Meet The Vintage Poster Boys

KOLKATA: When Satyajit Ray was flummoxed about who would be his Hindi-speaking heroine in Abhijan, he had two friends who would rack their brains with him - his artist friend Nirad Majumdar and Parimal Roy, a much younger pal. One day, when they were weighing their options together, Majumdar suddenly asked Ray, "What if you ask Waheeda Rehman to act?" The rest is history.
Parimal, the then college-going boy,
was witness to the excitement that followed. "Ray literally jumped at the idea. Rehman was by then a sensation, her Pyasa and Kagaz Ke Phool having taken the country by storm. He agreed that Majumdar had hit the nail on the head," the 75-year-old Roy remembers. Parimal knew Majumdar closely and it was with him that he had started frequenting Ray's Bishop Lefroy Road residence. Gradually, the bonding grew so strong that Ray started depending heavily on Parimal for getting him collectibles that were shown in many of his films.
The shawls that Victor Banerjee wore in Ghare Baire, the gold mohurs that Soumitra Chatterjee threw on the table in the same film, the masks that were used in Agantuk, were all Parimal's. He has been collecting curios all his life, but what interested him most was collecting posters of films, since his college days. Parimal perhaps has the largest collection of film posters, lobby cards and booklets in the country, and needless to say, he has a complete collection of the publicity material of Ray's films, something that no one else has. Researchers on film studies make a beeline for these posters to Parimal's Bhowanipore home. The University of California, which has a Ray archive, recently wanted to buy these posters at a hefty price, but Parimal refused.
Ray himself designed the posters and other publicity materials for his films. However, these originals were destroyed after the posters, lobby cards etc were produced. "We have to fall back upon the posters to know Ray's genius behind the innovative artwork," Parimal said.
While we have seen the Sarbajaya-Durga-Apu picture that was widely used on the poster of Pather Panchali, but there were several others that Ray had designed for the film, samples of which were collected by Parimal. There were specially designed posters of the film in English and Russian for worldwide release. These too are there in Parimal's collection, just like some lobby cards for Kanchenjunga that were hand designed by Ray on the spot at film halls.
Recently, the state government has published a book on the entire Ray poster collection, which has been in wide circulation since. After the book was published, Parimal gifted his entire Ray collection to Ray's son, Sandip Ray. "The collection needs archiving and conservation. I am old and cannot take so much responsibility anymore. Moreover, there's a constant pressure from collectors..." Parimal rues. He still has a large number of posters from the silent era, not to speak of at least 206 of the total 218 Uttam Kumar films.
Parimal is not alone in his quest. He has an ally in Rudrajit Mukherjee, a documentary filmmaker, who is also Sir Gurudas Bandopadhyay's descendant and lives in the family's heritage property at Narkeldanga
. The mysterious portals of the huge mansion, is perfect setting for the mammoth collection of posters, lobby cards and booklets from films.
Apart from a selection of Ray's films, you will also find posters of Ritwik Ghatak's Jukti Tokko Goppo and Tapan Sinha's Sagina Mahato and Jhinder Bondi. These are extremely rare and will probably not be found with any other collector, leave alone distributors for these films. A large number of posters from the silent film era, 1917-1934, will also be found in Mukherjee's collection. Mukherjee, too, has a collection of posters of nearly all of Uttam Kumar's films.
However, what perhaps sets him apart is the collection of 1,600 booklets of yesteryear films. Those days the synopsis of films, stills and all the songs would be printed in these booklets that were collected by viewers, mostly for the lyrics. The school of texts and cultural records of the Jadavpur University found this collection perfect archival material for the film studies department and under the leadership of academician Sukanta Chaudhuri the entire collection was recently digitised.
"I have some rare Ray posters like the kiosk posters that he designed for Devi. Again, there was some publicity material that only I have because I chanced upon an opened box of Kanchenjunga's publicity material that was left by the distributor of the film with Kamal Ghosh, the owner of Megaphone company," confides Mukherjee.
Memories preserved in posters
Even today when he finds time, he roams in the lane behind Jyoti Cinema Hall. This lane is popularly called poster gully and is a collector's paradise, since old publicity material often find their way here. His latest buy is a set of 20 posters from Desh Premee.