Mrinalini Vasudevan and Tapati Guha Thakurta are honouring the Bengali actress and director, Arundhati Devi, on her centenary year. This archival exhibition explores, through her life-story, a rich era of the film and cultural history of 20th century Bengal. It brings together a rare family archive of photographs, alongside various private collections of film memorabilia of her time.
A budding writer, a talented radio artist, a thinking actress, a strong-willed director and producer, Arundhati Devi wore many hats in the course of a rich life and career from 1924-1990. However, she never saw herself as a star. Even though the title of our centenary tribute may then seem ironic, it speaks to her radiant spirit that helped her chart new territories. She carved out her own space in largely male-dominated landscapes, bringing worth to the fields of art and entertainment that were often still associated with only commercial leanings and not respectability.
The wealth of this archive has had to constantly fight the challenges of losses. A large number of her films no longer survive. The ones that remain are often of poor quality. Arundhati left behind no autobiography and gave only a limited number of interviews. Many of the people she closely engaged with have also passed on. Moreover, film scholarship in Bengal and India has left her and the stories of many others out of its annals. Against the lapses of public histories, small familial, personal and institutional collections have held the candles of remembrance. It is with their support that we hope to help older generations recall and newer generations discover the star that was and is Arundhati.
Visuals: Animikh and Sandipan
#MrinaliniVasudevan and #TapatiGuhaThakurta #ArundhatiDevi #Actor #FilmStar #BengaliCinema #BengalBiennale #WestBengal #Shantiniketan #Art #Culture #Bengali #Heritage
A budding writer, a talented radio artist, a thinking actress, a strong-willed director and producer, Arundhati Devi wore many hats in the course of a rich life and career from 1924-1990. However, she never saw herself as a star. Even though the title of our centenary tribute may then seem ironic, it speaks to her radiant spirit that helped her chart new territories. She carved out her own space in largely male-dominated landscapes, bringing worth to the fields of art and entertainment that were often still associated with only commercial leanings and not respectability.
The wealth of this archive has had to constantly fight the challenges of losses. A large number of her films no longer survive. The ones that remain are often of poor quality. Arundhati left behind no autobiography and gave only a limited number of interviews. Many of the people she closely engaged with have also passed on. Moreover, film scholarship in Bengal and India has left her and the stories of many others out of its annals. Against the lapses of public histories, small familial, personal and institutional collections have held the candles of remembrance. It is with their support that we hope to help older generations recall and newer generations discover the star that was and is Arundhati.
Visuals: Animikh and Sandipan
#MrinaliniVasudevan and #TapatiGuhaThakurta #ArundhatiDevi #Actor #FilmStar #BengaliCinema #BengalBiennale #WestBengal #Shantiniketan #Art #Culture #Bengali #Heritage
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00We are currently in Arthshela, Shantiniketan and my mother and I are presenting a show called
00:07Tararnam Orundhuti, a star named Orundhuti, which is an archival exhibition that is a
00:14centenary tribute to a Bengali film actress and director called Orundhuti Devi.
00:30Orundhuti really was an acting not so much for the glamour of it.
00:45She was in it more for the intellectual satisfaction that she gained from her craft.
00:50We're associated with Orundhuti Devi via family ties.
00:54So she's my grandaunt and she's my mother's aunt.
00:58My mother came into the project from an interest in familial archives and I came into the project
01:06from an interest in cinema history.
01:08And I definitely wanted it to be about Orundhuti's individual journey, but also Orundhuti in
01:16her time.
01:17She's a rare case of an actress who came into the Bengali film industry in the 1950s with
01:25a very cultured background and she grew up in Dhaka, trained in Shantiniketan.
01:32So she comes with that kind of erudition.
01:35And Shantiniketan really was a very close space for her, in fact, in terms of everything
01:42that it gave her, its association with Rovindra Sangeet, as well as, you know, dance and theatre.
01:50And she was also here during the last years of Tagore's time in Shantiniketan and she
01:56gets to sing for Rovindranath Tagore.
01:58This is also a period of, you know, nationalist upheaval.
02:02So we wanted to basically do an exhibition which was multifaceted and we were given the
02:11option of first staging this exhibition in Shantiniketan, it's later going to travel
02:16to Calcutta.
02:17But we thought really this was the best way of bringing back Aurangbhuti to a place that
02:22was so close to her heart.
02:34She was a big name in the 1950s and 60s.
02:39And then after that, she took a hiatus and she comes back briefly to cinema, but she's
02:46not as well known as, say, Ashu Jitrashen or Ashu Priyadevi.
02:52And I definitely wanted it to be about Aurangbhuti's individual journey, but also Aurangbhuti in
03:00her times.
03:01So, you know, who were the other figures who were part of this particular industry at that
03:05time, and on whom there really hasn't been that much written.
03:09There might be more in the Bengali field of scholarship and in literature and in journalistic
03:15studies, but not so much within, you know, things like overall national scholarship on
03:23Bengali cinema.
03:24So it was really also about rediscovering the figure, in fact, for my generation.
03:31And we also wanted to bring out the different aspects of Aurangbhuti's life and career because,
03:36of course, she's best known as a cinema actress, but she really had a prior career as a radio
03:43artist.
03:44And then after that, she goes into direction and she's one of the early women directors
03:50in Bengali cinema, and she even starts a production house.
03:54So it was important for us to bring in all these different facets.
04:02One thing that I've noticed from whatever films I've been able to watch, and this really
04:06has been the challenge of this particular project, because there are close to 37 films
04:11that Aurangbhuti Devi acts in, but out of that, I've been able to watch only 15 or 16
04:17because most of the films are in a fairly poor quality or many of them have been completely
04:23lost.
04:24But one of the things that I have recognized in her acting and also the roles that she
04:30chose was that, again, very much like her own personality, she liked to play characters,
04:37in fact, who had a strong independent sense of identity.
04:49So I think the first photograph I want to point out is this one.
04:53It has Aurangbhuti with Nargis and Surya Kumari and Bina Rai and they are in 1952 and in Hollywood.
05:04This is part of an interesting album which came down to us and this was a trip that Aurangbhuti
05:10made as a part of a larger delegation of representatives of the Indian cinema industry who were invited
05:18by Hollywood to tour their studios and it was part of a kind of creative cultural exchange
05:26program.
05:27This was also at the height of the Cold War.
05:28So there are new kind of political alignments, in fact, that are at play.
05:35But I think for me what's most interesting is how all of them are so fascinated by something
05:40we've taken for granted now, which is television.
05:43But back then it was, in fact, a very new form of technology and Aurangbhuti actually
05:49writes about how she was really amazed by the workings of the big studios, how formal
05:56as well as how well planned they were.
05:58And you know, we've also included a quote on her looking at makeup.
06:04There's an image over here also of her looking at makeup, how well it's done in Hollywood.
06:09So this really is one special photograph.
06:18One advantage we had was that Aurangbhuti Devi was very neat and organized in the way
06:24in which she preserved her own material and she labeled a lot of her photographs.
06:31Her daughter Anuradha also inherited a lot of this material and she also clustered these
06:37in different ways.
06:38So thanks to both of them, we actually got bits of information.
06:43But the one thing, in fact, that we had to do was we had to, in fact, create a larger
06:49sense of really an organized archive.
06:52And we're still in the process of doing this because the thing is that there's lots of
06:57photographs that are still there.
06:59We've been able to digitize close to around 200 to 250 photographs.
07:05There's a lot of fragile paper documents also that we found because, you know, as I said,
07:10she ran her own production house.
07:13She maintained all the meticulous correspondences, in fact, with different people she was approaching.
07:19A lot of, in fact, working strips, unfinished material, in fact, that exists.
07:25We had a three stage plan, really, for the project.
07:30One was, in fact, to do initial set of screenings on Aurangbhuti Devi's birth anniversary, which
07:36was the centenary, April 29th, 2024, which happened at Nandol.
07:42Then we wanted to do an exhibition later in the year to kind of show everybody the wealth
07:46of the photographs that we have.
07:49And over here, I must say that my designers, as well as the person who worked with me in
07:55printing, there's Shan Bhattacharya, Somadeep Ghosh and Saurbhujoy Paul, they really did
08:01a fantastic job taking small images or really damaged images, in fact, cleaning them up,
08:08showing you what exactly could come of these images.
08:11So this exhibition is really devoted to that and to kind of give a lot of people who have
08:17very little information on Aurangbhuti, a sense of her life.
08:21And then after that, we want to bring out a book out of this and eventually to entirely
08:27digitize the archive.