NOSTALGIA: Bhumika (1977)

A CAREER-DEFINING ROLE

A girl who grows up too soon, a mother who doesn’t know how to balance her own needs with that of her daughter’s. A woman in search of her true identity. An actress whose reel life often spills over into her real self, creating tempestuous situations she can barely cope with. Shyam Benegal’s Bhumika, based on the book Sangtye Aika, by Marathi actress Hansa Wadkar, traces these dilemma’s in the life of the poor village girl Usha as she rises to stardom and drifts from one traumatic relationship to the next, in her constant quest for fulfillment.

Smita Patil was just 22 when she essayed this role of a lifetime. It fetched her a National Award and tremendous critical acclaim.

The Women of Bhumika: Please wait for the slideshow to load, and navigate using the 'next' and 'previous' links.

SLIDESHOW TEXT BY VIKRAM PHUKAN. These images are screengrabs from the official release DVD. No copyright infringement intended.

Brilliantly shot by Govind Nihalani, Benegal uses black & white photography for the film’s extensive flashback sequences and contrasts them with bright colours and tight compositions for the rest of the film as he recreates the era from the 1930s to the late 1950s, and offers glimpses into not just the modes of the times, but also the evolution of the cinema in India from mythologicals to social dramas.

Smita’s Usha, (Urvashi for the screen), is defiant and stubborn from the start, but being a woman in a conservative environment, she’s never really able to break the shackles. When her much older husband Keshav (Amol Palekar) pushes her to continue acting after marriage, all we see is a tight close-up that frames her disappointment, when he forces her to attend parties she doesn’t want to, she fumes and protests, but eventually must go along. But when he takes things too far and makes her swear by God she’ll behave and drags her across the house to the puja room, she angrily asserts she’ll do exactly as she pleases.

Her troubled marriage prompts her to walk out of the house on a routine basis and often she either goes to a hotel or to her co-star Rajan (Anant Nag), who’s remained single in the hope of marrying her some day. But Usha refuses to relent for she fears it will ruin their bond. Yet, she drifts into a casual affair and a suicide pact with the glib-talking director Sunil (Naseeruddin Shah), who obviously has no intention of killing himself or her. Finally, Usha gets drawn towards the principled businessman Kale (Amrish Puri) who takes her to his village estate and gives her a sampling of a real home—albeit one which also houses his bed-ridden first wife and their little son. Usha enjoys this interlude, till she’s rudely informed that while she has all the freedom within the confines of the mansion, she’s not allowed to step out. Finally, she must summon her estranged husband to rescue her from this prison.

Smita shines through this complex role with a maturity way beyond her years. She plays multiple characters as Usha’s life is often juxtaposed ironically with the roles she essays on screen. When she first walks out on her husband at the beginning of the film, she’s playing the part of Savitri, the devoted wife who won her husband’s life back from the god of death. Later she’s a righteous woman who refuses to let her drunkard husband sell her off, and in another role, she’s in the dock and makes an impassioned speech about a woman’s place in society. Without being a conventional ‘entertainer’ Bhumika offers the actress tremendous scope for histrionics—from dances to sword fights to on-screen melodrama.

In her real life as Usha, Smita alternates between being contemplative and combative. Her defiant body language and smouldering eyes that often cut through the screen accusingly, mask the character’s inner restlessness. Her tenderness spills through her need to protect her daughter, and her steely resolve when she matches Keshav’s taunts word for word. But Usha looks most vulnerable when she’s alone in her hotel room, gazing at the mirror trying to fathom the essence of her self, or pacing restlessly up and down the room, which has now become her cage. It is this sense of being trapped and the struggle to find a release that becomes the defining emotion in her life—the more she struggles, the more futile it all seems.

Life comes a full circle as Usha ends up in the same hotel room at the end of the journey. Only this time, she seems less unsettled by her predicament and assures her now married daughter that she’ll be all right. For the first time in the film, we see a quiet acceptance of her fate as perhaps now Usha knows she only has herself to live with.