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Out of a family archive
Updated On: 05 May, 2024 07:57 AM IST | Mumbai | Sucheta Chakraborty
A Bengali film actress and director’s centenary has initiated efforts towards the restoration of her films, bringing attention to how family archives can contribute to the building of larger public histories while shining a light on the work of women professionals
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Arundhati Devi in Bicharak, 1959
On April 28, at Kolkata’s Nandan 3, the Arundhati Devi Centenary Project was launched with two film screenings of the Bengali film actress-director Arundhati Devi. The discussions began about eight months ago, son Anindya Sinha, professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, tells us. The reasons behind the initiative were two-fold. “One was that here was a woman who in some sense lived a life ahead of her time, but her creativity had gone largely unrecognised. She is in the minds of certain people of her generation, but she remains out of our common vision because we don’t talk about her.”
The long-term goal of the project started by the family—Sinha and wife Kakoli Mukherjee, niece, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, and grand-niece, Mrinalini Vasudevan—was to build interest around a centenary exhibition later in the year, accompanied by talks, screenings and a publication, and eventually an archive. This would include memorabilia, including written notes, scripts, pictures, stills and her song recordings for Bharat Records and Hindustan Records, as well as recordings of her contributions as a voice artist for All India Radio. “She was in fact, invited by AIR to sing Tagore songs on the day Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated. That was a very moving moment in her life which she often spoke about,” Sinha tells us. Arundhati Devi’s first directorial film Chhuti for which she was conferred the National award for best film based on high literary work in 1967 has been restored by the National Film Archive and was one of the films screened last weekend to mark her birth centenary. “We would like to see if we can restore more of her films, not only for the unique sensitivity and creativity she brought in, but also as a woman director, actor, and singer who straddled different words of the media as well as a very difficult personal life. I think she is an interesting role model for women even today, who are striving to establish themselves in a patriarchal world,” shares her son.
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