After his new Hindi OTT film Kadak Singh premiered at IFFI 2023 in Goa, Bengali filmmaker Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury remembered an advice he got from his caddie at The Tollygunge Club in Kolkata. During his early attempts at playing golf, his caddie would tell him to listen to the sound of the club hitting the ball—an indicator whether the connection had been made. When Roy Chowdhury, 58, heard the audience clap on Wednesday night after the final scene of Kadak Singh, he knew that he had made the perfect shot.
After the passing of the Ritwik Ghatak, Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Tapan Sinha era, Bengali cinema stopped making noise outside West Bengal. There was Rituparno Ghosh, of course, who took the mantle forward and made movies that appealed to a wider audience. But the current crop of filmmakers haven’t been able to repeat him.
Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury or Tony-da to friends and industry colleagues is the exception. He straddles both Bengali and Hindi film industries with ease, and without compromising his Bengali identity.
“Give me rice, biulir dal, paanch masala r torkari and kakrol bhaja for lunch and I am content! It is the connect with food, with culture, with Kolkata that makes my creative juices flow,” says Roy Chowdhury over the phone from Goa.
His comfort with both Bengali and Hindi film industries allows him to make cinema that speaks to an international crowd, and has earned him the moniker, the Global Bengali. Kolkata-based film critic Bhaswati Ghosh who has tracked his career from the beginning says the filmmaker takes the best of Bengal’s creative sensibility and seamlessly merges it with stories that have a pan-India appeal.
“It is indeed admirable that a Bengali filmmaker has been successful in expanding his horizons. The excitement that the trailer of his film Kadak Singh generated across India is indeed a matter of pride, so also is the fact that the biggest actors in India, from Amitabh Bachchan to Pankaj Tripathi are excited to work with Roy Chowdhury,” says Ghosh.
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The international connection
If his 2016 film Pink spoke about a dysfunctional society where women have to take men to court to teach them about consent and hammer home the point that “No means no”, then Kadak Singh is about a dysfunctional family that somehow manages to come together at a very difficult time.
The filmmaker is always looking for connections—joining the dots to tell compelling stories. And it is this ‘connect’ that led him to cast Bangladeshi actress Jaya Ahsan as the love interest of Kadak Singh’s hero, Pankaj Tripathi who plays financial officer A.K. Srivastava in the thriller. He was impressed by Ahsan’s performance in Kaushik Ganguly’s 2017 Bengali language movie Bishorjon — a love story between a Muslim man who washes up on the banks of the Ichamati river in Bangladesh and the Hindu woman who rescues him.
“I was blown by her performance and congratulated her over a text message. I have wanted to work with her ever since,” says Roy Chowdhury. But it took some years for him to find a role that he felt only Ahsan could do justice to. And no one could have portrayed the role of officer A. K. Srivatava’s love interest, Nayna, better than Ahsan, he says.
“The film is about retrograde amnesia and conflicting identities. The roles [of both Srivastava and Nayna] demand actors who have honed their skills by playing a wide range of characters.”
Ahsan’s debut in the Hindi OTT space comes soon after another Bangladeshi actor Azmeri Haque Badhon played Tabu’s lover in Vishal Bhardwaj’s OTT hit Khufiya. Badhon is elated that another Bangladeshi actress is making inroads in the Hindi OTT space.
I did not cast Ahsan because she is Bangladeshi and it is becoming a fad to cast actors from that country. It doesn’t matter whether an actor is from Chittagong or Cincinnati, she should be able to deliver
–Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury, director, Kadak Singh
“Jaya-apa is a big name in Bangladesh. As an industry senior, she has been an inspiration for us. Though she has nothing to prove, having acted in cinema of both Bangladesh and West Bengal, her Hindi film debut opposite the brilliant Pankaj Tripthi in an Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury film is good news for the Bangladesh film industry,” says Badhon.
She doesn’t see boundaries and borders, geographical or otherwise, as a hurdle. And a growing number of Bangladeshi actors are taking on roles in Bengali and Bollywood films. And with Bangladeshi OTT platform Chorki now streaming in West Bengal, there will be more cross-border content.
But Roy Chowdhury dismisses this as a passing trend.
“I did not cast Ahsan because she is Bangladeshi and it is becoming a fad to cast actors from that country,” says Roy Chowdhury. “It doesn’t matter whether an actor is from Chittagong or Cincinnati, she should be able to deliver.”
The two other female characters in Kadak Singh are played by Sanjana Sanghi who is from Mumbai and Parvathy Thiruvothu from Kerala. “Where an actor comes from is irrelevant, what they bring to the table is all that matters,” he adds.
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Never far from Bengal
The filmmaker does concede though there is a Bangladeshi in him. A child of Partition, both his parents were from East Bengal which became East Pakistan and then Bangladesh. Growing up, Roy Chowdhury heard the Bangladeshi dialect being spoken in his house —very different from the Kolkata dialect he heard outside.
He is glad that OTT has erased the geographical boundaries between West Bengal and Bangladesh. Quintessentially Bengali, from his eating habits to artistic sensibilities, Tony-da started his film career with the 2006 Bengali film Anuranan, which won a National Film Award in the Best Feature Film in Bengali category.
It explores the trajectories in the relationships of two married couples and the complexities of modern life.
“It’s a film that touches on extramarital relationships but goes beyond such narrow definitions to say there is no label, only love,” says Roy Chowdhury.
When Anuranan released, some critics said the film was too anglicised to appeal to the Bengali audience. The characters in the film spoke in English and their lifestyle was distinctly upper crust. The fact that so many years later the film is still talked about proves them wrong.
“Not just the Kolkata crowd, I have met people from small towns who still quote lines from the film,” says the filmmaker.
He’s won three national awards, the Aravindan Puraskaram award, one International Indian Film Academy Award, two Zee Cine Awards, two ETC Bollywood Business Awards, one Stardust Award and many more—an honour roll of awards.
“Roy Chowdhury has shown it is possible for a Bengali filmmaker to go beyond the borders of Bengal to make a mark nationally while not letting go of his Bengali sensibilities,” says Ghosh.
After Pink, Roy Chowdhury directed the thriller Lost with Yami Gautam, starring Rahul Khanna and Pankaj Kapur. His heart, though, is in Kolkata. Work keeps him in Mumbai most of the time, but he always rushes back to the city he calls home to fill up what he calls the “Kolkata deficiency”.
“The air, the food, the adda, the people give me material for my movies. I am always on the lookout for a story to make yet another Bengali film,” he says.
Despite his success in Bollywood, Roy Chowdhury has not left Kolkata or its cinema behind. It informs his art, his stories.
“Local is the new global. I make sure I never lose the connection in order to make cinema that transcends borders,” he says.