Uttam Kumar comes to Karunamoyee: Durga Puja pandal celebrating actor's legacy

The road to this pandal may be winding, tucked away in the lanes of Karunamoyee, but film buffs will find the journey every bit worth it.

Karunamoyee F Block Sarbojanin Durgotsav is presenting its puja on the theme of Uttam Kumar, whose centenary year it is, and their tribute is much more than just a clutch of songs from the superstar’s films sung by residents. The organisers have put in nearly a year of research into it and have designed it all on their own, without outsourcing to a theme artiste.

For starters, they have posters of all but one of Uttam Kumar’s 202 films. “A 1978 film Nishan released in Bengali and Hindi. We couldn’t find the Hindi poster,” said puja secretary Suvakshan Dutta.

Visitors enter the pandal through a corridor that bears the address of Kumar’s ancestral house in Bhownipore. Posters of his films are plastered on the walls chronologically, but there is an exit in the corridor midway, around the posters of the 60s. “Logistically, we had to create this gap as it is the entrance into one of our buildings, but we have marked this exit “3 Moira Street” - Supriya Devi’s residence. In the 60s, Kumar moved in with the actress,” Dutta said.

There are dedicated sections for posters of his 10 Hindi films, his six films that released posthumously as well as films that never got made at all. One such was a Bengali film Anando Sangbad, co-starring Raj Kapoor.

Live actors

The pandal’s most interactive sections lie ahead. “We have an actor who will play Kumar, sit in the famous Sanyasi Raja pose and deliver lines from the film. Inside a train installation, he and an actress (playing Sharmila Tagore) will enact scenes from Nayak. Later, they will change costumes, hop onto a bike parked outside the pandal, and like Uttam-Suchitra in Saptapadi, lip sync the song Ei poth jodi na sesh hoye. The actor playing Kumar will also sit for make-up and “shoot” in an outdoor location next to the pandal,” says Dutta. The live performances will only take place in the evenings.

There are galleries on Kumar’s pictures, dialogues, what others have said about him, a fan mail section and one on his heroines. “Only 30 per cent of his pictures with the heroines are from the Net. The rest we had to take screenshots while playing the movies, increase resolution using AI, and then take printouts. We had to give visitors something new,” says Dutta, wearing a fotua with the image of a reel of Kumar’s films. All committee members are sporting these.

The pandal concludes with the parting shot of Saptapadi, where Kumar’s character walks into the sunset carrying Suchitra Sen. This leads visitors to the Durga idol in a separate enclosure.

Inaugurating the puja on Wednesday was Dilip Roy, an 89-year-old who had met Kumar multiple times. “I used to frequent his Bhowanipore neighbourhood. In fact, during the Pujas, Uttam Kumar would himself sing on stage even after becoming a star,” he said. “We shall never get performers like Uttam and Suchitra but I congratulate the puja organisers who are celebrating their legacy through this theme,” he said.