Director's cut

What was it that so haunted this young man? When he died by suicide in 1964, Guru Dutt was 39 years old. It was his third attempt. In his centenary year (Dutt was born on July 9, 1925), Poonam Saxena revisits the tortured yet exquisite cinema, the unfading legacy and the personal trials of a remarkable artist

- Poonam Saxena

On the morning of October 10, 1964, Guru Dutt was found dead in his flat in Bombay, lying on his bed in a crumpled kurta-pyjama.

He had drunk a glass of pink liquid, sleeping pills crushed and dissolved in water. He had turned 39 in July.

This was his third suicide attempt. His first was at the peak of his career, while directing and starring in Pyaasa (1957), a classic that is considered his greatest film.

What was it that haunted this young man? Biographers have been trying to answer that question for decades.

It was as if success drew him deeper into himself. In her book Guru Dutt: A Life in Cinema, Nasreen Munni Kabir quotes his brother, the filmmaker Atma Ram, as saying: “He was quite social in his early days... had a very pleasant nature... Whether it was the success or his filmmaking, he became increasingly enclosed, more and more cut off.”

His movies changed too. After early lighthearted releases such as Aar Paar (1954) and Mr & Mrs ‘55 (1955), both romantic comedies, came Pyaasa, a dark masterpiece about a poet rejected at every turn, who finds solace with a prostitute. This was followed by the even bleaker Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959), about a successful filmmaker whose anguished personal life leads to his ruin.

The melancholy of his movies made him something of an outlier in the world of 1950s Hindi cinema, when directors such as Raj Kapoor and Mehboob Khan were telling hopeful stories of exuberance-amid-hardship in a newly independent India.

Filmmakers such as Bimal Roy spotlit the darker side, with tales of systemic injustice, exploitation and caste. But Guru Dutt’s stories didn’t fit in here either. Because the despair he sketched with such artistry wasn't systemic, it was deeply personal.

The descents into insomnia, depression and drink were the story of his life, told in real time.