Was he Ray’s ‘Sidhu Jyatha’, Kolkata debates before R P Gupta’s centenary – Times of India

Kolkata: Along with the centenary of Satyajit Ray and Chidananda Dasgupta, Kolkata is set to witness the centenary of Radha Prasad Gupta. A close associate of Ray and Dasgupta, Gupta was the co-founder of the Calcutta Film Society, author of ‘Kolkatar Feriwalar Dak O Raster Awaz’, a gastronome, a collector of rare books, Kalighat pats, Battala wood-engravings and chromolithographs. Popularly known as Shatul Babu, some believed that he was Ray’s ‘go-to Google’ on whom he had modelled his ‘Sidhu Jyatha’ character. As a tribute to his birth centenary on Tuesday, the Centre for Social Sciences is hosting historian Tapati Guha-Thakurta’s slide-show presentation on Gupta’s art collection, which he had given to the institute. A calendar of his collections will be out next year.

Director Goutam Ghose, who will be speaking at the event, described him as his personal ‘Sidhu Jyatha’, an encyclopedia on art, history and culture, and “one of the remnants of the Bengali renaissance”. In the late 90s, Ghose had shot two long interviews with Shatul-da on video cassettes. “However, the cassettes went untraced from the producer’s office because of a spell of rain that resulted in waterlogging. Not just books and art, he even had an enviable collection of old restaurant menus. He was my chief advisor for ‘Antarjali Jatra’. After returning from Leipzig, where I attended my first international film festival with ‘Hungry Autumn’, Shatul-da had asked me if I had been to the place where Bach used to play the organ. While he hadn’t visited the city, I had no idea about this even after going there,” Ghosh said.
Both Gupta and Ray had an advertising background. “Baba used to work as a copywriter with J Walter Thompson. I have heard that it was Baba who, on learning that the acclaimed Hollywood actor-director John Houston of ‘The Maltese Falcon’ fame was in Kolkata, had shown him the rushes of ‘Pather Panchali’,” said Gupta’s daughter Gargi. Ray was enthused when Huston said he was “deeply impressed” and “recognised it as the work of a great film-maker”.

Radha Prasad Gupta and Satyajit Ray
She also remembers how the likes of M F Husain, Mulkraj Anand and Pamella Bordes dropped by at their residence to interact with him or seek his advice. “Madhu Jaffery had sought his advice on cookery. Hollywood actor Julie Christie of ‘Dr Zhivago’ fame, who was born in Assam, had come to Kolkata in1991. She came home one evening, when we were throwing a surprise party on his 70th birthday. While others were excited about her presence, my father had no clue. She had introduced herself as Julie, who acted in movies. Imagine our surprise when my father went around introducing her as Julie Andrews,” Gargi said.
At the Dover Lane Music Conference, Gupta’s wife had once literally crawled in to listen to a concert of Pt Bhimsein Joshi. “She was shocked when, on her way out, she saw a leaflet mentioning my father as the conference’s president,” she said.