Guru Dutt: Indian cinema’s melancholy poet, consumed by the pain of living

In the pursuit of artistic excellence, poets and artistes across time have waged long battles with their inner demons, some eventually and tragically succumbing to them. The list of tortured, tormented creative geniuses throughout history is quite long: from Vincent van Gogh to Ludwig van Beethoven, from Sylvia Plath to Jimi Hendrix, from Kurt Cobain to Amy Winehouse, you name it. All of them produced some of their most celebrated works even as they were caught in the throes of personal tumults. Their stories show us how great art can spring from great pain, and how suffering, too, can be a crucible for creativity.

For Guru Dutt (1925-1964), madness was in the method. He was a genius who ended up sacrificing his life at the altar of heightened sensitivity — a typical trait associated with the artistically inclined. Chasing his artistic vision, relentlessly and recklessly, he pushed himself to the brink. His films, which sprang from the deep well of his personal experiences, are explorations into urban vicissitudes, feudal claustrophobia, the perversity of fate, the exploitation of artists at the hands of a cruel society focused on material gains, disappointments in love, and the unmistakable melancholia. They are also a testimony to the fact that Guru Dutt was far ahead of his time.

Beating his wings in a void

When Dutt died on October 10, 1964, reportedly due to the overdose of sleeping pills, he was all of 39, and though he had directed eight movies, including the big three cult films — Pyaasa (The Thirsty One, 1957), Kaagaz Ke Phool (Paper Flowers, 1959), and Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (Master, Wife, and Servant, 1962) — and acted in several others, one could argue that the best was yet to come, and he had many creative years of his life ahead of him. Nearly six decades after his death, his art remains ‘a vital living force,’ as Nasreen Munni Kabir describes it in Guru Dutt: A Life in Cinema (Oxford University Press, 1996), for those who swear by his style of filmmaking, characterised by a chiaroscuro of light and shade. 

Introverted, brooding and a man of few words, Dutt would hardly ever speak of his films or his life. It makes piecing together his portrait hard for his biographers like Kabir and Yasser Usman, who have to rely on the accounts of his family members, actors, filmmakers and others in his orbit who worked with Dutt, and saw him from close quarters. In Pyaasa, which made its way onto Time magazine’s list of 100 Greatest Movies, the verses of poet Vijay, played by Dutt, are accorded their due only after his death. Kabir writes that Dutt had a premonition of being such an artist; the fact that his contribution to Indian cinema was recognised years after his untimely death illustrates the cruel irony of belated recognition.

“Every artist’s work changes when he dies. And finally no one remembers what his work was like when he was alive; Sometimes one can read what his contemporaries had to say about it. The difference of emphasis and interpretation is largely a question of historical development. But the death of the artist is also the dividing line... The reason Giacometti’s death seems to have changed his work so radically is that his work had so much to do with an awareness of death. It is as though his death confirms his work: as though one could now arrange his works in a line leading to his Death, which would constitute far more than the interruption or termination of that line which would, on the contrary, constitute the starting point for reading back along that line for appreciating his life’s work…” writes John Berger in About Looking (1980), a book on the life and work of the Italian sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Kabir underlines that Berger’s words ring true in the case of Guru Dutt, too.

Though he had a troubled relationship (it threw them both in the bottomless pit of alcoholism) with Geeta Dutt, his wife, and one of India’s finest playback singers, ever since Waheeda Rehman entered the picture with Pyaasa, even she could not help admire his intense dedication to his craft. In Guru Dutt: An Unfinished Story (2020), Usman writes that she never tired of listening to Guru Dutt talking passionately about the stories he wanted to create on celluloid.

“The artist’s first love is his work. It is as simple as that, really, when everything boils down to the essentials. It appears to be the final explanation of the mystery of all artistic and creative endeavours, be it painting, writing, filmmaking, dancing or singing… From where does the inspiration come which causes those divine fires in the creator, fires which result in his frenzied seeking after artistic perfection? Where indeed? This question often strikes me when I watch my husband at work. I never cease to wonder at the devotion with which he works, his passion for perfection, the zeal which makes him forget people, circumstances, and the mundane, everyday realities. And I asked myself: ‘What is the secret of this frenzy? From where does it come?’” Geeta said in an interview.

Guru Dutt himself remained fully conscious of the risks he ran as a filmmaker trying to make the films that he wanted to make. Trying to find a balance between the demands of the market and his artistic indulgence, as a producer he had made a pact with himself that he would make a commercial entertainer for every serious arthouse outing. “In the formula-ridden film world of ours, one who ventures to go out of the beaten track is condemned to the definition which Mathew Arnold used for Shelly…‘An angel beating his wings in a void.’ I believe one who is out to go against the winds has to be prepared for bouquets as well as brickbats, for triumphs as well as heart-breaks, whether or not one makes a classic or collects the cash. It is this baffling unpredictability that gives the edge to the thrill of movie-making,” he once wrote. Dutt was that angel beating his wings in a void.

An indecisive, unsure genius

Guru Dutt was born as Vasanth Kumar Shivashankar Padukone into a lower middle-class family. His parents, Shivshankar Rao Padukone and Vasanthi Padukone, came from Mangalore’s Saraswat community — a Brahmin caste originally from North India which had settled in different parts of the country. He was inquisitive and stubborn as a child. His siblings, sister Lalitha Lajmi and brother Atmaram, remember him as a child who “always quiet, aloof, always lost in his own world, dreaming his own dreams.”

Shivashankar Rao Padukone, a clerk at the Burmah Shell Company, was a laidback, idealistic man, who wanted to be a poet. As he remained content with Keats, Shakespeare and Shaw, his family suffered. “We had a disturbed childhood…our father did not believe in success. He believed in poetry which is not enough to survive. We looked up to our elder brother Guru Dutt,” Lalitha told Usman. Their mother, on the other hand, was ambitious: married off at 12 and determined to acquire the education that she had missed as a child, she passed her matriculation exam in 1940. A year before, Guru Dutt had passed; he never went to college. Soon after, at the age of 16, he got his first job as a telephone operator in a mill on a monthly salary of Rs 40 to supplement his father’s meagre income.

As the family lived in rented houses, changing many houses in Calcutta — where Shivashankar Rao Padukone was posted — the idea of a stable home eluded them. His parents would often have heated arguments, which made the environment at home stifling. He wanted to escape the reality of his life. As did his mother, Vasanthi, who was caught in an unhappy marriage, like her own parents; the trauma seemed to be intergenerational. Guru Dutt’s life changed when his uncle B.B. Benegal, painter of film hoardings, introduced him to cinema. He gave him a dream — of recognising the artist in him, of producing works of enduring value.

Subsequently, Guru Dutt joined the Uday Shankar India Culture Centre in Almora (erstwhile UP), where he imbibed his ‘sense of rhythm, music and power of images’. But the Second World War was on, and Shankar found it hard to run the centre, finally closing it down in 1944. Guru Dutt returned home. But in the same year, he embarked on a new journey: as a choreographer with the Prabhat Film Company in Pune in 1944, where he met Dev Anand. Talking about Guru Dutt, the legendary actor once said: “He always looked and felt melancholic. He had a great cinematic sense and rhythm but would shoot and shoot and shoot, wasting a lot of footage. He was indecisive and unsure.”

The Hamlet of films

According to Abrar Alvi, who directed Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, Guru Dutt would lose inspiration the moment he felt that the film was not shaping up well. No amount of advice, or fear of financial loss could make him continue with the project. “He was the Hamlet of films. He has often been accused of vacillation and fickle-mindedness; of starting films and dropping them. Having known the man very closely I can say he was a very restless man — but genuine and sincere to the core. If a subject inspired him, on an impulse, he would start the film. But as he went along creating, his critical faculties would also have full play,” wrote Alvi. Guru Dutt, who had abandoned two films, Gouri and Raaz, despite spending substantial time and money on them, was always sincere when he started a film, and equally sincere when he dropped it.

Guru Dutt, however, would even pay the artists signed for the films that would be shelved. “If with the cancellation of a film in the making, some people who had got a break in that film, found their hopes ending— Guru Dutt’s heart bled for them. For days, I’d see him sulky and morose, not because his money went down the drain, but because he felt he had let down these people. He did not even have the heart to face them and people misunderstood. If only people could have understood his innate sincerity to his art,” Alvi wrote.

Pyaasa: A dream project

It was at 33 that Guru Dutt’s downward emotional spiral began; it was triggered after the collapse of Gouri, which would have been the first CinemaScope film of India, the first Bengali film of Guru Dutt, and the first to launch Geeta Dutt as an actor. “But it only ended up as the first unfinished, abandoned, shelved big budget project of Guru Dutt,” writes Usman. As a person, he was short-tempered and would lose his cool at the drop of a hat. He was also touchy, and would react to little things. According to Atmaram, sometimes, he left a lot of bitterness behind: “But he didn’t mind; it was only the film that mattered to him. He didn’t care about relationships.”

A year before Pyaasa, Guru Dutt had established himself as a filmmaker, with four big successes as a director — Baazi, Aar Paar, Mr & Mrs 55 and C.I.D. The commercial success made it possible for the thirty-one-year-old to finally live his dream: he had a bungalow in Bombay’s uber posh Pali Hill area, married to a legendary singer, and also a film banner as a producer-director-actor — Guru Dutt Films Pvt Ltd — in place. He could finally pick the story he had been waiting to tell on the big screen for more than a decade, a story he had written during his days of struggle in his early twenties, partly inspired by his father’s failed bid to be a poet. After Shivashankar Rao Padukone’s dream of a creative life was shattered, he became a bitter and frustrated man, who would scream at his children for no rhyme and reason. 

In Pyaasa, a critique of capitalism in the post-colonial and post-Independent India, Guru Dutt channelled the exasperation of his childhood, which was marred by acrimony, reclusion and constant fights. It was his dream project, and he wanted to give it his best shot. It also, ultimately, meant that he scrapped and reshot entire sequences if they did not turn out to be his liking. “He wanted it to be perfect. Sleep evaded him. The misuse of and dependence on alcohol had begun. At his worst, he started experimenting with sleeping pills, mixing them in his whiskey,” writes Usman. According to Lajmi, the serious films he was making also affected him. There was a marked change in his personality. He became more reclusive. “Sometimes he used to call me saying he wanted to talk about something. But whenever I went to meet him, he never really confided. He was disturbed,” she recollects.

End of a dream

By Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam¸Guru Dutt had reached a point of no return. He had lost the conviction that he would be able to replicate the success of Pyaasa. A year later, in 1963, his dream home, the bungalow at Pali Hill, was razed; Geeta believed that the bungalow was haunted. When writer Bimal Mitra (Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam is based on his 1953 Bengali novel) asked Guru Dutt, he said it was because of Geeta. When he prodded the latter further, Guru Dutt said: “Ghar na hone ki takleef se, ghar hone ki takleef aur bhayankar hoti hai (The agony of not having a home is as formidable as the terror and affliction of having one).” It reminded many of the scene from Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam where Guru Dutt, who plays a middle-aged architect, goes back to the haveli and asks the workers to pull it down. “His life and cinema kept merging with each other like that,” writes Usman.

The bungalow at Pali Hill had birthed great stories on celluloid. And it was also there that Guru Dutt had twice attempted to kill himself. “Once, after surviving a suicide attempt, a friend asked him, “Why should you have done it? You have fame, wealth, and the adoration of the masses. You possess all that most people crave for! Why are you so dissatisfied with life?” The filmmaker replied: “I am not dissatisfied with life, I am dissatisfied within myself. True, I have all that people crave for. Still I don’t have that which most people possess — a nook where one can repair [retire to] after the day’s task is done, where one can find some peace and forget one’s cares. If only I could get that, life would be worth living!”

It was not to be. In yet another instance of his film mirroring his life, the last shot he gave was for the film Baharen Phir Bhi Aayengi, which was reshot with Dharmendra later and released after Guru Dutt’s death. Essaying the role of a reporter, he hands over his resignation letter to his editor and says, “I am leaving.” When Guru Dutt breathed his last, it was at his rented apartment at Pedder Road, where he had been living alone. In Guru Dutt’s films, the idea of home is intricately problematized. As Rashmi Doraiswamy writes in Guru Dutt: Through Light and Shade (2008), his previous films had the lead protagonists establish a strong bonding with the street. However, from Pyaasa onwards, home takes a thematic and stylistic significance.

In Pyaasa, Vijay lives on the streets after he is thrown out of his brother’s home. Kaagaz Ke Phool is about the dehoming of Suresh Sinha (Guru Dutt), a director who resides in a grand mansion but lacks a true sense of ‘home.’ Even Shanti, his actress, who is an orphan, forges a sense of belonging in Bombay only to relinquish her career and abode to honour a promise to Sinha’s daughter. The theme of dehoming resonates prominently in Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam as well; it is epitomised by the tragic fate of Choti Bahu and the demolition of the haveli, which signifies the end of an era.