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.
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