This is the enigma of Basu Chatterji: His films did not have the box-office ingredients that could make them a distributor's hot pick, nor were they art house cinema that needed unravelling over many cups of tea. He was the quintessential 'middle-of-the-road' film-maker, a genre that he founded in Bollywood. His films, whether it be Chhoti Si Baat or Rajnigandha or Chitchor, were about common people and common problems, such as employment and love, social and economic inequalities, and joint family conflicts. Like fellow cartoonist R.K. Laxman, who created the 'common man', Chatterji too was an auteur of the common man, whose journey he portrayed with charm, delicate warmth and humour.
As a person, Basu was much like his common man: mild, unobtrusive and media-shy. He preferred not to scout for stars and mostly made his films with rookies, giving them respectability as artistes. And today, names like Amol Palekar, Vidya Sinha, Pearl Padamsee, Zarina Wahab, Nandita Thakur, Girish Karnad, Rakesh Pandey, Bindiya Goswami and Ranjit Chowdhry have become central to the history of Indian cinema, thanks to Basu.
Basu Chatterji: And Middle-of-the-Road Cinema, anecdotal in nature, goes behind the scenes of his films. It places Basu's cinema and television work in the context of the changing times, like the emergence of Rajesh Khanna, Kishore Kumar and Amitabh Bachchan, the Emergency, the return of Sarat Chandra's stories, the introduction of disco and the decadent phase of Hindi cinema in the 1980s. The book celebrates the work of one of the most underrated, yet successful, film-makers in Hindi cinema.
ANIRUDHA BHATTACHARJEE is a SAP consultant by profession, a musician by passion and a chronicler of music and cinema by vocation. R.D. Burman: The Man, The Music, his first book (co-written with Balaji Vittal), won the National Award for best book on cinema in 2012. Gaata Rahe Mera Dil (also co-written with Balaji Vittal) won the MAMI Award in its inaugural year, 2015. His other books include the critically acclaimed S.D. Burman: The Prince-Musician (2018, co-written with Balaji Vittal) and the bestseller Kishore Kumar: The Ultimate Biography (2022, co-written with Parthiv Dhar). Anirudha lives with his family in Kolkata. Basu Chatterji: And Middle-of-the-Road Cinema is his first book on a film-maker.
R.D. Burman: The Man, The Music, Anirudha Bhattacharjee and Balaji Vittal's biography of the music maestro, had captivated me from the very first page. Simple in style, the book was a treasure trove of interesting anecdotes. It was quite a page-turner, and richly deserved that year's National Award for best book on Indian cinema. Anirudha had, in turn, seen my films, and was vocal in his appreciation of them, both the writing and the direction. So, you may say that an informal mutual admiration society was formed. It seemed quite befitting, therefore, that he should ask and I should agree to write the foreword of his new book. That this book was on the work of a film-maker whom I greatly admired was the icing on the cake.
I had met Basu Chatterji a number of times. Both of us being makers of parallel cinema, or the so-called 'good cinema', it was inevitable that we bumped into each other fairly often at seminars, film festivals, special screenings, soirees and so on. We were both on the National Awards jury at one time and mostly agreed on the choice of worthy films. We were also members of a newly- formed association of film-makers who championed the cause of meaningful cinema. Alas, this venture, like so many well-intended but overreaching projects, was short-lived. I do remember, however, a charming episode connected with our very first meeting at Kantilal Rathod's bungalow in Pali Hill.
In attendance were luminaries such as Mani Kaul, Saeed Mirza, Ketan Mehta and Kundan Shah. After the meeting, Basu offered to give Virendra Saini a lift home as he lived in the same area.
Book's Contents and Sample Pages
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