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The Melancholic, Joyous Soul of Guru Dutt

By Mayukh Sen

Features—

Jun 8, 2022

The Melancholic, Joyous Soul of Guru Dutt
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While working on what would become his final film, Paper Flowers (1959), the Indian director Guru Dutt repeatedly heard pleas from friends warning him against making it at all. “It’s just your personal life,” the music director S. D. Burman, who composed the film’s songs, reportedly told Dutt. He was too close to the material at hand, his allies reasoned; the film seemed like a portrait of Dutt’s own grievances as an artist navigating commercialism. But Dutt didn’t listen, his commitment to his vision too unwavering. He proceeded with production anyway.

Paper Flowers concerns the creative life of the filmmaker Suresh Sinha, played by Dutt himself, and his entanglement with Shanti (Waheeda Rehman), who becomes a studio star with Suresh’s assistance. But as Shanti’s profile rises, personal circumstances pull them apart, and their partnership—both artistic and romantic—wilts. With time, Suresh becomes a public punchline known for making flops. He lapses into an alcohol addiction, turning him into a vagrant. Living in squalor, he dies unloved by the film fraternity that once showered him with such respect. 

Dutt, thirty-four upon the film’s release, had established himself as a multi-hyphenate of great repute by that point—a sensitive actor, a skilled director, a producer whose work attracted healthy box-office sums—but Paper Flowers signaled a turn in his good fortunes. The first Indian film ever shot in CinemaScope, it was a formally inventive project, but those meticulous production values couldn’t buoy it against hostile reception from both audiences and the press. Dutt had put an obliquely similar story to celluloid before with his opus, Pyaasa (1957), about a poet who toils for recognition in a greedy world; it was both a critical and commercial success. But he heard boos after Paper Flowers’ initial screening in Mumbai’s Maratha Mandir theater. At other showings, audience members reportedly heckled Dutt when he appeared on-screen.

Dutt took these matters so personally that he settled for producing and acting for the remainder of his short life. He was able to recoup losses by producing and starring in Chaudvin ka chand (1960), a romantic drama set in Lahore and directed by Mohammed Sadiq, a member of the group known colloquially as the Guru Dutt team; Dutt followed this with the critical darling Sahib bibi aur ghulam (1962), a chronicle of a woman’s steep descent into alcoholism in nineteenth-century India directed by Abrar Alvi, also a mainstay of Dutt’s production company. But his career came to an abrupt end shortly thereafter: Dutt died by a suspected suicide in 1964, just thirty-nine years old, after a handful of failed attempts. (The precise cause of death remains a matter of dispute.)

The specter of Dutt’s death has had a far-reaching effect on his legacy, casting a melancholic pall over his filmography while also ennobling him in public memory. The adoration for him now stretches far beyond India. Since its release sixty-three years ago, Paper Flowers has undergone a critical reevaluation, receiving a significant boost when it, along with Pyaasa, was named in the British film magazine Sight & Sound’s poll of the greatest films ever made. Dutt’s memory gained more global attention in 2005, when Pyaasa was the only Hindi film on Time magazine’s list of the greatest films of all time. The magazine’s critic Richard Schickel situated Dutt in a group of Hindi filmmakers around that era alongside Raj Kapoor and Bimal Roy. They, Schickel posited, borrowed cues from the grit of Italian neorealist traditions and the sweep of Hollywood melodramas, applying those inspirations to musicals meant to have wide audience appeal. Dutt’s films continue to inspire and provoke dissection today. Over the decades, a considerable number of biographies and book-length studies of Dutt’s life and work have appeared, most of them published in India. This literature understandably tends to fixate on his death, linking his private pain to his public output. But pigeonholing Dutt as an artist who trafficked only in tragedy does not honor his range, nor the full scope of his oeuvre.

Dutt knew anguish early on. Born Gurudutt Padukone in 1925 in what is now the Indian state of Karnataka, he lived in dire financial straits as a child. The death of a younger brother shortly after birth traumatized him. A quiet and introspective kid, Dutt took after his father, a clerk and journalist who wanted to be taken seriously as a writer. To help his family make ends meet, Dutt aborted his studies after graduating high school at sixteen, working as a telephone operator. But his passion for the performing arts was too intense to silence. An uncle named B. B. Benegal, a painter, noticed Dutt’s inclination toward dance, enrolling him in the revered choreographer Uday Shankar’s academy in 1941. It was there that Dutt picked up a camera, taking photos of various goings-on at the school. “I used to get impressed by simple things,” he would later say of the images he saw through that camera. “I saw how complex life is, and how simple too.”

The school closed due to lack of funding in 1944, and Benegal steered Dutt to the​ Prabhat Film Company, where Dutt was hired as a dance director on contract. Prabhat was one of the leading studios in North India throughout the 1930s, yet its influence began to wane during the following decade, according to the scholar and filmmaker Nasreen Munni Kabir’s book Guru Dutt: A Life in Cinema (1996). The 1940s saw the gradual collapse of Hindi cinema’s studio system in favor of independent productions. Part of this change had to do with wartime limitations like restrictions on film-stock imports, which made studio work costly. Studios continued to put out films of influence—Bombay Talkies, for example, released what was arguably Hindi cinema’s first blockbuster, Gyan Mukherjee’s drama Kismet (1943), which popularized certain narrative conventions like putting an antihero at the center of a film. But the demise of studios steadily led to a shift away from the theatricality that had characterized much of Hindi cinema and toward more naturalistic storytelling, the kind in which Dutt felt at home. While at Prabhat, Dutt occasionally dabbled in acting while also serving as an assistant director. He fell in with a crowd of similarly ambitious talents, like the director and actor Dev Anand, and Dutt’s interest in filmmaking as a profession grew.

India’s independence from Britain in 1947, along with the gory Partition, would slow the industry’s momentum. Talent began migrating to what is now Pakistan, for example, leaving Hindi cinema in a state of flux. Dutt felt this tumult acutely. His contract with Prabhat concluded that same year. Dutt failed to find a consistent job for a few months, the rejections unceasing. He managed to secure a few intermittent gigs as an assistant director after that period of stasis. But it was Anand, who cofounded his own production company ​in 1949, who helped tunnel Dutt out of this slump, asking him to direct the house’s second film, Baazi (1951), a celebrated noir with Anand at its center. Around this time, Dutt met many other artists who would become his collaborators, including the singer Geeta Roy (later Geeta Dutt), his future wife.

Suffering seems like such an abiding presence in Dutt’s later work that it can be tempting to overlook the delight in his early directorial efforts, ones that he also starred in. His charisma is the engine that powers Baaz (1953), an adventure film that casts him as a prince in sixteenth-century Portuguese India, and Aar paar (1954), a comedy with noirish notes in which he plays a taxi driver courted by two women. Not all of these films set the box office alight. It was the financial failure of Baaz, in fact, that caused him to strike out on his own, forming what he called Guru Dutt Productions (later Guru Dutt Films Private Ltd.). He could, at last, make films that reflected his sensibilities without too much meddling from other parties. Dutt’s films from this era hint at the fierce social criticism that he would start to articulate more openly as his career progressed. Mr. & Mrs. ’55 (1955) is a showcase for the incandescence of its female lead, Madhubala, who plays a charmingly insolent rich woman who weds a cartoonist (Dutt) in an arranged marriage, only to gradually gain a sense of independence from the rigidity of her strict upper-class upbringing. The question of what freedom is, and who defines it, animates this film.

Baaz

The more morose Pyaasa, then, can seem like a tonal departure from such titles. Dutt wrote the draft for the screenplay around 1947, a decade before its release. The memories of the constant setbacks he faced in that period stayed with him. Dutt stars in the film as an underappreciated poet named Vijay, whose work is valued so little that it’s sold as wastepaper. He becomes acquainted with Gulabo (Waheeda Rehman), a sex worker; they are both pursuing maligned lines of work, professions that the outside world regards as unworthy of respect. But it is only after Vijay’s presumed death in a train accident that gatekeepers in publishing—the same ones who once overlooked his talents—seek to capitalize on his gifts and profit from his work. In the film’s unsettling but hopeful final gesture, Vijay (who is actually alive) and Gulabo shirk that demeaning existence. Dutt imagines a life away from the pressures of capitalist production, which reduces creative minds to mere sums of money and disrespects their humanity. The two outcasts seek peace somewhere better. 

Vijay’s torment becomes crushingly apparent in the romantic duet “Hum aapki aankhon mein” (“What if my heart were to dwell in your eyes?”). In this musical sequence framed by V. K. Murthy (the cinematographer on many of Dutt’s films), Vijay fantasizes about being with a past lover, Meena (Mala Sinha), now married to a prosperous publishing executive. Vijay pictures Meena’s shadow descending a looping set of stairs on what looks like an elaborate film set: Plumes of fog waft through the air, while balloons seem to fall from the sky. Vijay, outfitted in a suit, awaits her at the foot of the staircase. The two then begin to dance in isolation, undisturbed by anyone who might interfere with their bond. But even in this seeming state of bliss, Meena rebuffs Vijay’s expressions of devotion. “What if I close my eyes and punish your heart?” she sings to him. Murthy’s camera toggles between intimate close-ups of both characters and longer shots that situate them in this artificial milieu and thus reemphasize the impossibility of their union. By the song’s end, Meena floats away from Vijay and ascends to that higher plane from which she came, a station that Vijay, a man with little financial stability, cannot occupy. His face freezes in disbelief as she disappears, and the dream fades. Though initially included in Pyaasa to lift the film’s otherwise somber mood, the song is a bittersweet reminder of the personal indignities Vijay must face, ones that ultimately drive him toward that rebellious decision he makes at the film’s end.

Pyaasa

But it is perhaps Paper Flowers, with its pristine aesthetic polish, that captures the essence of Dutt’s art more forcefully than any other entry in his filmography. The film is not without blemishes: Today, one might wince at the comic interludes involving Sinha’s jester-like brother-in-law, Rocky (Johnny Walker, another frequent Dutt collaborator). These moments of levity seem like strained endeavors to broaden Paper Flowers’ reach to a mass audience, but they may strike modern-day viewers as discordant with the film’s focus on the tortured artist who drifts toward another lonely woman. The film opens on the image of Suresh, now an elderly man with cottony white hair, staggering onto an unpopulated film set as he recalls his past life. “Once my path was strewn with flowers,” he sings. “Now, I cannot even hope for thorns.”

Suresh, the viewer learns, is estranged from the mother of his teenage daughter (Baby Naaz), a child he treasures dearly. His in-laws view filmmaking as a dirty profession. He meets the woman who will become his life’s great love, Shanti, by chance one night. Shanti sells medicine for a living, but Suresh sees the star of his next film in her. Waheeda Rehman, who plays Shanti, is a fluid, open performer, her delicate touch conveying Shanti’s fragility and fortitude in equal measure. At first, Shanti is naive, innocent; she shudders at the mere mention of brandy, for example. The mechanics of filmmaking—the camera inching toward her, the oppressive glare of the lights—initially terrify her when she stumbles onto a set by accident. Later, men associated with the studio criticize her endlessly, telling her she’s too plain to become an actress. Filmmaking, Dutt knew, could be a site of pain, even humiliation.

But Shanti eventually learns to acclimate to this hostile new environment. When she attends a party to promote the film, Suresh recoils at her appearance: her makeup, her glittering dress. It is as if the superficial glitz of filmmaking has corrupted her basic purity. He tells her, cruelly, that she looks like a monkey. Suresh is not always an easy character to like, which may partially explain why audiences were so cool on Paper Flowers initially: it is a risk to hinge the plot on a man who can treat others so shabbily.

Paper Flowers

But Dutt, through both his performance and direction, makes Suresh’s plight sympathetic. His daughter resents Shanti, convincing her to leave Suresh. Soon after, he loses custody of the child. This accumulation of grief draws him closer to alcoholism, a disease that destroys him. Dutt’s narrative choice here was a gamble for that era, too: friends told Dutt that moviegoers were used to misery befalling women, not men. And though Shanti is an ill-fated figure in her own right—she returns to acting by the film’s end out of duty, yet the profession seems to give her little fulfillment without Suresh’s nurture and care—it is Suresh’s anguish that consumes the film. In hindsight, the lack of appreciation for Paper Flowers upon release isn’t terribly surprising, for its outlook is fundamentally more pessimistic than Pyaasa’s. The film entertains no possibility that one can find respite from the punishing demands of commercial art. Yet its great strength is that Dutt makes this cynicism feel earned rather than cheap. His critique of the fickle film industry lands with such sharp force because he shows how such ruthlessness can destroy a person’s soul.

Though Dutt did not direct after Paper Flowers, subsequent works from his team bore his stamp: Chaudvin ka chand, in which two men fall for the same woman, ends, too, in despair. And like Paper Flowers, Sahib bibi aur ghulam is a striking parable of addiction, portraying the unromantic reality of alcohol dependence with clarity. That film is anchored by the performance of Meena Kumari, who plays the neglected wife of a loutish zamindar. In an effort to salvage what’s left of her marriage, she begins drinking as heavily as her husband. A longtime alcoholic in real life, Kumari would die in 1972, at thirty-eight, of liver cirrhosis. She is just one of the many talents in Dutt’s orbit who also died before making it to forty. Madhubala, his star in Mr. & Mrs. ’55, died in 1969, at thirty-six, of the lingering effects of a ventricular septal defect.

It is as if tragedy is woven into the grammar of Dutt’s cinema, so that agony is everywhere you look. But so, too, is joy, which lurks just beneath that surface: an image from Dutt’s filmography that endures is that of Suresh and Shanti from Paper Flowers as they sit in the backseat of a car, smiling as they realize they are falling in love. In these moments of pure pleasure, one senses Dutt’s urge to keep creating in the face of life’s struggles, to see flowers in a path strewn with thorns.

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Mayukh Sen is the author of Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America (W. W. Norton & Company, 2021). He is currently writing a biography of the Indian-born Hollywood actor Merle Oberon, which will be published by W. W. Norton & Company in winter 2025.

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