Remembered by his mother as a sensitive son and recalled by his cinematographer V.K. Murthy as the ‘Hamlet of cinema’, Guru Dutt remains Hindi cinema’s most iconic auteur whose art was inseparable from his life
Sixty years ago, coroners had declared that Hindi film actor-director Guru Dutt (1925-1964) had not died from an overdose of alcohol and sleeping pills. However, even as Indian cinema marks his birth centenary this year, the circumstances of his death remain shrouded in speculation. He died before the age of 40, and it has long been believed that he took his own life, succeeding in his third attempt. The ambiguity surrounding his death continued to trouble his mother, Vasanthi Padukone — a poet, writer, and Gandhian — who raised these doubts in her 100-page book Nanna Maga Guru Dutt (My Son Guru Dutt).
Published in 1976 by Karnataka’s noted publishing house Manohara Granthamala, which has announced plans to reprint the book and release it in September year, it carries a preface by playwright Girish Karnad. Dutt’s brother, Atmaram, contributes an introduction about their mother, describing her wide-ranging talents: her knowledge of multiple languages, sharp intellect, and prolific writing. Vasanthi portrays Guru Dutt as a stubborn and impulsive son, a voracious reader, and an unusually sensitive child from his formative years.
She recalls her unease over the events of that morning, when Geeta, Dutt’s wife, instructed domestic help to break open the door to his room after realising he had not woken up. “How can a mother ever digest the tragic death of her son?” she asks, and tries to console herself with reason: “There is no point in lamenting over the past.”
Her doubts deepened when doctors delayed issuing the postmortem report. Initially unwilling to send her son’s body for examination, she relented only after Atmaram convinced her that the procedure was essential to secure a death certificate. Vasanthi ends her book with a haunting image: musician Abdul Haleem playing Raga Bhairavi, praying that Dutt’s tormented soul might finally find rest. “I am still searching for an answer,” she writes. “Did my son commit suicide? Did someone do away with him? Or was it simply a natural death? I haven’t found a convincing answer.”
‘A much misunderstood man’
At a festival of Guru Dutt’s films held in Hyderabad in 2001, the organisers released a souvenir in which Abrar Alvi — Dutt’s longtime creative partner in script and dialogue writing — recalled the filmmaker’s last hours: “He refused dinner that night, saying, ‘I can’t eat, I am feeling tired. I would like to retire.’ With those words, he closed his bedroom door. How little did I know he was going to retire forever. The next morning, when the door was broken open, he was lying there, in that serene yet unusual posture of a thought-filled eternal sleep.”
(from left) Guru Dutt as a child; in the 1950s; mother Vasanthi Padukone; and his cinematographer V.K. Murthy.
It was the night of October 9. Dutt had read aloud fragments from a letter written by a childhood friend who had been admitted to a mental asylum in Pune. Abrar Alvi speculated that the letter had deeply unsettled him. After sharing a few excerpts with his colleague, he returned quietly to his room.
In the same souvenir, actress Waheeda Rehman offered her own reflections, calling Guru Dutt a much misunderstood man. “An extremely sensitive… complex person like him could not but be misunderstood. He was so quiet that his modesty … could be misinterpreted as arrogance. He was a man who loved creation, yet also admired death — and wanted to destroy himself. He used to say, ‘What is there in life except success and failure? One of the two must happen, and I have seen both. There is no charm in living any more.’ Yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaaye to kya hai (even if I were to gain the world, what meaning would it have?) was so typical of his thinking.”
Also read: Guru Dutt at 100: How the auteur of Hindi cinema made melancholia his signature
Conflicting accounts still surround the events of his final night. Some family members insist it was an accident. His mother maintained that he had been immersed in several projects and had scheduled appointments for the next day. Yet the line from Pyaasa — quoted by Waheeda Rehman — remains an apt epitaph for a man whose art often seemed inseparable from his own life. In him, there was always that strange blurring between the artist and the art.
Astrologer predicted he’d be famous
She was only 15, newly married, when an astrologer told Vasanthi Padukone that she would soon give birth to a son who would be world-famous. She dismissed the prediction, partly because she was too young to understand childbirth, and partly out of shyness. Recalling the day Guru Dutt was born, she writes that her labour pains had intensified when her husband, Shivashankar Padukone, accompanied by her mother, rushed her to a charitable hospital in Bangalore. At the time, the family lived at Chamarajpet.
Guru Dutt was born at noon on July 9, 1925. In the maternity ward, a nurse mistakenly handed Vasanthi a baby with the wrong identification tag. “I was just sixteen then. A baby was handed to me bearing number six. I began to breastfeed when the nurse realised her mistake and brought me the baby with number nine — a boy, my own flesh and blood. He looked adorable, with jet-black curly hair, a fair complexion, and large eyes. He weighed less than six pounds. When I brought him home, people called him gonta (beautiful).” It was providential, she notes, that the switch was discovered in time.
The family first named the boy Vasant Kumar, but a few years later the name was changed. When he fell seriously ill, a healer advised the Padukones that the name was unlucky for him. The new name chosen was “Guru Dutt,” a gift of the planet Guru, since he had been born on a Thursday.
Shivashankar Padukone, a Saraswat Brahmin from Padukone, a coastal village in Karnataka’s Udupi district, had worked as a headmaster before losing his job. The family then moved to Bangalore and settled at Chamarajpet. He had studied English literature in college and wrote poetry, but his work was never published. Vasanthi’s relationship with Shivashankar was not an easy one. Her irrepressible spirit and zest for life made her into an independent, strong-minded woman who lived on her own terms. Among the many roles she undertook was assisting Gandhi when he stayed in Bangalore to recover from illness. “Gandhiji used to call him Dutta, engage him in childish gibberish, and offer him kallusakkare (sugar candy).”
For sometime, the Padukones lived near the jail in Mangalore, where young Guru Dutt spent hours with prisoners, helping distract them from the harsh treatment of the guards. Vasanthi often took him along on her travels to distant cities — Mangalore, Bangalore, Madras, Ahmedabad, and Calcutta. The family’s stay in Calcutta was long enough for Guru Dutt to absorb its culture and language, which left a lasting influence on him. He never went to college, but he read widely and deeply, and his mind was nourished by books.
Arrival in Bombay
Vasanthi home-schooled Dutt while in Calcutta and significantly influenced his artistic, aesthetic, and poetic sensibilities. “Guru Dutt was not interested in academics. But he read a lot, borrowing books from neighbours and from nearby libraries. When we were in Panambur (near Mangalore), he used to spend nights watching Bayalata (folk theatre) and Yakshagana, bringing back lines to repeat and roles to reenact in his free time.”
Vasanthi recalls how she wrote a film script titled Jawani ki Jurm in Hindi and sent it to Chandulal Shah and Chaturbhuj Joshi. Ranajit Movietone had announced plans to produce a film based on the script but never did. “In Kolkata, Guru Dutt used to listen to Hindustani music concerts by Hirabai Barodekar and Abdul Karim Khan. He once watched a dance performance by the Uday Shankar troupe and decided to learn dance. He went to the Uday Shankar India Cultural Centre in Almora on a scholarship. When he returned to Bombay, where I had moved, I could not recognise him. He had changed a lot. He was now a charming young man speaking in the mature voice of an adult male. He soon found work in Pune as dance director at Prabhat Company run by Baburao Pai,” she writes.
Guru Dutt with Waheeda Rehman in Kaagaz Ke Phool.
Vasanthi’s narrative tells us that Guru Dutt had a difficult childhood, marked by financial hardship and the strain of his parents’ troubled marriage. He carried into adulthood the trauma of several deeply scarring experiences: the continued hostility of his maternal uncle’s family, a frightening encounter with another uncle who was mentally ill, and the memory of witnessing the death of his seven-month-old brother. When Dutt moved to Bombay (now Mumbai) in the 1940s, he was often mistaken for a Bengali, as “Dutt” was a common Bengali surname. In the city, he spent time with his mother’s cousin, Balakrishna Benegal, who painted cinema posters. Shyam Benegal, the filmmaker, was the son of Sridhar Benegal, Balakrishna’s younger brother.
Turning melancholia into a genre
Vasanthi recounts Guru Dutt’s first love in these words: “One day Guru Dutt came home with a girl and introduced her to me as my would-be daughter-in-law. She was an ordinary girl. She later returned to Pune.” She devotes many passages to the strained relationship between Guru Dutt and playback singer Geeta Roy (later known as Geeta Dutt), whom he met during the making of Baazi in 1951. Geeta’s family initially opposed the union but later relented, and the couple were married on May 26, 1953. Vasanthi accuses Geeta of wilfulness, “harassing,” “torturing,” and “blackmailing” Dutt.
The 16th edition of the Bengaluru International Film Festival (BIFFes) paid tribute to Guru Dutt by screening his last film, Kaagaz Ke Phool, which he directed, a film that was a box-office disaster at the time. In August this year, the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) and the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) jointly organised a retrospective of Dutt’s moody, musical masterpieces that have influenced generations of filmmakers and audiences. He was a filmmaker who turned anguish into art and fashioned melancholy into a genre. Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959), India’s first film in the cinemascope format, remains a landmark in the history of Hindi cinema.
Also read: Why Guru Dutt remains Hindi cinema’s most enduring filmmaker 60 years after his death
Venkataramana Pandit Krishnamurthy, better known as V.K. Murthy, is the only cinematographer to have been honoured with the Dadasaheb Phalke Award for Lifetime Achievement. A close associate of Guru Dutt, he created the magical, ethereal beam of sunlight for the song Waqt Ne Kiya in Kaagaz Ke Phool. In a conversation with this writer before his death, Murthy described the thought process behind that unforgettable moment.
“We were filming at Rajkamal Studios in Bombay. I noticed sunlight streaming in through the ventilators. Dust in the air caused parallel shafts of light to form. Guru Dutt wanted me to reproduce that kind of refracted effect. I was considering the problem when a unit boy passed by with a mirror that reflected sunlight onto the wall. That gave me an idea. We brought two big mirrors. We placed one outside in the sun, and that mirror reflected the sunlight onto another mirror set on the ramp. We then opened the balcony door, allowing multiple reflections to form, which created the parallel beams. Finally, we added smoke for the magical effect,” Murthy had said.
The Hamlet of cinema
When asked about the box-office failure of Dutt’s films, V.K. Murthy remarked: “Have classics and cash anything in common except for the first letter ‘C’? Do masterpieces ever go hand in hand with cash in the world of filmmaking?” Murthy recalled Guru Dutt once saying, “It is not difficult to make successful films that cater to the box office. The difficulty arises when purposeful films have to be shaped to succeed at the box office.” Dutt often admitted that the road to experimentation was paved with hurdles.
“He has been described as an eccentric master craftsman. He may have been a misguided intellectual. But he was an artist of extraordinary skill and finesse, both as actor and director. He was like a volcano of ideas burning deep within him. The idealist inside always fought with the man of etiquette outside,” he added.
Guru Dutt on the sets with V.K. Murthy
Continuing his account of Guru Dutt’s filmmaking journey, Murthy described him, curiously, as the Hamlet of cinema. “It was his existential dilemma: to be or not to be. He had occasional bouts of depression. When funds ran out, he would choose to make a film for the box office. But such decisions came at a price: the more he matured as a filmmaker, the more reluctant he became to take such recourse. It made him restless.”
Murthy recalled how Dutt often spent recklessly in the pursuit of art: “I saw him squander lakhs on his films. Many artists who were signed and paid were never used. Many story rights bought were never mounted on the sets. Many films that went on the floor were never finished. He had been accused of vacillation and fickle-mindedness. Having known him very closely, I can say he was a restless man, sincere to the core. He would start a film on impulse if a subject inspired him. He gave his critical faculties full play. But the moment he felt the film wasn’t shaping well, he lost inspiration — and no reminder of the monetary loss could make him return to it. He started a film with all sincerity. He dropped it with equal sincerity.” Murthy’s eyes filled with tears as he recalled this Hamlet-like dilemma that consumed Guru Dutt.
His preoccupation with light and dark
“While dropping a film in the making, his heart bled for those who worked in it. I saw him sulking and morose not because his money went down the drain but because he had let people down. He did not have the heart to face those associated with the film, and people misunderstood him. He never worshipped wealth, and perhaps it was because of this indifference to it that wealth stayed with him. But he was one of the most introverted people I have ever known. A very lonely man. I wish he had talked and laughed more. Perhaps then he might have still lived,” Murthy said.
Also read: Guru Dutt: Indian cinema’s melancholy poet, consumed by the pain of living
Murthy moved his camera in alignment with Dutt’s cinematic aesthetics. In the early works, it is possible to discern a fascination for movement and the textures of light and shade. Murthy experimented with circular and planar movement. Their shared aesthetic seems to reflect the belief that life is the union of light and shade.
“We believed in the truth of the law that a passing light is always accompanied by a passing shadow. The knowledge that light and shadow are phenomenological complements in the flux of life is the underlying principle of our work. Dutt’s preoccupation with light and dark — chiaroscuro — never led to sharply contrastive images, and they were never static nor angular because they were always in motion.”
On the decision to make Kaagaz Ke Phool, Murthy said, “If something took his fancy, there was no way he wasn’t going to pursue it. I tried many times to convince him against making Kaagaz Ke Phool. ‘Who would be interested in the life of a director?’ I said. ‘Don’t do it. It is too serious.’ Dutt said, ‘Nahin re, Murthy. Don’t worry about that.’ I had predicted the film would flop, and it did. But he just did what he believed in and never feared experimenting…. When he passed away, I felt I had lost a part of myself.”
Comparing their cinematic oeuvres, it is possible to find similarities between Ritwik Ghatak and Guru Dutt. Both preferred the melodic structuring of narrative rather than drama. Both shared a taste for their own unique style of melodrama. There was also the use of a panoramic-epic scale, depth of focus, and a breaking away from the symmetric framing balance seen in Western classics. Both shared a fascination for playing with differential planes in the frame. However, the difference between them, minor as it is, is that Dutt used tilts of angle — high or low — in a way that was not as pronounced as in Ghatak.
Guru Dutt left behind a legacy of many unfinished works. Those that he did complete, although relatively small in number, came to be highly regarded and are considered a significant contribution to Indian cinema. In a brief yet impactful career spanning just two decades, he distinguished himself as an actor, director, and producer, demonstrating a profound mastery of every facet of filmmaking. Dutt tackled pertinent social issues, especially the inequalities in post-independence India, and often explored avenues for social change.
