GURU DUTT

GURU DUTT - Film Actor/Director

Vasanth Kumar Shivashankar Padukone (9 July 1925 – 10 October 1964), popularly known as Guru Dutt was born at Bangalore to Shivashanker Rao Padukone and Vasanthi Padukone in a Konkani Chitrapur Saraswat Brahmin family. His father was initially a headmaster, and then a bank employee. His mother Vasanthi, while initially a housewife, later taught in a school, gave private tuition and also wrote short stories and translated Bengali novels into Kannada. Vasanthi was only 16 when Guru Dutt was born.

Guru Dutt had a tough childhood with financial difficulties, and was also affected by the fact that the relationship between his parents was strained. As a child he had some bad experiences; the hostility from his maternal uncle's family, a frightening encounter with his insane adopted maternal uncle, and the death of his seven-month old brother (Shashidhar).

Guru Dutt spent his early childhood in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and he grew close to Bengali culture and intellect. He even adopted the name Guru Dutt, Dutt (more commonly Datta or Dutta) being a common Bengali surname. He was joined by three younger brothers, Atmaram, Devidas and Vijay and a younger sister, Lalitha. The Indian film director, Kalpana Lajmi, is his sister's daughter.

He was a good student, but never went to college, partly because of financial troubles at home. Instead, he joined the performing arts troupe of Uday Shankar, the older brother of the better-known Ravi Shankar.

The Uday Shankar India Culture Center at Almora taught dance, drama, and music. It aimed at combining the best of the Gurukula system with a modern Arts University, and tried to turn out well-rounded students, at home in many disciplines. A young Guru Dutt joined the center at age 16 in 1941 on a five-year scholarship of Rs.75 annually (a lot of money then), and studied at Almora until 1944, when the advancing World War II forced the closing of the center.

His uncle found him a job under a three-year contract with the Prabhat Film Company in Pune (then called Poona) in 1944. This once premier film producing centre had already seen the departure of its best talent, V. Shantaram, who had by then launched his own Kala Mandir. It is here that Guru Dutt met two people who would remain his good friends - actors Rehman and Dev Anand.

Guru Dutt acted in a small role as Sri Krishna in Chand in 1944. In 1945, he acted as well as assisted director Vishram Bedekar in Lakhrani, and in 1946 he worked as an assistant director and choreographed dances for P. L. Santoshi’s film, Hum Ek Hain.

This contract ended in 1947, but his mother got him a job as a freelance assistant with Baburao Pai, the CEO of the Prabhat Film Company and Studio. However, after that, for almost ten months, Guru Dutt was unemployed and stayed with his family at Matunga, Mumbai. During this time, Guru Dutt developed a flair for writing in English, and wrote short stories for The Illustrated Weekly of India, a local weekly English magazine.

It is during this time that he is supposed to have written the script for the almost autobiographical Pyaasa. Its original name was Kashmakash (struggle), which was changed later to Pyaasa and was written at his home in Matunga.

While Guru Dutt was hired by Prabhat Film Company as a choreographer, he was soon pressed into service as an actor, and even as an assistant director. After Prabhat failed in 1947, Dutt moved to Mumbai, where he worked with two leading directors of the time, with Amiya Chakravarty in Girl's School, and with Gyan Mukherjee in the Bombay Talkies film Sangram. 

At Prabhat, he met Dev Anand and Rehman, who both became stars. These early friendships helped ease his way into the film world. This developed into a great friendship, since they were of the same age. They promised each other that, if Guru Dutt were to turn filmmaker, he would hire Anand as his hero, and if Dev were to produce a film then he would use Guru Dutt as its director. Then, Dev Anand offered him a job as a director in his new company, Navketan, after the first movie had flopped. Thus, Guru Dutt's first film, Navketan's Baazi, was released in 1951. It was a tribute to the Forties' Film Noir Hollywood with the morally ambiguous hero, the transgressing siren, and shadow lighting.

Dev Anand fulfilled his end of the bargain with Baazi, but regretted that his friend Guru Dutt did not. Guru Dutt indirectly did fulfill his promise. His studio, Guru Dutt Movies Pvt. Ltd., produced "C.I.D." which starred Dev, but the film was directed by Raj Khosla (an assistant director to Guru Dutt). Thus, technically, Guru Dutt never directed Dev Anand under his production company.

Guru Dutt and Dev Anand would make two super-hit films together, Baazi, and Jaal. Creative differences between Guru Dutt, and Chetan Anand (Anand's elder brother), who was also a director, made future collaborations difficult.

Baazi also highlights two early key technical developments in Indian movie-making that are attributed to Guru Dutt. The use of close-up shots with a 100 mm lens - there are over 14 in the movie - which became known in Indian movie-making as the "Guru Dutt shot", and the use of songs to further the narrative in the movie. Guru Dutt also introduced Zohra Sehgal (whom he met at Almora) as the choreographer in the movie, and he also met his future wife, Geeta Dutt during the making of the movie.

Baazi was an immediate success. Guru Dutt followed it with Jaal and Baaz. Neither film did well at the box office, but they bring together the Guru Dutt team that performed so brilliantly in subsequent films. He discovered, and mentored, Johnny Walker (comedian), V.K. Murthy (cinematography), and Abrar Alvi (writing and directing), among others. He is also credited for introducing Waheeda Rehman to the Hindi cinema. Baaz was notable in that Guru Dutt both directed and starred, not having found a suitable actor for the principal character.

Fortune smiled on Dutt's next film, the 1954 Aar Paar. This was followed by the 1955 hit, Mr. and Mrs.55, then C.I.D., Sailaab, and in 1957, Pyaasa - the story of a poet, rejected by an uncaring world, who achieves success only after his apparent death. Guru Dutt played the lead role in three of these five films.

His 1959 Kaagaz Ke Phool was an intense disappointment. He had invested a great deal of love, money, and energy in this film, which was a self-absorbed tale of a famous director (played by Guru Dutt) who falls in love with an actress (played by Waheeda Rehman, Dutt's real-life love interest). Kaagaz Ke Phool failed at the box office and Dutt was devastated. All subsequent films from his studio were, thereafter, officially helmed by other directors since Guru Dutt felt that his name was anathema to box office.

Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, a critically and commercially successful film, was directed by his protégé, writer Abrar Alvi, which won him the Filmfare Best Director's award. The film's star Waheeda Rehman denied rumors that the film was ghost-directed by Guru Dutt himself. Guru Dutt also has his influence on his last box office smash hit Chaudhvin Ka Chand. 

His legacy to direction of Hindi cinema is unmistakable and accepted by many leading Hindi directors of the day, including another of his protégés, Raj Khosla.

In 1964 he acted in his last film Sanjh Aur Savera directed by Hrishikesh Mukherjee opposite Meena Kumari.

Guru Dutt first married a woman he eloped with called Vijaya from Pune, and later his parents had him married to his maternal niece, Suvarna, from Hyderabad.

In 1953, Dutt married Geeta Dutt, a well-known playback singer. They had been engaged for three years and had to overcome a great deal of family opposition to marry. They had three children, Tarun, Arun, and Nina.

Dutt had an unhappy marital life. According to his brother Atmaram, Guru Dutt was "a strict disciplinarian as far as work was concerned, but totally undisciplined in his personal life" (Kabir, 1997, p. 124). He smoked heavily, drank heavily, and kept odd hours. Guru Dutt's relationship with actress Waheeda Rehman also worked against their marriage. At the time of his death, he had separated from Geeta and was living alone. Geeta Dutt herself died in 1972 at age 41, after excessive drinking which resulted in liver damage. According to an interview with Abrar Alvi, one of Dutt's close friends and his assistant director in films, Dutt did not "open up" to discuss his thoughts and problems, even though they were spending many hours together.

On 10 October 1964, Guru Dutt was found dead in his bed in his rented apartment at Pedder Road in Mumbai. He is said to have been mixing alcohol and sleeping pills. His death may have been suicide, or just an accidental overdose. It would have been his third suicide attempt.

At the time of his death, Guru Dutt was involved in two other projects - Picnic starring actress Sadhana, and director K. Asif's epic, Love and God. Picnic remained incomplete and Love and God was released two decades later with Sanjeev Kumar replacing Dutt in the leading role.

Guru Dutt was at first mourned as a matinee idol but as the years passed, it became ever clearer that it was as a director that he would be remembered. Starting in 1973, his films were shown at film festivals throughout India and the rest of the world. Despite being a commercial director, he appealed to the same intelligentsia who made Satyajit Ray an international favorite. He also has a place in the hearts of many ordinary Indians for his song picturisations and the many vivid characters sketched in his films.

Pyaasa was rated as one of the best 100 films of all time by Time Magazine. In the 2002 Sight & Sound critics' and directors' poll, two of his films, Pyaasa and Kaagaz Ke Phool, were among the top 160 greatest films of all time. The same 2002 Sight & Sound poll ranked Dutt at #73 in its list of all-time greatest directors, thus making him the eighth highest-ranking Asian filmmaker in the poll.