Tathapi

1950 122’ b&w Bengali d Manoj Bhattacharya pc Chhabi-o-Bani st Swarnakamal Bhattacharya sc Bimal Roy lyr Rabindranath Tagore, Atul Sen, Shyamal Gupta c Jayantilal Jani m Rabin Roy lp Pronoti Ghosh, Sunil Dasgupta, Sova Sen, Bijon Bhattacharya, Manoranjan Bhattacharya, Prabhadevi, Sudipta Roy, Ritwik Ghatak

A film remembered mainly for introducing several key Bengal IPTA figures to the cinema, including Ghatak. Although scripted by Bimal Roy from a story by noted leftist writer Swarnakamal Bhattacharya, the film stands at a tangent from the radical realist initiative launched by Roy’s Udayer Pathey (1944) and which culminated in Nemai Ghosh’s Chinnamul (1950). The plot has a mute heroine (a novelty at the time) named Kalyani (Ghosh, in her debut). Hero Pranabesh (Dasgupta) is tricked into marrying her and insists on continuing to meet his lover Sujata. A rather ugly encounter leads to Kalyani being injured and returning to her village. The hero, having a change of heart, saves Kalyani from committing suicide and brings her back home. Contemporary reviews in Chitrabani and Rupamancha commend the film’s sensitive portrayal of psychological changes and its refreshingly untheatrical observation of life. Bimal Roy apparently supervised the direction of this film.

Film