running off with the dinner
by
Douglas Messerli
Shyam
Benegal, and Girish Karnad (screenplay, based on a work by by Sangtye Aika on Hansa
Wadkar), Satyadev Dubey (dialogue), Shyam Benegal (director) Bhumika / 1977
I
had never previously seen a film by Indian director Shyam Benegal and was
delighted to see some of his works posted on Filmstruck. This work, Bhumika, with a script by Benegal,
Girish Karnad, Satydey Dubey, and others based on the work by Sangtye Aika on
Hansa Wadker, a widely transgressive and stunning Indian film star of the
1940s, is a truly fascinating film about the Indian film tradition,
particularly the Bollywood filmmaking, although the film itself lies outside of
that cinema tradition.
Certainly, this film has many of the
Bollywood tropes, a woman who, as a child, was taught the music of the old
tradition from the Devadasi community of Goa by her grandmother, a famous
singer of that tradition, dismissed by Usha’s mother (Sulabha Deshpande), who
is clearly a bourgeois religious woman, herself married to an abusive and
alcoholic Brahmin. But in Usha’s world, everything is still based on a
hierarchical cultural perspective, which she quickly, even as a child, rejects,
running off with a chicken, for example, that is about to be slaughtered for a
Korma dinner.
She is clearly a rebel who needs to be
constrained, that is until the family loses any financial standing, and must
use their daughter’s musical and acting talents in order to survive. In a
strange sense, this musical parallels the Hollywood film, A Star Is Born, but with little of the possible passion available
to that film’s actress.
Here, Usha (the wonderful Smita Patil) is
quickly married off to the family friend Keshav Dalvi (Amol Palekar), who
pushes her into the Bombay film industry, while also getting her pregnant with
a child. This is not only a man who uses her to create his own financial
success, but has lusted after her from childhood; and it is quickly apparent
that he is not only an abusive husband, but, as Usha’s mother perceives, not of
her own caste. For the young wife, it is not the caste that matters as much as
his inability to perceive Usha’s worth and talent, using her to help support
himself while also verbally attacking her. When she determines, finally, to leave
him for the second time, she is not allowed to take her daughter with her.
Nonetheless, fed by the film magazine
gossip, her worthless husband, Dalvi, is convinced she is having an affair with
Rajan, and when she finally leaves their dark relationship, she is left without
ties to her former family life.
Now forced to stay in a hotel, the unhappy
singer develops a relationship with another self-centered man, Sunil Verma (Naseeruddin
Shah), developing with him a pact for a double suicide, which he does not carry
out.
Clearly, not a good judge when it comes to
men, Usha then develops a relationship with a wealthy businessman, Vinayak Kale
(Amrist Puri), whom she happily marries. But despite his lavish life-style, she
soon after realizes that he intends to keep her house-bound, refusing to allow
her to leave the house, let alone the palatial estate. Furious with the
restriction, she calls on her hated former husband Keshav, who with a
militaristic-like maneuver, rescues her, now bringing her back to Bombay, where
he has plastered the streets with billboards of her picture. But her life soon
after finds her back in drab hotels with little prospect of change.
As Kale’s bedridden first wife observes,
as Usha prepares to leave, "The beds change, the kitchens change. Men's
masks change, but men don't change." In short, Benegal turns his musical
into a kind of ur-feminist tract, making it clear how young women—even those
who become, like Usha, successful—have little possibility of true happiness in
a world controlled by men.
Like her own grandmother, we suspect she
will one day become part of her daughter’s household, secretly teaching a
granddaughter the secrets of the musical tradition in which she so brilliantly
performed.
The director here presents his musical
interludes as a mix of comic irreverence (their plots are clearly static and
hackneyed) and high respect, particularly when Smita Patil is on stage. A bit
like an Indian Judy Garland, when she sings she transforms this sad tale into a
wondrous spectacle that surely would appeal to the hundreds of locked-away
housewives.
Los Angeles, July
29, 2018