Out there every film critic worth his or her salt is writing about the fifty years of Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de soufflé (Breathless), including those in Hollywood which has suddenly remembered that the French filmmaker deserves an honorary Oscar. Back home anyone with half a glass cinematic eye is celebrating the golden anniversary of Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-capped Star), his biggest commercial success at that time.
Both, needless to say, were landmark films.
But there were many other films that were made in that very year (I will need to restrict myself to India here because of logistical constraints). You will be surprised to know which all. If you read on, you will know that the year 1960 was a productive year in Indian cinema history, and this list features the works of greats.
There are, of course, other films that were made that year. This is my pick.
1. Anuradha; Love of Anuradha
Dir: Hrishikesh Mukherjee
Story: Sachin Bhowmik
Music: Ravi Shankar
Cast: Balraj Sahni, Abhi Bhattacharya, Leela Naidu, Baby Ranu, Nasir Hussain, Asit Sen, Ashim Kumar, Madhav Chitnis, Bhudo Advani, Hari Shivdasani, Mukri, Rashid Khan
This version of Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary predates Ketan Mehta’s Maya Memsaab by decades. Anuradha Roy is a lively and successful singer who marries a dull but idealistic doctor. Her former lover re-ignites pas memories and persuades her to return to singing. But she is subsequently reconciled to her new life and husband. Some poetic shots play in life’s ironies: Anuradha looks at palm trees in the moonlight, the doctor gazes at wriggling worms through his microscope. The chiaroscuro of life, and that of past and present, are amazingly cut by Mukherjee. More amazing is Sahni’s restrained acting in this conservative take on marriage.
2. Baishey Shravan; The Wedding Day
Dir: Mrinal Sen
Story: Kanai Basu
Music: Hemanta Mukherjee
Cast: Gyanesh Mukherjee, Madhabi Mukherjee, Hemangini Devi, Umanath Bhattacharya, Sumita Dasgupta, Anup Kumar
It’s a cruel film about the cruel world. A middleaged hawker marries a beautiful 16-year-old girl. The days begin well, but soon the spectre of World War II looms large over them. The catastrophic Bengal Famine (of 1943) hits them hard. The hawker’s mother dies when the roof collapses, and the hawker laps up the little rice he can find in the house, without leaving a morsel for his wife. The entire fabric of life disintegrates – that of their own and those of all around. In the end the wife hangs herelf. This is a stark story of a manmade famine.
3. Chaudhvin Ka Chand
Dir: M Sadiq
Story: Saghir Usmani
Music: Ravi
Cast: Waheeda Rehman, Guru Dutt, Rehman, Minoo Mumtaz, Johnny Walker, Mumtaz Begum, Perveen Paul, Naazi, Nurjehan, Razia, Zebunissa
It’s a love story that happens behind the purdah of a Muslim world. A nawab accidentally catches the glimpse of Jamila’s face and falls in love with her. He gets a torn fragment of her veil and gets her to be traced. The veil itself lands up with someone else and the nawab identifies the wrong woman. He persuades his close friend to marry his mother’s choice for a wife – Jamila. Each later tries to outdo the other in sacrificing their love. The nawab choses to die.
4. Devi; The Goddess
Dir: Satyajit Ray
Story: Prabhat Kumar Mukherjee
Music: Ali Akbar Khan
Cast: Chhabi Biswas, Soumitra Chatterjee, Sharmila Tagore, Purnenu Mukherjee, Karuna Bannerjee, Arpan Choudhury, Anil Chatterjee, Kali Sarkar, Mohammed Israel, Khagesh Chakraborty
Ray’s film is a psychological profile of a young woman and her zamindar father-in-law in 19th century Bengal. Since the son is away at school, the woman takes care of her father-in-law. One evening, the zamindar has a dream that the daughter-in-law is an avatar of Kali and must be worshipped as such. Soon other people too start to believe that she is an incarnation of the goddess. The husband returns home but is unable to remedy the situation as the young woman herself begins to believe that she is an avatar, a belief which soon turns to tragedy.
5. Ganga; The River
Dir: Rajen Tarafdar
Story: Samaresh Bose
Music: Salil Choudhury
Cast: Niranjan Ray, Gyanesh Mukherjee, Sandhya Roy, Ruma Guha Thakurta, Seeta Devi, Mani Srimani, Namita Sinha
This is an epic drama about a young fisherman of the Sunderbans, Bilash, who must overcome fear and superstition to sail down the river to the sea. The story revolves around the dangerous lives of fishermen, their struggles with storms, floods, hunger, and debts. The film is known more for its lyricism and its primitivist iconography than its melodrama.
6. Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai
Dir: Radhu Karmakar
Story: Arjun Dev Rashk
Music: Shankar-Jaikishen
Cast: Raj Kapoor, Padmini, Pran, Tiwari, Nayampalli, Chanchal, Raj Mehra, Lalita Pawar, Sulochana Chatterjee, Nana Palsikar, Vishwa Mehra, Amar
This pacifist story about bandits of Central India tells the story of Raju, who abhors violence and believes in the purity of the Ganga. He rescues a bandit chieftain and reforms the entire gang. He falls in love with the chief’s daughter, but has to grapple with the lieutenant.
7. Kala Bazaar
Dir: Vijay Anand
Story: Vijay Anand
Music: SD Burman
Cast: Dev Anand, Waheeda Rehman, Nanda, Leela Chitins, Vijay Anand, Kishore Sahu
Hero Raghuvir is Bombay’s top black marketer of film tickets who falls in love with Alka who shuns this ill-gotten money. He reforms and starts a ‘white market’ with his legitimate gang of touts. The film makes characteristic use of realism as a counterweight to fantasy.
8. Kshudita Pashan; Hungry Stones
Dir: Tapan Sinha
Story: Rabindranath Tagoretold
Music: Ali Akbar Khan
Cast: Soumitra Chatterjee, Arundhati Devi, Radhamohan Bhattacharya, Chhabi Biswas, Padmadevi, Dilip roy, Bina Chand, Rasaraj Chakraborty
A young tax collector decides to live in a 250-year-old palace on the banks of the Susta river. He is warned that the palace is haunted, but remains undaunted. He instead falls under the spell of the palace; its hallucinatory world takes him over in the form of a beautiful female apparition. He starts living in a world of fantasised history where is a slave trader who falls in love with one of his victims. The palace is the king’s pleasure den and its stone scream out the untold anguish of the victims so much so that it overwhelms all those who dwell there.
9. Meghe Dhaka Tara; The Cloud-capped Star
Dir: Ritwik Ghatak
Story: Shaktipada Rajguru
Music: Jyotirindra Moitra
Cast: Supriya Choudhury, Anil Chatterjee, Bijon Bhattacjarya, Geeta De, Niranjan Ray, Geeta Ghatak, Dwiju Bhawal, Gyanesh Mukherjee, Ronen Ray Choudhury
The film revolves around Neeta, a beautiful young woman who lives with her family, refugees from East Pakistan, in the suburbs of Calcutta. Neeta is a self-sacrificing person who is constantly exploited by everyone around her, even her own family, who take her goodness for granted. Her life is ridden with personal tragedy: she loses first her fiancé, then her job and finally her health by contracting tuberculosis. Her mostly absent would-be singer brother is the only person who cares about her. In the end, she screams out her agony, throwing herself into her brother's arms.
10. Mughal-e-Azam; The Greatest Story of the Mughals
Dir: K Asif
Story: K Asif
Music: Naushad
Cast: Prithviraj Kapoor, DilipKumar, Madhubala, Burga Khote, Nigar Sultana, Ajit, Kumar, Murad, Jilloo, Vijaylakshmi, S Nazir, Surendra, Gopi Krishna, Jalal Agha, Baby Tabassum, Johnny Walker
The megabudget spectacular and India’s best-known historical romance is loosely based on an episode in the life of the Mughal Prince Salim, the weak and pleasure-seeking son of Emperor Akbar. Salim falls in love with Anarkali, a court-dancer. Another jealous dancer exposes them, the father objects and throws Anarkali into prison. The prince rebels, is defeated in battle and sentenced to death. Anarkali pleads for his life in exchange for her own, and is condemned to be walled up alive. The king owes a favour to the dancer’s mother, who begs for her daughter’s life. He relents, and arranges for Anarkali's secret escape into exile. Salim is left to believe that Anarkali is dead and the lovers are separated for the rest of their lives.
