Nirmal Dey (b. 1913)

Bengali director born in Mymensingh (now Bangladesh). Graduate in fine arts. Published short fiction in the 30s. Assisted Bimal Roy at New Theatres as cameraman, later sharing joint screenplay credit with him for Udayer Pathey (1944). Turned director when Murlidhar Chatterjee of MP Prod. persuaded him to give up his self-imposed retirement at Shantiniketan to make Basu Parivar. Débuted with the unfinished but important Bedeni based on a Tarashankar Bannerjee story (Ghatak took it over for a while before it was abandoned). His Sharey Chuattar launched the screen duo of Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen, followed by Champadangar Bou and a string of successes. Satyajit Ray rated Sharey Chuattar among the most important early Bengali sound films, regarding the director as the first genuine purveyor of Bengali social comedies. His formal training in the visual arts, literature and photography often yielded dexterous combinations of witty dialogue, inventive acting and a fluid narrative style that rarely resorted to middle-class sentimentalism while evoking, with a sense of self-mockery, its manners and conversational culture. Despite their success, Dey made only a few more films, scripting other film-makers’s work instead, including Gurudas Bagchi’s Samanaral (1970).

FILMOGRAPHY: 1952: Bedeni (incomplete); 1954: Champadangar Bou; 1955: Du-Janay; 1959: Nirdharita Silpir Anupastithi Tey.

Director