Beyond Bollywood—Smita Patil

Pairs

It began as an intuition about actors and actor pairs. An intuition that has gathered strength beginning with my initial foray into French films. I initially saw Arth (1982, dir. Mahesh Bhatt) with Smita Patil, Shabana Azmi, and Kulbhushan Kharbanda because Azmi and KK act as a couple in the film some 14 years before they play together in Fire (1996, dir. Deepa Mehta). Kharbanda is the stuffy husband in both films and Azmi, the wronged wife in both. In Arth, she walks away in the end after asking her husband if he would have forgiven her her trespasses (he is asking her to forgive his). While, in Mehta’s film she evolves into a woman no longer content to just leave a husband for a life alone but to go ahead and embrace an altogether new life. Arth seemed to me a statement of vast import for India circa 1982. Smita Patil who plays the other woman is not depicted in the Bombay film industry archetype role of the period as low, indecent or vampish. Playing a mentally disturbed film actress in the film, Smita eventually recovers enough to get rid of KK herself. The two women, wife and mistress are decent in their own ways to each other and, for once, the self-absorbed jerk is cast aside by both. To balance the negative male role of KK, Mahesh Bhatt introduces two ancillary male characters.

Arth was not my introduction to Smita Patil. She and Amitabh Bachchan acted together in Shakti (1982, dir. Ramesh Sippy). A regular Bollywood potboiler about a police inspector and his son in which Patil and Bachchan took their clothes off in one of the first nude scenes in a mainstream Indian movie (that I ever saw at any rate). Arth led me to Bhumika (1977, dir. Shyam Benegal), another film where Patil plays an actress. Over-reaching in its ambitions as a story, Bhumika suffers at moments from bad editing. But there are marvelous vignettes throughout the film that more than compensate for Benegal’s inability to focus at times on what he wants to get across. Patil carries off the role of a successful actress, troubled at home, disenchanted by a husband who is much older than her, unable to truly engage romantically with the assorted filmi* men who wish to consort with her with great elan. In particular, this film prefigures what could only have been a deep intestinal rumbling in the urban Indian belly at the time: Naseeruddin Shah playing the role of Sunil Verma articulates a post-modernist existentialist position to Patil about god, death, and love. Shah works with mediocre dialog and next to no precedence in Indian cinema and pulls off the role with charm. The morning after Patil suggests they kill themselves together and Shah offers her an overdose of sleeping pills we come across a scene that tells us why existentialism can go only so far in India. The scene is wonderful and Benegal’s imagination at its acme here.

Naseeruddin Shah and Patil also act together in Chakra (1981, dir. Rabindra Dharmaraj). Set in a Bombay slum Shah plays a man perpetually on the run from the law. Smita Patil who has run away from a village and set herself up in the slum has an affair with Shah and with Kulbhushan Kharbanda, a man on the right side of the law, trying to earn a living as a truck driver. The performances of Shah and Patil take a backseat in comparison to the life of the slum. The younger generation, Patil’s son on whom our hopes are pinned has the same life as the older man, Shah. Prostitution, robbery, and murder dominate. Patil is equally at ease playing this role as she is playing the high-flying and adored actress of Bhumika and Arth.

Patil and Shah act together in possibly one of the best Indian films ever made, Mirch Masala (1985, dir. Ketan Mehta). Shah plays a subedar in the colonial service camping on the outskirts of Patil’s village as he extorts taxes and payments in cash and kind from the village folk. At the very outset of the film a brief chance encounter between Shah and Patil (a married woman) establishes Shah’s desire for her. The rest of the film revolves around how he intends to fulfill this desire and the extent to which he is willing to abuse his power to do this. A towering drama about the tension between man and polis, the tyranny of rulers, the baseness of each man when he is for himself, and the fierceness of those with pride and principles, this film is at once a masterwork on colonialism, money, power, lust, and gender. With an extraordinarily rich palette and the profoundly circumscribed canvas of one small village, Ketan Mehta achieves a work of art that is unparalleled all the way from its surface to its depths. The cast is magnificent and Shah and Patil never once get self-conscious in the roles they play. Their characters subsume them entirely as they should.

Patil and Shah play together again in Manthan (1976, dir. Shyam Benegal), an idealistic film played by India’s most idealistic actor Girish Karnad. No one else can pull off these do-good roles without stickiness, this is Karnad’s forte. Karnad, a vet, comes to a village to set up a dairy cooperative. Early in the film, we see the instant affinity between Patil and Karnad, a matter that has some import later. Naseeruddin Shah plays a low caste leader who must get his people to rally together with the upper caste in order to set up the cooperative without letting the caste tensions get the better of all concerned. The villagers struggle with the idea of leaving their caste hierarchies behind as they try to align their economic interests together. The machinations of the local dairy lord who has been repressing the villagers involve using Patil, a low caste woman, against Karnad. Karnad and the cast of urban progressives who have come to the village to set up the cooperative have to play their roles very finely to not seem patronizing. Benegal as the director is extremely finely tuned to the variety of roles these men can fit and is able to get a rich spectrum of motivations across through the secondary characters.

Karnad and Patil play equals in Subah (1982, dir. Jabbar Patel). Patil is Karnad’s wife and lives a bored life in a provincial town with his family. She wishes to live and work as the superintendent of a woman’s reform facility some 300 miles away. Karnad, playing a somewhat unlikely and progressive husband for circa 1982, agrees. The bulk of the film shows Smita Patil in a dignified role as she brings her educational experience, integrity, and idealism to bear upon the daily running of the reformatory. The Board of Trustees who run the institution are at best indifferent to the plight of the inmates and loathe to cede any control to Patil. This role is a great natural counterpoint to Patil’s role in Arth. In Arth, Patil is convincing as a mentally disturbed pill-popping actress who’s emotions and imagination are literally too large for her to contain within her person. She is also constantly in need of a man (KK) to function in her day to day life. In Subah, Patil is a woman who travels away from her family to find fulfillment in her work, and despite all the instabilities of the reformatory which surround her, maintains a steel will, iron discipline, and a humane approach all at the same time. As prostitution, jealousy, lesbianism, self-immolation, and corruption all lead the reformatory to go into a tailspin Patil stands above it all without any pomposity. A role that once again, required walking a very thin line. There is one amusing scene that dates the movie. When two inmates are found and exposed as being involved with one another, the rest of the inmates lobby for these two girls to be thrown out. The Board of Trustees wishes the same. Patil argues that they are just ill and need psychological treatment and fights on their behalf. Watching this scene one has to marvel that from Subah to Fire, from 1982 to 1996, Indian films have come a long way. If Patil had been alive in 1996 would she and Azmi have been cast as lovers?


*for more f-words.