Bikash Roy: fronti nulla fides

জন্মশতবর্ষে বিকাশ রায় স্মরণে

অবসর (বিশেষ) সংখ্যা, সেপ্টেম্বর ৩০, ২০১৫

Bikash Roy: fronti nulla fides

Dr. Narasingha P. Sil

Salem, Oregon

Bikash Roy, a professional lawyer from an educated upper class family, is an artist, an actor par excellence—not just an actor like one who enacted Hamlet’s role and was belittled by Henry Fielding’s garrulous character Benjamin Partridge in Tom Jones (1749): “Why, I could act as well as he myself….He speaks all his words distinctly, half as loud again as the other. Anybody may see he is an actor.” Bikash did not look like an ordinary actor, witness his firm jaw, wide forehead, aquiline nose, and deep thoughtful eyes—a new Adam of the Bengali screen in postcolonial Calcutta. But the most wonderful truth of the matter is: he was the quintessential actor. Hence my rather pedantic and presumptive Latin subtitle, introduced as a friendly warning to unsuspecting readers: “never trust the appearance” (fronti nulla fides). Bikash Roy could act the role of the silly brat Kumar Bahadur with a mindless patriarchal pananche in Śāpmochan (1955) as realistically as the déclassé orphan Debkamal (though born of an unwed mother and fathered by a well-established medical doctor), a self-made cultivated mature male with a social conscience, as in Jībantṛṣṇā (1957). He gave the cinegoers of the late fifties the persona of a new type of the so-called villain with a philanthropic and socialistic ideal, the cultivated self-made millionaire Rajshekhar as in Sūryatoraṇ (1958). Despite some overdramatic shots loved by the middle class hoi polloi such as Rajshekhar’s fondling of a handgun to no purpose but to shoot himself as if afflicted by compulsive thanatos or death wish, Roy was elegantly at ease depicting the nobility of heart even when verbalizing tough and terse transactional deals with Anita played by Suchitra Sen. No doubt, Sūryatoraṇ registered another Uttam-Suchitra superhit in the eyes and minds of the average joe of Bengal, but to the educated and discerned audience Bikash ushered in a new paradigm of “villainy,” a curious amalgam of the relentless and the dignified. He was equally adept in acting the part of an unmitigated evil—witness, Major Trivedi in Biyalliś (1951)—or Rashu, the mean and malignant factotum of a villainous village medic in Bibhās (1964). He was of course particularly suited for the role of an educated man and with his superb voice and English pronunciation, not affected or stilted like Bengal’s beloved matinee idol Uttam Kumar (vide his pathetic dialogs in English in the role of a barrister in Jay Jayantī, 1971 or as the business tycoon in Nabarāg, 1971), but with cultivated enunciation of syllables, he actually provided the college-going young audience of his day a template of a modern urban male.

It must be borne in mind that Roy was never suited for the role of duet-singing and romping romantic pretty boy of the silver screen. His halcyon days as a movie actor coincided with the popular Uttam Kumar, but it also is true, as an anonymous critic in the Station Hollywood blogspot has it, that “if Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen had made Bengali film reach its level of excellence with their romantic performance then Bikash Roy had facilitated their stories with the diversified characters he had played for a period of thirty years.”

In this author’s opinion, however, Roy’s brief but brilliant performance in Sandhyā Dīpder Śikhā (1964) in the role of Major Anupam Banerjee, married to a magnificent Jayanti played by Suchitra Sen, is simply superb, to say the very least. Actually, it was Bikash Roy’s spontaneously elegant performance as Manish Roy, the erstwhile lover of Debyani (enacted by Suchitra Sen) in Uttar Phālgunī (1963), that presaged his performance in Sandhyā Dīper Śkhā. Also, Suchitra never acted so freely and naturally as an educated, liberal, and loving woman and never looked so gorgeous, albeit in the first part of the movie (her characterization of a neurotic and alcoholic widow obsessed with death needed close directorial monitoring in order to keep the overdramatic excesses under control). Similarly, his anabadya performance as the comically idiosyncratic and endearing barrister Prashanta Ghosh in Chaddabeshi (1965) brings Roy at par with his senior colleague in the world of Bengali cinema, the legendary Chhabi Biswas (as Suresh Ghosh in Haat Baadaalei Bandhu, 1960).

In this connection, it should also be noted that Bikash Roy, arguably the greatest character actor of Bengali cinema, falls short of his own genre in a single role of the singularly idiotic and cowardly factory manager Biren Chatterjee in Agnisamskar (1961). This is not to question his acting acumen but his indiscretion in accepting the role of the character that absolutely distorts his authentic personality and thus makes an unfortunate dent in his impeccable record as a film artist. This factory manager’s role should have suited perfectly another actor of a lesser stature, Deepak Mukherjee, who had made a name for himself as the perfect simpleton of the silver screen in Bengal.
No discussion of Bikash Roy the actor is complete without mentioning his grand performance as the indigenous medic Jiban Mashay in Arogyaniketan (1969) that provides an iconic visual representation as the calm and stolid beleaguered sentinel of his inherited tradition and culture under attack from Western science. His make up and his performance--both superbly artistic and realistic--speak volumes of his acting acumen. In the final analysis Roy was a consummate artist par excellence.

About the Author: Narasingha Prosad Sil was Professor of European and English history at Western Oregon University, Author of eleven academic books, he was an invited Book reviewer of The Statesman, Kolkata.

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