Remembering Deepak Roy

Deepak Roy (1949-2017) was a talented, committed documentary film maker of the old school. His best films combined with perception, content with a sureness of technique. His Docu-feature in 1997 – 'Dhanna' won him the National Award for Best Film on Social issues. It was about a specially-abled boy Dhannaraj, who brings water to his parched village in Madhya Pradesh.

He directed, 'Limits to Freedom' in 1996, on women prisoners of Tihar Jail in Delhi. It won him deservedly the National Award for Best Director and Best Documentary film on social issues. Roy was striving then, as he was till the end, for clarity of expression. It was this strong desire to communicate with each individual viewer in the audience that promptedhim to find a common audio-visual language which would establish a rapport: certainly this was achieved in his better works with ease.

He had learnt his cinema in the School of Hard Knocks. He became a member of the Delhi Film Society on finding his first job in the mid-70s. One would be forever in his debt for being smuggled into the hall, usually at Maharashtra Rangayan at Paharganj(Delhi) or later, DTA Auditorium on Ring Road near ITO, to see the European and Japanese classics. Films by French masters – Renoir, Vigo, Godard, Resnais, Truffaut; Italian luminaries like de Sica, Rosellini, Visconti, Fellini; the Russian pioneers like Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Japanese film poets, Kurasawa, Mizoguchi, Ozu, not to forget the two Indian stalwarts Satyajit Ray and RitwikGhatak were screened as a matter of course.

Other non-mainstream Indian directors like Kumar Shahani, Mani Kaul, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, G Aravindan, John Abraham also found a platform for their filmshare. Deepak Roy learnt his cinema watching films at Delhi Film Society and in the cinema halls of Delhi.

In the late 1980s, he directed 'Beauty without Cruelty' about the senseless cruelty of humans towards animals. It had music by the illustrious Ustad Bahadur Khan whose Sarod resonated in many sequences of the film.

'Setu' made for the Madhya Pradesh Nirman Nigam had Kedarnath Singh's eponymous poem in place of the standard garullous commentary which was the norm of the day. He also made a film on the same famous Hindi poet for Sahitya Akademi as he did on Babu Nagarjun and Harbhajan Singh, luminaries of Hindi and Punjabi literature respectively, also for the same literary body.

His preferences in life and art were radical. As a young man growing up in the cosmopolitan Delhi of the late 1960s and early 70s, he imbibed the best in the politics of Indian and International Left. His cinema naturally grew out of the education he received in his youth.

Well before he began as a documentary film maker, he had written a feature film script based on Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's 19th century Bengali satire, "Muchiram Goorh". He managed to catch the character of the bizarre comic rising comprador bourgeois character Babu Muchiram Goorh and place him accurately in the context of British Bengal of the time. It is another matter that he did not make the film then or later. He had incidentally won the script writing competition of the National Film Development Corporation thrice.

Although, he aspired to, he never made a fiction film in his life. Later as he established himself in Documentaries, he wrote anunusual script on a lady mountaineer who had only one strong functional leg. There was a flurry of negotiations with producers in Bombay(Mumbai) , but ultimately the money did not come through.

He also wanted to do a film with Pran, the quintessential Hindi film villain, casting him against in an unusual, sympathetic role of an artist. In the second half of his career, he found and ideal partner in his wife Rita Shah who was with All India Radio. She proved to be tireless researcher and in certain ways a genuine facilitator of his projects.

When he was downcast after the amputation of a gangrenous tow following a neglected cut, she told him to cheer up and get ready to make his next film. "The best is yet to come' was her well-founded conviction. Roy's commitment to social issues arose from his education in radical politics and not out of mere attention seeking and monetary rewards, as is the case with so many documentarists today.