Obituary: Tapan Sinha

The Indian film-maker Tapan Sinha, who has died aged 84, made more than 40 feature films in Bengali, Hindi and Oriya in a career spanning nearly half a century. A contemporary of West Bengal's cinema icons - Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen - Sinha was an equally powerful storyteller who, like his favourite novelist, Charles Dickens, won a large and appreciative audience by dealing with the problems that confront ordinary people. Born in Kolkata, Sinha was the fifth child of Tridibesh and Pramila Sinha. He attended schools in Bhagalpur and Bankura. As a student at Patna University, Bihar, Sinha responded sympathetically to Mahatma Gandhi's Quit India movement, launched against the British in 1942. However, when he moved to Kolkata University, where he was studying for an MSc in physics, he fell under the spell of British and American film-makers, particularly John Ford, Billy Wilder, Frank Capra and Carol Reed. He later claimed that it was Jack Conway's 1935 version of Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities that motivated him to become a film-maker. After gaining his master's in 1946, Sinha joined the New Theatres studios, Kolkata, as a trainee sound engineer. Two years later, he moved to the Kolkata Movietone studio and, in 1950, he received an invitation to the London film festival and an opportunity to work at Pinewood studios, near London, where he took a job in the director Charles Crichton's unit as a sound engineer. While in London, he was exposed to the works of Italian directors Federico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini. On returning to India, Sinha made his first film, Ankush (The Goad, 1954), which featured an elephant belonging to a zamindar (tax collector) as the central character. It was a groundbreaking idea but the film bombed at the box office. Sinha's next two films, Upahar (1955) and Tonsil (1956), were rather more successful, but the one that firmly established him as a film-maker of note was Kabuliwala (1956), based on a famous story by the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Chhabi Biswas gave a stellar performance as the protagonist, a migrant fruit-seller from Afghanistan. Critically acclaimed, the film was nominated for a Golden Bear at the Berlin international film festival of 1957. Two further films completed Sinha's Tagore trilogy, Tagore: Kshudita Pashan (Hungry Stones, 1960), which starred his actor-director wife, Arundhati Devi and Soumitra Chatterjee, of Ray's Apu trilogy fame, and Atithi (The Guest, 1965). Sinha's subtle approach gave cinematic life to the spirit of the material, with the addition of situations, incidents and subplots that together formed a cohesive and compelling whole. Both films won national awards. Sinha wrote his own screenplays, but was often inspired by other Bengali writers. "Literature is a character and cinema portrays its spirit," he said. Sinha's acclaimed feature Louhakapat (Iron Door, 1957) takes a sympathetic view of hardened criminals. The film is notable for its unsentimental and realistic depiction of the daily grind behind bars and the complex relationships that develop between the inmates. Hansuli Banker Upakatha (The Folk Tale of Hansuli Bank, 1962), based on a novel by Tarashankar Bandopadhyaya, depicts the survival of a group of people living on the banks of a small river in the Birbhum district of West Bengal. Sinha also worked with Bollywood stars in both Bengali and Hindi films. His Bengali hit Sagina Mahato (1970), with the Bollywood icon Dilip Kumar and Saira Bano, was remade into Hindi as Sagina (1974) with the same stars. Directed by Sinha, both were phenomenally successful. Among his other Hindi films are Safed Hathi (White Elephant, 1977), Zindagi Zindagi (Life, 1972), Hathi (White Elephant, 1977), Aadmi Aur Aurat (A Man and a Woman, 1984) and Anokha Moti (Rare Pearl, 2000). Sinha's last film to win critical acclaim was Ek Doctor Ki Maut (Death of a Doctor, 1991). The film, which had Pankaj Kapur and Shabana Azmi in the cast, was voted second-best feature film, while Sinha won the national award for the best director. Sinha, whom many critics regarded as India's David Lean, was honoured at international festivals in Berlin, Venice, London, Moscow and San Francisco and had received the Dadasaheb Phalke award, the highest cinema honour from the Indian government in 2008. His wife died in 1990. Sinha is survived by a son and a daughter. • Tapan Sinha, sound engineer and film-maker, born 2 October 1924; died 15 January 2009