Anjan Dutt

Anjan Dutt is an Indian film director, actor, singer and songwriter as well. He was born on 19 January 1953 to a Bengali family and the mountains of North Bengal. His father was a solicitor and wanted him to make a career in law. He had his basic schooling from St. Paul's School, Darjeeling and came to Kolkata for further studies. He did his Post graduation in English literature, from the University of Calcutta, in India. It was during his University days when he began to work in theatres with thespian Badal Sarkar. He was inspired by his friends to take acting seriously as a career option. He began first by joining a group called 'Open Theatres' at the end of 1970s. Here they used to perform plays on the works of renowned English drama writers like Peter Weiss, Jean Genet, and Sartre, etc.

The group was inspired from Nandikar a highly active and already famous theatre group at that time. His career in film industry started with the movie 'Chalachitro' directed by Mrinal Sen Mrinal Sen was a renowned and highly skilled India >> Read More... . This can be called as an unexpected break for him, as it got a critical acclaim in Venice film festival and Anjan got the best newcomer award for his performance. This movie never got released commercially in India, and the reason behind has been unknown till now. His second film 'Kharij' was also directed be Mrinal Sen and got different awards in ' National Film Awards The National Film Awards gets presented every year >> Read More... ' 1983. He worked in many films, but he was more interested in doing art films rather than commercial cinema. Some of Anjan's talked about films were Shilpi, Mr. and Mrs. Iyer, Madly Bangalee, etc. Slowly his interest turned towards music.

He loved to listen the songs of singers Kabir Suman and Bob Dylan. Anjan was deeply influenced by music of Kabir Suman (earlier Suman Chatterjee) who gave songs that were very much different from other Bengali Music that existed at the time. After this, Anjan started translating some English songs and decided to enter the music arena. But he realized the seriousness of this decision when London-based music company HMV offered to publish his songs. His first album 'Shunte Ki Chao' was launched in 1994 and later; he released around 17 albums one by one and sang many singles as well. Anjan's music is different from the others in a sense that it has simple tunes and the lyrics were natural.

In 1998 Anjan debuted in the world of cinema through the Hindi movie 'Bada Din,’ and six years later debuted in Bengali directorial with the film 'Bow Barracks Forever.' The concept of this film was to highlight the struggle that the Anglo-Indians were facing to get back their identity since the end of British rule. Anjan was much more interested in doing art cinema, rather than commercial movies, but this choice made him suffer a lot as the art films were not commercially successful. He faced a lack of work and had to work in advertisement, and later became a journalist for the Kolkata-based daily, The Statesman. He achieved success through hard work and has faced lots of difficulties in life. Today what we see as Anjan Dutt is the result of almost 30 years of experience and working. His recent work is the movie Hemanta that is a modern-day adaptation of Hamlet, a story by William Shakespeare.