EXTRAORDINARY MOVIES ABOUT ORDINARY LIVES

This book by Anirudha Bhattacharjee celebrates the feelgood cinema of Basu Chatterji

- Aditya Sinha

BASU CHATTERJI AND MIDDLE- OF-THE-ROAD CINEMA

By Anirudha Bhattacharjee

PENGUIN VINTAGE

As soon as I saw Basu Chatterji on a store shelf, I wanted to read it. Though many current readers may not readily know of him—their touchstones of middle-of-the-road cinema would be gems such as Dum Laga ke Haisha (2015) or Badhaai Ho (2018)— he was, as Pearl Padamsee put it, the master of the low-budget film. His were the antithesis of the other memorable strain of the ’70s films—the angry-young-man movies. Chatterji’s films were anything but angry—they were middle-class character studies that sought to, as biographer Anirudha Bhattacharjee says in his book, find the lighter interludes of an ordinary life filled with burdens and obligations. Or, he depicted the independent-minded young woman.

Chatterji was loved by producers because he kept to a low budget and a quick three-week shoot. He was loved by actors because, as testified by the over 60 film personalities Bhattacharjee interviewed, the shoot was “like a picnic” (and film raconteurs like Utpal Dutt or Dadamoni Ashok Kumar also enjoyed the post-shoot whisky-fuelled “adda”). He was loved by cinema-goers because in the chaos that was urban India, in his films the oasis was the family.