Sagarika - Bengali - Uttam, Suchitra

Sagarika, 1956
Director: Agragami (a collective)
Music Director: Robin Chatterjee
Lyrics: Nitai Bhattacharya, Pranab Roy, Gouriprasanna Majumdar
Playback: Shyamal Mitra, Sandhya Mukhopadhyay, Alpana Banerjee, Satinath Mukherjee, Utpala Sen, Dwijen Mukherjee
Cast: Suchitra Sen, Uttam Kumar, Jamuna Singha, Namita Sinha, Tapati Ghosh, Kamal Mitra, Jahar Ganguly, Pahadi Sanyal, Anup Kumar, Sabita Bhattacharya, Manjushree Ghatak, Jiban Bose, Nitish Mukhopadhyay, Santosh Sinha, Salil Dutta

English translation included.

The Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema has this to say about Sagarika:

Classic Sen/Kumar melodrama evoking e.g.
Nitin Bose’s love tragedies with Dilip Kumar.
Impoverished and orphaned medical student
Arun (U. Kumar) falls in love with colleague
Sagarika (Sen). Following an act of perfidy by
Arun’s cousin Sipra (Sinha), who is also in love
with him, Arun loses a scholarship to go to
England and has to borrow money on condition
that he marry Basanti (Singha) on his return. The
suffering Sagarika has to look after the illiterate
Basanti, which means writing Basanti’s love-
letters to Arun. Arun goes blind after an
accident, and on his return Sagarika nurses him
back to health, pretending to be Basanti. In the
end, the lead couple unite. As in the Kapoor/
Nargis love stories of the same period, this film
is famous for the ecstatic, soft-focus close-ups of
the lead pair and esp. of Suchitra Sen, which
became classic icons in Bengali popular culture,
transcending the characters and suggesting a
fantasy of romance in which love can, by its
own internal strength, develop an independent
destiny. The monologues, esp. of Uttam Kumar
as a voice on the soundtrack, contribute to the
lyrical scene transitions, a style which evolved
further with e.g. Ajoy Kar (cf. Saptapadi,
1961), Salil Dutta and Asit Sen generating the
finest examples of popular film’s absorption of
the Bengali romantic literary tradition. These
films, and others such as Saat Pake Bandha
(1963), are further enhanced by their contrast to
the resurgence of traditional values in 80s
Bengali cinema, partly through assimilating the
‘social’ contemporary Jatra, and partly as a
means of keeping a distance from the influence
of Hindi film.

There are much better quality versions of the film available here on YouTube. But I, for one, don't like my black and white films tinted blue. And I, for one, don't like them in a modified aspect ratio ('widescreen', with 25% of the film cropped away (removed, missing, destroyed), rather than the original 'full-screen'). This version has additional film footage as compared to other versions here. But the film is still incomplete as the same encyclopedia quoted above says the film is 152 minutes long. There are obvious breaks in the narrative from time to time. The most glaring omission is a scene where Uttam Kumar loses his scholarship to study abroad. Apparently, Suchitra Sen had reported him to the head of the school, based on false information. It's discussed later on in the film. The other versions of the film here on YouTube are missing the same scene. Maybe it's lost forever. But there are other times, too, where you think to yourself, "Hey, what happened?"

Madhu (Dusted Off) has a review of the film, going into more detail about the missing scene, explaining about Uttam Kumar losing his scholarship, and why:

https://madhulikaliddle.com/2014/08/3...

This version has a bouncy picture at times, missing frames, lots of vertical scratches, and a sometimes scratchy audio.

Here's a link to a playlist of the songs from Sagarika:
   • Sagarika - Bengali - Amra Medical Col...  

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION:
The Indian copyright law:
http://copyright.gov.in/Documents/Cop...

INDIAN COPYRIGHT ACT, 1957 CHAPTER I Preliminary (f)
"cinematograph film" means any work of visual recording on any medium produced through a process from which a moving image may be produced by any means and includes a sound recording accompanying such visual recording and cinematograph shall be construed as including any work produced by any process analogous to cinematography including video films.”

"CHAPTER V Term of Copyright 26.Term of copyright in cinematograph films.
In the case of a cinematograph film, copyright shall subsist until sixty years from the beginning of the calendar year next following the year in which the film is published."

My words:
Indian film copyright (including video, dialog, music, lyrics, songs) lasts for sixty years and any film and its songs released more than sixty years ago is in the public domain. No extensions, no renewals, no exceptions. This film is no longer protected by copyright.