What role did marriage play in the Suchitra Sen-Uttam Kumar screen pairing?

Of the thirty films that they acted in together, Suchitra Sen and Uttam Kumar appeared as a married pair in six films. These films are Agnipariksha (1954), Chandranath (1957), Harano Sur (1957), Indrani (1958), Grihodaho (1967), and Nabaraag (1971). Why do narratives of “married love” form a negligible part of their couple corpus? Their iconicity as the ultimate screen couple participated in and relied on their romantic desirability, and perhaps enacting the married couple was not considered a safe box-office bet.

Is on-screen marital conflict merely the function of the melodramatic form, in order to stage the crisis of self that domestic melodramas are meant to enact, or is it also the unravelling of their “private” selves into the diegetic? Suchitra was separated from her husband, Dibanath, and had moved out of her Ballygunj Place house to her own home in the same area sometime in 1963. They had reportedly had a tumultuous married life as Dibanath was predictably jealous of his successful and working wife.

Uttam never formally divorced his wife, Gauri Devi. He moved in with Supriya Debi around 1963 and lived with her for seventeen years, but maintained his marital household as well.

However, in her autobiography, Supriya claims that as soon as her divorce came through, her father took...

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