'Guru Dutt's legacy is a wound...': Mahesh Bhatt says superstar took 'aching mess' of human life

Mumbai, Guru Dutt's legacy is not of awards but of silence, the kind that lingers on after the screen fades to black, says Mahesh Bhatt about the legendary filmmaker who "let beauty crumble into truth".

Dutt, regarded as amongst the greatest filmmakers of Indian cinema with films such as “Pyaasa”, “Kaagaz Ke Phool” and “Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam”, would have been 100 on July 9. He was found dead, possibly from a cocktail of sleeping pills and alcohol, in 1964 when he was just 39.

"He took the aching mess of human life, and turned it into poetry that could pierce even silence. Those of us who came after we carried forward the wound. We do not celebrate a hundred years of Guru Dutt. We return to him,” Bhatt told PTI.

The filmmaker said he was captivated when he first saw a large photograph of Dutt at Raj Khosla's office. “Guru Dutt’s legacy isn’t made of awards, posters, or reels. It is made of silence. The kind that enters a room after the screen goes black and stays. He was our Vyasa.

"Guru Dutt took private anguish and gave it mythic proportions. He lit his characters with compassion and contradiction. He let the poet in him rage. He let the woman feel to the point of tears. He let beauty crumble into truth. ‘Waqt ne kiya’ that ageless song from ‘Kaagaz ke Phool’ is a throbbing wound. His legacy is not a style you can copy. It is a wound you must survive,” Bhatt told PTI.

The filmmaker-producer said he was working on his 1982 acclaimed film “Arth” when poet-lyricist Kaifi Azmi remarked that he had inherited Dutt’s pain as a protege of Khosla.

“We were working on a song for ‘Arth’. Jagjit Singh was shaping the early melody of ‘Tum Itna Jo Muskura Rahe Ho’. Kaifi saab sat quietly, listening not just to the tune, but to the wound behind it. And then, in his unmistakably gentle voice, he said to me: ‘Tumne Guru Dutt ka dard virasat mein paaya hai. Pain is your legacy’.

"He wasn’t romanticising it. He was naming it. I had been Raj Khosla’s assistant, and Raj Khosla had been Guru Dutt’s assistant. That was the line. Not one of fame, but of fracture, not of ambition but ache, wounds passed down like sacred relics. He was right.”

The 76-year-old writer-director said he carried the wound into his own work. "Arth", "Saaransh", "Daddy" and "Zakhm", Bhatt said, weren't just films but echoes and testament to what Kaifi Azmi saw that day.

"Proof that pain, if you dare not flee it, becomes your voice. And if that voice refuses to lie—it becomes cinema."

Bhatt remembers the first time he watched the 1957 masterpiece “Pyaasa” in a theatre, and how deeply it touched his soul. “Guru Dutt is not a memory for me. He is a wound that never healed. He’s not a figure from the past, I carry him inside me. His cinema invaded me as a boy sitting in the front stalls of Citylight cinema. ‘Pyaasa’ didn’t entertain me; it undressed me. It showed me what it meant to ache without apology,” Bhatt said.

“Even today, when the lights dim and I hear the rustle of silence before a scene, it is his ghost I meet. He is the one who taught me that sorrow, when surrendered to, becomes your signature. He is less my inspiration and more my inheritance,” he said.

Bhatt said filmmakers like Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Vishal Bhardwaj, and Mohit Suri, carry forward the same passion that Dutt embodied in their unique way. 

“Guru Dutt cannot be reproduced, only echoed. There are filmmakers who carry a similar hunger for truth and beauty like Sanjay Leela Bhansali, in his obsessive pursuit of the lyrical frame, and Vishal Bhardwaj, in his willingness to explore pain through music and poetry, Anurag Kashyap, when he lets his darkness speak without disguise, Mohit Suri in how he listens to silences and centres the unseen through his use of music,” he said.

“These filmmakers may walk different roads, but like Guru Dutt, they understand that cinema, when it dares to feel deeply, becomes poetry in motion and that perhaps, is how the flame continues to burn. Not loudly, but faithfully,” Bhatt said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DNA staff and is published from PTI)