Bollywood lost one of its most legendary directors today when B.R. Chopra, the commercially successful but often controversial filmmaker who managed to bring a tone of moral seriousness and ethical inquiry to an industry most often given over to frothy, lightweight musical entertainments, passed away at the age of 94. As reported in the New York Times and elsewhere, Chopra's death from natural causes was announced by his son, also a film producer and a member of what has grown to be a prominent family in the Indian film industry.
Originally trained as a journalist and setting out to support a large family with only his determination to succeed as a filmmaker, crag-faced Baldev Raj Chopra initially encountered failure in his film career, helming a few forgettable romantic comedies before scoring mild success with popular thrillers that showed the influence of Hitchcock. It was in the 1950s that Chopra's career truly blossomed, mirroring the success of the industry itself; and, as time went on, he proved himself capable of scoring popular successes with traditionally-minded audiences while still seeking to push the boundaries of what was allowed in Indian film of the day.
Chopra's best-known film was Naya Daur, a 1957 musical that played up the conflict between technocratic urbanism and rural agricultural life at a time when India's leadership was pushing for more urban development and a transition from old-style community values. Though he worked with many of the biggest Bollywood stars, he sometimes made a statement by eschewing big names, such as in the 1980 drama Insaf ka Tarazu (dealing with the often-taboo subject of rape); he likewise bucked the Bollywood trend of featuring songs in every film in movies like the popular courtroom drama Kanoon. Though he directed his last film in 1992, he continued to act as a producer for his won B.R. Films company until 2006, when he released another controversial film -- Baabul -- which challenged the treatment of women in traditional Indian society. His most well-known work in the west, oddly, was not a film, but a television series: in 1988, he produced a serialization of the Hindu epic Mahabharata, which found an audience in the U.S. thanks to being syndicated by PBS.
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