Suchitra Sen and Bikash Roy were unparallel in Surjotoron.







Suchitra Sen and Bikash Roy were unparallel in Surjotoron.

Director Agradoot gave hit romantic films one after the other in the mid-50s. Very significantly most of those films involved the eternal pair of Bengali celluloid namely Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen, and that too during the early phase of their career. All the films, Agniparikkha, Sabar Upare, Pathe Holo Deri, Sagarika did great business in the mid-50s.

Surjotoron was written by eminent lyricist Gouri Prasanna Mojumdar. Surjotoron was related to the story of a young architect engineer played by Uttam Kumar who dreamt about creating a huge building named Surjotoron for the slum-dwellers. The idea was that of Suchitra Sen who was an eminent writer in the film and daughter of huge builder Kamal Mitra.

Uttam Kumar learned architecture from an old engineer played by Kali Banerjee. But Kamal Mitra, an eminent builder gave a number of projects to Asitboron, who was also an architect engineer, but very incompetent in work. He destroyed the goodwill of Kamal Mitra in the market, and Bikash Roy bought all the shares of Kamal Mitra in the real estate sector.

At the end of the film, Uttam Kumar did build Surjo Toron. Bikash Roy committed suicide to allow Uttam Kumar to marry Suchitra Sen. He left his voice recorded in a record player which expressed the reasons for his death. He was evicted from his slum during infancy, by the eminent builders. He spend his teenage in prison. He became a big builder later on and wanted to marry Suchitra Sen. With the work of Uttam Kumar in building Surjotoron, a huge flat complex, build to accommodate the slum-dwellers, his dream was fulfilled. He never wanted to survive any more.

Although Uttam Kumar was the hero of the film, the performance of Bikash Roy and Suchitra Sen did outcast him. Bikash Roy’s mellifluous voice left the viewers spellbound. Suchitra Sen gave able lips in Sandhya Mukherjee’s brilliant songs “amar jibone nei alo, ache aleyar hatchani”, and “e aral aar sohite parina ogo akaron”, which had fantastic orchestration relating to piano.

The film should be restored for the uncommon story and powerful performance of Bikash Roy and Suchitra Sen.