Suchitra-Uttam

"The poet is not like
the feelings his poetry evokes."

—This line by Rabindranath perhaps applies far more to the great hero Uttam Kumar. The journey of Arun Kumar Chattopadhyay becoming Uttam Kumar—along that path lay so many thorns, so much humiliation, so much suffering, and so much waiting that we, as audiences watching films, could never grasp. Even Suchitra Sen herself sometimes humiliated Uttam!

Defeated again and again, at one point Uttam had even decided to bid farewell to the film industry. Until the very end, he had to fight simply to survive, giving everything he had. Ah, how many different kinds of pain a person must bear!

Everyone knows about the charm of the Uttam-Suchitra pair, about the magic they cast together on screen. But what everyone doesn't know is how they would quarrel with each other, and yet also respect one another. Ego battles raged between them, but on the other hand, each always acknowledged the other's friendship.

After the Uttam-Suchitra pair achieved tremendous success, Suchitra began to feel that films succeeded purely because of her strength. So instead of the pair being called Uttam-Suchitra, it should be Suchitra-Uttam. At that time, she informed director Chitta Basu of their film 'Ekti Raat' about her wish. She said her name had to come first on the title and poster. When Chitta Basu politely conveyed this proposal to Uttam, he said, "Fine then, put Rama's name first—where's the objection? Rama is so beautiful to look at that audiences come just to see her!"

Breaking the established tradition of Bengali cinema, without entering into any ego battle, Uttam Kumar accepted such a significant matter so easily. Of course, it was precisely because of such a mindset that Uttam Kumar was able to become truly excellent. Anyone else would surely have been defeated by ego and lost their career. From that incident onward, their pair became known as the Suchitra-Uttam duo.

This incident also beautifully reveals Uttam's respect for Suchitra's decisions. When asked whether he had ever fallen in love with Suchitra, he said, "Who said I didn't fall in love with Rama? Is it possible not to love Rama? But she's a very intelligent girl. Do you know what she said? She said, 'If we become lovers, it will damage our image as dream lovers. Our films won't do as well. Audiences won't accept us as a romantic pair anymore.'"

Besides, looking at Suchitra's actions at various times, it seemed that a worry, a fear would frequently overtake the actress—that if audiences didn't remember her separately from Uttam, as simply Suchitra Sen, what would happen? Yet Uttam's work never suggested that he thought this way or harbored such fears.

A couple of years after Suchitra withdrew from the screen, shortly before his death, Uttam Kumar said in an interview: "The film world isn't what it used to be; we've changed too, the nature of cinema has changed, even the artists and the stories now are different. I can no longer adapt myself to many things or reconcile with them. Perhaps Rama did the right thing. She stepped aside at the right time. Everyone must know how to make the right decision at the right time."

By letting Suchitra remain as Suchitra, Uttam had made the right decision at the right time; otherwise, perhaps such an immortal pair would have met an untimely death from the wounds of Mrs. Sen's sky-high ego. Again, by withdrawing behind the screen, Suchitra too had made the right decision at the right time; otherwise, perhaps the great actress would have been inevitably counting down her final days prematurely, wounded by spiritual death, accepting the curse of a melancholy lifespan.