On the late actor-director Arundhati Devi’s birth centenary, her son Anindya Sinha called for good prints of her films as the family was facing an uphill task of archiving her works.
“It is very difficult to find good prints of her films. The prints are generally with the distributors. Doordarshan has prints of some of her films that they telecast. But they cannot locate them unless the dates of broadcasting are given,” Sinha said on the sidelines of the two-day centenary celebrations of Arundhati Devi at Nandan on April 28 and 29.
On her 100th birth anniversary on Monday, her directorial debut, Chhuti, which won the National Film Award for best film based on high literary work, was screened. Its print has been restored by the National Films Archive.
Chhuti was based on Bimal Kar’s novel Khwarkuti and Arundhati Devi wrote its screenplay and composed music for the film.
Before the film was shown cinematographer Palash Bandopadhyay, who worked on the sets of the film, reminiscenced: “No other film director has ever had to face what Arundhati Devi faced after Chhuti was critically acclaimed and became a success. People began to say that the film had been done by Tapan Sinha.”
As the better half of acclaimed film director Tapan Sinha, Arundhati Devi was often overshadowed but she stood her own ground. Sinha, too, encouraged her to do so. “Most scholarship in Bengali cinema has focused on the director trio of Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen, or the pairing of Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen. There needs to be more research done on other figures from the time, especially the women who contributed to the industry in its formative years. Arundhati Devi was one such personality,” said Mrinalini Vasudevan, grandniece of Arundhati Devi who has curated the event.
Her niece, art historian, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, and her grandniece Vasudevan, have sifted through the family archives in her New Alipore home, which have so far been preserved by her son, Anindya, and daughter-in-law, Kakoli Mukhopadhyay.
These have yielded albums of rare photographs, including those of her visit to Hollywood in 1952, her diaries, scribbled notes, film posters and other memorabilia.
There are plans to have an exhibition later this year based on all these materials and more that can be sourced.
On Sunday, Samik Bandopadhyay, the well-known cultural critic who interacted closely with Arundhati Devi and Tapan Sinha, delivered an inaugural lecture followed by the screening of Bhagini Nibedita. This 1962 film was directed by Bijoy Bose, for which Arundhati Devi was conferred the Bengal Film Journalists’ Association award for best actress in 1963.
Bandopadhyay said his interview with Arundhati Devi for Doordarshan also could not be located.