Every Sunday after lunch while I was growing up, my mother would sit on the living room sofa, switch on the TV, and flick through all the Bengali film channels on the cable service until she found what she was looking for: any of the 200-odd Bengali films starring Uttam Kumar. Somehow, there was always one of those playing on one of the channels. Maybe they still are. There have been many stars in the history of Bengali cinema over the years, but there was, is, and will ever be only one Uttam Kumar.

For many generations of Bengalis like my mother — both men and women — who came of age between the 1950s and the 1980s, Uttam Kumar embodied the ideal Bengali man. Women wanted him, and men wanted to be him. In films like 'Harano Sur' (The Lost Tune, 1957), 'Saptapadi' (Seven Steps, 1961), 'Grihadaha' (Home Fire, 1967), Satyajit Ray's 'Nayak' (The Hero, 1966), and 'Antony Firingee' (the acclaimed 1967 biopic of the Bengali-Portuguese poet-singer-songwriter Anthony Firinghee), Uttam Kumar played men who listened, men who cried, and men who could be wounded without wallowing in self-pity — offering an alternative vision of tender, masculine, emotionally intelligent, and vulnerable male characters that are still rare in Indian Cinema today.

What distinguished Uttam Kumar's romantic heroes was their emotional availability. Unlike the hyper-masculine protagonists of Hindi cinema, his characters cried, faltered, hesitated, failed, and loved with a sincerity that was rare for male leads of the time. Across his vast filmography spanning over three decades — especially in his romantic collaborations with Suchitra Sen and Tanuja — Uttam Kumar cultivated an on-screen persona marked by emotional intelligence, vulnerability, compassion, and confidence. His characters challenged dominant norms of masculinity through their gentle romanticism, intellectual introspection, and deep respect for women.

These romantic roles, particularly opposite Suchitra Sen, established Uttam Kumar as an enduring icon of the Bengali silver screen. At the height of their stardom, the Uttam-Suchitra pairing was nothing short of a social phenomenon. In 'Harano Sur', for example, Uttam Kumar played a man who loses his memory and falls in love anew, unaware of his past, with a delicate, unsure, almost childlike joie de vivre. And In 'Saptapadi', he played the devil-may-care Krishnendu, a Hindu medical student, who falls in love with his Anglo-Indian classmate Rina Brown (played by Suchitra Sen), and converts to Christianity, leading to tragic consequences. The iconic duet 'Ei Poth Jodi Na Shesh Hoy' from Saptapadi, with Uttam and Suchitra riding a bike and dreaming of an endless journey, continues to define romantic imagination in Bengal even today.

Uttam Kumar represented the quintessential Bengali bhadralok, or gentleman: educated and cultured, who read poetry and played the piano, who was as comfortable in a courtroom as he was in a moment of emotional intimacy. This persona resonated with audiences in Bengal, where notions of masculinity were themselves being negotiated amid Nehruvian ideals of nation-building, a rising middle class, and the remnants of colonial codes of conduct.

But Uttam Kumar's roles were not just romantic — they were also political. They resisted the aggressive posturing of dominant masculinity, offering instead a vision of tenderness, self-doubt, and sensitivity. His characters often made space for the women around them to speak, decide, and leave — should they want to. This made him particularly attractive to young women. While much has been written about his on-screen chemistry with Suchitra Sen, what stands out in their films is also the sense of equal partnership. There is conflict and drama, yes, but rarely coercion or control. In Grihadaha (1967), for example, their on-screen love is portrayed as mutual recognition, not conquest. In a cultural landscape where female desire was often muted or sensationalised, Uttam Kumar legitimised it simply by taking it seriously.

The idea of the romantic hero as someone emotionally articulate, who can fall apart and still be attractive, owes much to the legacy Uttam Kumar left behind. In many ways, his on-screen portrayals of tender men were the precursor to today's men written by women.

When Satyajit Ray cast him in Nayak (1966) — much to the chagrin of his contemporary parallel cinema powerhouse Mrinal Sen — Ray used Uttam Kumar's public image as a "matinee idol" to probe the anxieties of fame, masculinity, and loneliness. The film follows movie star Arun Kumar over a 24-hour train journey from Kolkata to Delhi as he reflects on his personal and professional life. Stripped of glamour, the character becomes deeply human — ambitious, insecure, flawed, even mournful — and Uttam Kumar's restrained, visceral, devastating performance as the titular 'nayak' (hero) remains one of the finest depictions of a man confronting his own interior landscape in world cinema.

Today, in conversations about toxic masculinity and what it means to be a man on screen, the term "soft masculinity" is often used as a corrective alternative. But Uttam Kumar didn't just perform soft masculinity in his films; he embodied it. He made it cinematic — something to desire, something to aspire to. In doing so, Uttam Kumar offered something few leading men in Indian cinema have offered since: a model of manhood rooted in charismatic tenderness.

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