When Mrinal Sen used Amitabh Bachchan’s baritone voice in ‘Bhuvan Shome’

It was 1969. Mrinal Sen had finished shooting ‘Bhuvan Shome’ in Bhavnagar, Gujarat. During the days he was editing the film in Bombay, he had gone over to the house of friend and script-writer, K A Abbas, who had just begun work on ‘Saath Hindustani’. Abbas was sitting with a group from which he proposed to pick his cast and crew.
Mrinal Sen told him that he wanted a good voice as the narrator of his film and would prefer a new voice.
A young lad stepped out from among those seated and told Sen “Ami Bangla jaaney” (I know Bengali). Sen told “the boy” his Bengali was bad but his voice was good, and good enough for the narration in Hindi. That ‘boy’ was none other than Amitabh Bachchan. Abbas allowed Amitabh to take on the assignment.

When the work was done, Sen said he would not be able to pay him much. The boy did not want payment and said he didn’t do it for money. Sen insisted and paid the amount. The boy then asked whether his name would appear in the titles. Sen replied in the affirmative. The boy’s name was Amitabh Bachchan. “But in the title, put only Amitabh. Don’t mention Bachchan”, he pleaded and Sen agreed.

In the credit titles of Mrinal Sen’s ‘Bhuvan Shome’, the voice-over artiste’s name “Amitabh” appears last. Indeed, this must be the only film in which the Bachchan name figures at the end and not even in full. The narrator’s baritone voice — heard for less than five minutes at the film’s beginning and end — later became famous.
Bhuvan Shome bagged many awards, including the National Award in 1970, when the director and his voice-over artiste met in Calcutta. When the two went to a function at a film journalists’ association, a reporter, on seeing Amitabh, asked Sen, “Is he your next hero?” Sen admitted he liked the idea, “But I have to find a role that fits him”. Amitabh himself was keen on acting in one of Sen’s films. Sen would have liked to cast him in ‘Interview’ and the actor too would have liked the role. The hitch was that Mrinal Sen wanted an ordinary looking person. “And Amitabh, even then, was a striking personality”.

What’s fascinating is that “the boy” remembered all this. Once the Bollywood icon even corrected a critic that the first voice-over he did was not in 1983 for Satyajit Ray’s ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’ but for ‘Bhuvan Shome’.