shared by most actors, especially on stage," said Palekar. "And so we saw him fidgeting with his buttons, pulling out a cigarette, putting it to his lips, not lighting it, or sometimes lighting it, holding the hand of his co-artiste..."
Viewers could match the actions when Chhoti si Baat or Anuraag played out on the screen. "He suffered from asthama, but no one would know this as he used the
pauses in his delivery to mask this," Tapan Sinha wrote in his memoirs. Director Prabhat Roy was assisting Shakti Samanta when Anand Ashram was made. "When I took the script with his dialogues in Hindi, he asked for the full dialogues because 'Uttam Kumar would be there!', he'd said. Likewise, Uttam Kumar asked for the full dialogues because 'Dadamoni would be there!'" Roy recalls.
"On the set, when he returned the script, I found he had made jottings about his action while Uttam Kumar would deliver his lines. In a near repeat, Uttam Kumar's copy had jottings detailing his actions when Dadamoni would speak his lines."
In his first production, Howrah Bridge, Shakti Samanta wanted to cast Ashok Kumar and Madhubala - the top stars of the time - but knew he could not afford them. However, having started at Bombay Talkies as assistant to Gyan Mukherjee, he had known Dadamoni in various capacities. So he narrated the story to him even as he made it clear that he couldn't afford his going rate. "Dadamoni very magnanimously signed the contract for Re 1 and said, 'Pay me when the film becomes a hit,'" Samanta's son Asim quotes his dad. "And that wasn't all. He also persuaded Madhubala's father to let her act in the film. At his suggestion, she heard the story on the sets of Mughal-e-Azam and signed a contract on identical terms as Dadamoni!"
At the accompanying exhibition, courtesy Ashok Kumar Foundation, Kolkatans got to see Homeopathy books owned by the actor who'd trained in this stream of medicine, photographs of numerous moments from his personal life, and prints of his paintings of nudes, landscapes, horses, still life, self-portrait. "I knew he painted but didn't know I'd see signatures of a master," said Wasim Kapoor, who has painted a portrait in homage. "The nudes in particular, with faces that feature no eyes, no nose, no lips, still make clear the full anatomy through the tonal handling!" he was amazed.
And who was the model? - daughter Bharati had once asked the legend. "Why, your mother, at various stages of our life!" he'd quipped.
Humour, clearly, flowed through his vein at every point in his life.