‘Bistar badal jaate hain…par aadmi nahin badalte’
- the ‘heroine’ from Bhumika
to Iti Mrinalini
There’s a chance of rising to the top of every
profession . . . Why not? Others do it, why can’t I? Why can’t
you? When I think of the dames riding around in swell limousines, buying
imported gowns, living at the swellest hotels, terrible looking janes, too .
. . It’s all a question of getting some guy to pay for the certain
business, that’s all.
Mae West had been a
phenomenon who controlled her image on stage and screen and harvested her
career to become an icon who remained discussed till date as voice of sexual
expression of the other gender more than a victim of the phallic norms and
regulations. Mae West emphasized through her ‘body’ of work that the actress
(the male gaze) and the prostitute (the male desires) are the two faces of the
construction of the image of the “woman” in the social place. Not only in the
Western world, this interchanging position of the actress and the prostitute is
observed in the early Indian culture and entertainment as well.
Bhumika and Iti
Mrinalini are two films that are separated by three decades yet they share
a similar thread – both look at the ‘heroine’ – her frailties and insecurities.
In Shyam Benegal’s Bhumika (1977), at the
centre of the film is Usha (played by a vibrant Smita Patil) - a self-reliant
woman who wants to lead life on her own terms. The film was inspired from and
is a fictional recreation of the autobiography of the famous Hindi and Marathi
screen actress Hansa Wadkar.
Usha is conventional in many
respects and yet bent to defy every convention. However her quest for life and
a meaning to it had revolved round her relation with different men. Her goals
and her disappointments were all punctuated by the men in her life. Iti Mrinalini (2010, directed and acted
by Aparna Sen) on the other narrates the life of Mrinalini Mitra, who was a
Bengali film actress. The film starts with Mrinalini contemplating suicide to
end a vacuous life and planning to write a suicide note. Before taking the
sleeping pills, she decides to destroy all documentation pertaining to her
colorful past. This takes her to a reflective journey about her life and her
relationships. As audience, we traverse Mrinalini’s rise to stardom, her inner
turmoil and her quest to find an identity and meaning of her life.
The opening shots of Bhumika clearly set in the
director’s empathy for Usha. He wants the audience to empathize as well:
Ø Usha/Urvashi (Smita
Patil) dropped home by her co-star Rajan (Anant Nag) after a shoot
Ø Her husband Keshav
(Amol Palekar) confronts her when she enters the house
Ø Usha argues back
Ø There is a big fight
and Usha leaves. We find the three women and the uncertainty on their faces due
to their dependency on one man
Ø The film then
switches to a long flashback in black and white that traces her childhood years
till her entry into films
Usha’s character as depicted in the Bhumika is a
bundle of contradictions -She marries Keshav in defiance – against her mother
but hates him and repeatedly turns down his appeals to return home. However,
when held captive at a Kale’s estate she writes to Keshav only to rescue her, again
when back to Bombay,
accompanied by Keshav she readily agrees to check into a hotel without going
back home! Finally, when Rajan calls up at the end of the film, she refuses to
talk to him. She is loved by Rajan but has a strange lukewarm relation with him.
Apparently it seems Usha is irrational / emotional. But that is not represented
from a man-woman hierarchical standpoint. Instead Usha is shown as “human” with
human frailties. In the end, in her rejection of Keshav, Rajan and even her
daughter’s request to move in with them, she comes out as a strong-willed
individual instead of an “emotional woman”. The character’s sway between moods
is complimented with the duality of representation of the character on screen –
the shift from Usha’s character in reel reality to the roles of the heroines
she was playing in cinema. Just after Usha walks out on her husband and checks
into a hotel there is a montage of roles in b/w - she plays the faithful wife
Savitri pleading with Yamraj not to take away her husband Satyavan, then she
plays Champabai, a righteous wife who refuses to be sold off to a rich client
by her drunkard husband in a social and finally a city woman in an urban
melodrama where she fights to defend her honour inside a courtroom.
This is where Usha is even worse than the image portrayed
and carried through by Mae West – the tragic dilemma of the female entertainer
of the 20th century. She is a public woman subject to the
male gaze and the same time her chastity remains questioned through out.
Thereby she remains as a marginal – neither in the domestic space nor as the
social prostitute but in the fringe.
Finally, at its core the film’s latent philosophy is in
one dialogue when Kale’s wife tells Usha
“Bistar badal jaate hain, rasoi badal jaati hai, admiyon
ke naqaab badal jaate hain, par aadmi nahin badalte!”
As compared to Bhumika, the opening shots of Iti
Mrinalini are more personal in nature. They tend to establish the star of
yesteryear Mrinalini from an individual’s perspective than a social one. It's the men in her life where Mrinalini has
located her happiness. She looks for meaning in her life through love primarily
– of men and through them the love for self.
In a sense it can be attributed that patriarchy that has shaped the way
she thinks - the importance of being loved by men and identification of self is
in relation to men. However, regardless of that reasoning there is ample reason
to believe that Mrinalini’s self-absorbant existence is what adhere her to her
problems and losses. Mrinalini was frivolous with Abhi but wasn’t serious, she
was however haplessly in love with director Siddhartha who was married with
kids, she got pregnant by Siddhartha after marrying in a temple, once deserted
by him, she had a relation of trust and love with Chintan – thought of confiding
to him when planned suicide and finally falling for the much young director
Imtiaz who floored her and made her feel special when she was leading a lonely
and secluded life. There were four deaths depicted in Mrinalini’s life - Abhi,
her first boy-friend, Kamala-di, the dresser, Sohini, her daughter and finally
Mrinalini herself. However it is
important to understand that Death of near ones is essentially a ‘personal’
grief since it announces absence. In the representation of Mrinalini being
dictated emotionally by men and in her moving through deaths she is a perfect
depiction of woman in terms of the patriarchal norms that depict her as
emotional and irrational and with the heroine's end the director succumbs to
that patriarchal norm - she is romantic but she remained as one who is not an
individual self at the end.
In Bhumika Usha is shown as impulsive, irrational –
going by the standard identification of woman in cinema as a ‘second’ to man.
However the film-maker’s sympathy is evident and in the end her rejections of
her lover Rajan and her daughter act as an indicator of the strong will that
Usha has. Her earlier flirtations in life hence can be interpreted as her
deliberate stance in proving her solid belief in herself rather than she being
a pawn of patriarchy.
In Iti Mrinalini, the glares of patriarchy are less
evident but in making Mrinalini’s choices as too personal and in her decision
of suicide leaves us to believe that she is controlled by her men and the
patriarchal society that acts as the controlling factor. All throughout
resonates her love for suffering and in the end when she wanted to live her
symbolic death marks the death of the self-reliant woman in cinema.
[This article is edited from a paper presented in the UGC
Sponsored National Conference "Re-writing Culture, Re-telling Narratives:
Gender and the Politics of Representation" organized by Brahmananda Keshab
Chandra College, Kolkata in collaboration with Indian Statistical Institute,
Kolkata on 10th February 2012]
