Amitabh Bachchan has been approached to play Rabindranath Tagore in the first ever biopic made on the Bengali writer-poet, confirms its director. Research for Sound of Silence is currently on under the aegis of the I&B Ministry

That Hindi film superstar Amitabh Bachchan may play Rabindranath Tagore, has been spinning in rumour circles for a while. Now, Sunday MiD DAY's source insists, he will. Director Ujjvwal Chattopadhyaya will helm Sound of Silence, a film that tracks 20 years of Rabindranath Tagore's life in Shantiniketan.

Here's our illustrator Jishu Malakar's take on what actor Amitabh
Bachchan will look like in Rabindranath Tagore's get-up

Chattopadhyaya, who earlier directed the Manisha Koirala-starrer Escape From Taliban, recently released audio albums of Tagore's works, voiced by Bachchan. "For the last four years, I've wanted to do something with Tagore," says the young director. He began work on the script that's based on Tagore's Hey Bondhu Bidaye (Farewell My Friend), when scriptwriter-lyricist Javed Akhtar approached him with the idea.

Named after the Simon and Garfunkel song, Sound of Silence will be made in Hindi and English. The film is still being researched, although the first draft of the script is ready. Akhtar is writing the screenplay, and the film so intrigued the Information and Broadcast Ministry, that the crew was given access to the national archives.
"I'm working with a 36-member team, and we plan to include Tagore's music and his art in the film," says Chattopadhyaya. But government support also means the filmmaker will have to desist from showcasing even remotely controversial parts of the author's life.

While Bachchan's participation hasn't been formalised, it ought to happen once the script is ready for narration. "Yes, he has been approached," confirms Chattopadhyaya, adding that casting for other roles hasn't begun yet.

Sound of Silence will explore Tagore's life as seen from his writer son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter's perspective. "You won't see him as a Nobel Laureate, but as a family man. Humourous anecdotes form a big part of the film."

Tagore's dream, when he started a school in Shantiniketan (180 km north of Kolkata) in 1901, was to allow individuals to be educated, so they would be equipped to accept any situation life threw at them. Later, in 1918, the formal foundation for Viswa Bharati, a university for higher studies, was laid at Shantiniketan. The operative word in the curriculum was 'simplicity'; the courses included writing, painting and performance arts, with most classes being held in open-air spaces.

A source adds that the biopic will also touch upon Tagore's travels abroad undertaken after 1920, most of them to collect funds for Viswa Bharati. "That's when he met Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and German physicist Albert Einstein," reveals the source.

Fast fact
In the late '60s, Bachchan left his job as a freight broker in Kolkata, Tagore's hometown, to act
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Debuts in: 2011

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