Uttam Kumar At 100: How Nayak Mirrored His Loneliness, Fame's Dark Side And Money Fears

Where does one start about the emotion that 'Mahanayak' (The Great Actor) Uttam Kumar is for the Bengali fandom, and just cinephiles at large? The actor celebrates his centenary birthday today, and the world of cinema and the people deeply besotted with it celebrate the icon that was the great actor - Uttam Kumar.

As a tribute, there's a special screening of one of his most iconic films - Nayak by Satyajit Ray that has once again made its way to the screens. And truly, there couldn't be a better film to re-watch to truly comprehend the life of this actor beyond the arc lights.

What makes Satyajit Ray's Nayak so special?

Maestro Satyajit Ray wrote Nayak with Uttam Kumar in his mind. It was a reflection of the slew of insecurities, fear of poverty, and the impending doom of fame disappearing into thin air one day, all of which Uttam Kumar battled throughout his life of stardom. The film would have been altogether abandoned had Uttam Kumar refused to be a part of it.

But as fate would have it, Uttam Kumar became matinee idol Arindam Mukherjee in Satyajit Ray's Nayak. The entire film takes place in a 24-hour journey on a train where he meets a young journalist, Aditi (Sharmila Tagore), and in a stranger he finds solace to speak aloud about his dark secrets, guilt, regrets and anxieties masked behind a glamorous movie star life. Intelligently juxtaposed with a series of dream sequences and flashbacks, Nayak was like a lyrical representation of everything you don't see of the superstar that you hold next to god.

And it all makes us dig deeper into how it mirrors Uttam Kumar's real life where he spent an eternity battling all the same emotions as he did as Arindam Mukherjee in Nayak.

The Financial Struggles

Nothing lasts forever, they say, and that saying gets truer in the life of an actor. One day you are famous, the next day you are not. When Uttam Kumar first began his journey in the 1940s, he had a string of flops and earned the moniker 'Flop Master General'.

He used to work as a clerk at Calcutta Port Trust (Port Commissioners) as a day job to support his middle-class family. During his sunset years, the late 1970s, he worked in some subpar melodramatic commercial cinema to keep the Bengal industry afloat, working with producers and directors in regards to a delusional idea of loyalty he had towards them. After his ambitious Hindi production Chhoti Si Mulaqat (1967) failed hopelessly, he was in immense debt. His romantic era with Suchitra Sen was also disappearing by that time, and he simply had to be in sync with what's new.

And thus came the paradigm shift to doing films to stay relevant, compromising on theatrical ideals, and how money mattered in the long run.

The 'Star System' That Ruled

In many ways, his personal struggles during that phase are reflected in Nayak, where Arindam Mukherjee gave up his amateur theatre life under the mentorship of Shankar Da to sink into the more lucrative commercial side of cinema. Shankar Da despises commercial cinema; he argues how they turn artists into puppets, but Arindam Mukherjee would not hear any of it. Shankar Da coming to him in dream sequences is an axis to moral judgement.

A particular scene in the film shows Arindam Mukherjee traversing through mountains of cash till it turns into quicksand, suffocating him. It drastically pulls him into a downward spiral as skeleton hands reach out to him with ringing telephones. It is here that Shankar Da makes a haunting appearance, disapproving of how the actor traded artistic talent for fame.

There was another scene where Arindam Mukherjee goes in to wash his face in the train's washbasin and finds himself staring at himself intently. This was the moment that reflected Uttam Kumar's own turmoil and the real-life fatigue of giving into the star system.

While in Nayak, Arindam Mukherjee chose to leave his theatre life behind and deep dive into cinema for its reach and the pinnacle of success, as he says "I will go to the top, the top, the top", in real life it was a tad different.

In real life, signing films that he did not care about was a defence mechanism to sustain his livelihood. After the colossal failure of his Hindi film Chhoti Si Mulaqat (1967), which he had done out of ambition, he did films like Amanush (1975) and Anand Ashram (1977) which still did not solve the money problem. In later years he was struck by a range of production losses and failed investments.

Not just earning his daily bread, Uttam Kumar went to the extent of shouldering the burden of technicians, small-time directors, and producers so that they have their jobs too. But to what avail?

Some contemporaries have also stated how Uttam Kumar often spoke about the price of stardom that swallowed his artistic offering. Having seen deep financial struggles before, Uttam Kumar was in the constant fear of his stardom vanishing, creative exhaustion and money anxiety.

It's Lonely At The Top

One of the most pertinent themes of Nayak was also the acute loneliness that Arindam Mukherjee faced. What Uttam Kumar got from his fans was god-level worship, but he often believed that they showered such devotion on his 'superstar persona', rather than the person he was. What he lacked was human connection.

It is this feeling that added more gravitas to his scene in Nayak where he performs an alcohol-fuelled breakdown sequence with such conviction. There are murmurs that Uttam Kumar used to jot down notes about how alone he felt when the cameras stopped rolling; it was unbearable.

There's a particular scene when he is in deep conversation with the journalist - Aditi (Sharmila Tagore) who, though at first indifferent to the star, slowly gets into his world as she discovers the profound weight he carries in his chest.

In one scene, a crowd of fans hammer on to the window shield of the train, clamouring for Arindam Mukherjee's attention, treating him as the unparalleled enigma that he was, and yet, he feels all alone. It's all noise.

A deeply thought-provoking representation of Uttam Kumar's life as the superstar and that in Nayak, blurring the lines between the two for how similar it was.

It's the ending of Nayak that truly puts all these depleting emotions of the Mahanayak into a nutshell. The journalist Aditi tears off her notes of the conversation had on the train, and shields Arindam Mukherjee's humanity once again. Thus proving once again, the deep sense of not belonging and being lonely was a lived reality of stardom, one that Uttam Kumar heavily paid both on and off camera.

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