Introduction
She was Indian cinema’s Everywoman. Her genius shone through in rendering the everywoman extraordinaire with a signature hypnotic allure, a depth charged with intensity that exploded into emotions on celluloid, grand and subtle, dramatic and nuanced all at once. What is the key to unlocking Smita Patil’s haunting presence on the silver screen? Is it her finely sculpted face that can be so expressively mobile? Or those wide and deeply set eyes – when they accuse, you feel a twinge of uneasy guilt; when they are mute with agony, you suffer with her. What about that wilful and generous mouth full of passion – love and hate, rage and the promise of husky laughter? A voice vibrating with emotion, seemingly capable of infinite inflections, sometimes surprising you with girlish trills of gaiety. Her silence spoke as eloquently as her full-bodied voice, setting off tremors of complexities. The least flamboyant of gestures and the suggestion of a half-smile expressed a range of meanings. With the proud carriage of a born fighter, valiant as she is vulnerable, Smita created a new grammar of intensity and complexity. She subsumed her self and mannerisms to the demands of the role. Her body had the tensile strength of steel balanced with the suppleness of a reed. These are marvellous assets and a good actor is one who uses these inherent gifts wisely to bring out the familiarity of common experience, and yet portray the particular idiosyncrasies of the screen character.
Smita’s face fascinates; she has an earthy Indian look that could belong to any part of India. So many of her brilliant portrayals come to mind: a fiery Gujarati Dalit (Manthan), a free-spirited gypsy (Bhavni Bhavai), the migrant Bihari peasant who transforms from nurturing earth mother into avenging Kali (Debshishu), the vivacious Tamil wife ripe for extramarital amour in lush Kerala highlands (Chidambaram), an older widow navigating the crime and grime of a Bombay slum, coping with her young son’s drug habit even as she unravels her own love life (Chakra), a genteel housewife of Calcutta (a gem of a performance in Abhinetri, in the TV series Satyajit Ray Presents…), the Deccani Muslim woman who sells a young impoverished bride to an older Gulf-based man to cement her own uncertain status with a lover who will not commit to marriage (Bazaar), the uninhibited tribal woman giving her all to the love of her life (Jait Re Jait), a Maharashtrian upper-class woman with a conscience, who finally finds her vocation (Umbartha), the lonely writer wrenched from her daughter (Aakhir Kyon) and the traditional wife caught in marital misunderstanding (Bheegi Palkein). All these roles, albeit not as famous as her work in the more celebrated Bhumika and Tarang, depict a vibrant inner life apart from the external portrayal, convincing body language and bearing that bring the on-screen character alive.
Mrinal Sen endorses this unique talent to be everywoman. ‘Smita’s is an eventful story built in an incredibly short span of time, walking from one film to another, growing from strength to strength. Her versatility is a delicious feat, her range beyond easy measure. And true, she always makes herself spectacular by her natural qualities, by remaining exceptionally ordinary [the emphasis is mine], by her elegance and poise, and topping it all, by the intensity which surfaces irresistibly from within.’ Sen goes on,‘India is a country where people speak diverse languages, wear different outfits and where the people are easily identifiable by their different physiognomies. But pull Smita out from anywhere and throw her into any milieu in any part of the country and, surprisingly, she looks deeply rooted in it.’
Of course she made inexplicable choices in her personal life and career, something that confounded and disappointed her fans. That makes her human, not a devi to be put on a pedestal. Vulnerability is essential for a person to experience a range of emotions and even more so for an actor; it enables her to convey the tumult of the screen woman she portrays. Career choices need to be examined in their context and the personal must be respected – especially when she is not here to defend herself.
A veteran journalist, now based abroad, asked me amid the chatter of many simultaneous conversations endemic to a film festival: ‘Do you think she deserves a book?’ This book is my answer. Smita Patil is a living memory to many of us. Her contribution to Indian cinema, in redefining the Indian woman and interpreting her complexity in memorable films, is immense.
17 October 2014, Nehru Centre auditorium, Worli, Mumbai: Jhelum Paranjape’s students from Smitalay, the Odissi school run by this childhood friend of Smita, perform an innovative ballet Leelavati. With a cast of over a hundred dancers, the ballet asks and solves mathematical problems using Sanskrit shlokas, with imaginative choreography and inventive storytelling. In the audience are Shivajirao Patil and Dr Anita Patil-Deshmukh, Smita’s father and older sister. On the stage is a black-and-white portrait of Smita placed beside a brass diya. After the rousing performance, in an atmosphere of loving remembrance, Jhelum invites Prateik to the stage.
Overwhelmed by emotion even after all these years, Prateik goes up and sings ‘Happy birthday angel’, echoing the emotion that pulses gently through the crowd. Time has blunted the edge of grief but not our mourning; our poignant memories of her excellence linger in the air that envelops us. It is almost palpable, the mesmerizing memory of her, the warmth in our hearts.
Such abiding emotions, such collective memory, are not created in a vacuum. Smita was born in the dawn of our new cinema and grew to maturity in that creatively rich milieu. Destiny brings the right people together at the right time in history. What eminent critic James Monaco wrote of the French New Wave in 1979 is as true of the Indian New Wave:‘The metaphor of the “New Wave” was surprisingly apt: the wave had been building up for a long time before it burst on cinematic shores.’*
The 1970s were a time when the calcified mould of mainstream cinema began to break up, and amidst its splinters, shoots of vibrant, personal perceptions of film aesthetics struggled to find audience acceptance. All through the post- Emergency years when the Angry Young Man ruled the screen, there was a sense of fatigue with the formula building up. There was slickness of narrative and smart technology-aided gloss, but the themes were confined within narrow limits. Melodrama and romance, vengeance and violence were the bricks that built the box office pyramid. The reality of Indian life, its endless struggles, challenges and frustrations, little joys and great sorrows, the sheer variety of a multi-cultural pluralistic society were not being portrayed, neither by mainstream Mughals nor by slavish followers of a successful new formula.
Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen had shown that a different kind of cinema was possible. A cinema of personal vision that came from deep within a cultivated sensibility and educated intellect. One that was alive to the ferment at home and yet open to the winds of change wafting in from the world outside. Bengal acted like a beacon – as it had so many times in the past – to film-makers in other regions who forged a cinema that was rooted in their ethnicity and culture. It was a reassertion of the authentically local against the conformism demanded by mainstream cinema, not just Hindi but its regional counterparts too.
Auteurs of the new cinema flourished when the government stepped in – the Film Finance Corporation offered funding to a host of film-makers – many were often anti-establishment, a few espoused avant-garde experimentation, most were neo- realists who wanted to tell the truth without the embellishment of song and dance that is so inherent to our narrative traditions, and a minority of adherents pursued purist non-linear cinema. Wavelets of change were acting cumulatively to build up the surge that changed our cinema in the 1970s, through to the 1980s, until it petered out as any unstructured movement does in the course of time. New Cinema as a movement ran out of steam. Auteurs remained, ploughing their lonely way with admirable conviction even though they could not build up an alternate distribution system. Only the film festival circuit and Doordarshan were available. It is interesting to speculate whether parallel cinema could have thrived if multiplexes had arrived in the 1980s and catered to what was always a niche audience.
At its zenith, parallel cinema – the consensual term for what was variously described as art or the other cinema – minted new stars along with star auteurs. The climate was just right for the arrival, almost en masse, of gifted actors like Smita Patil, Shabana Azmi, Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Deepti Naval and a host of talent trained at the National School of Drama (NSD) and the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune. The iconic quartet of Smita, Shabana, Naseer and Om (the familiarity of affection dispensing with surnames persists to this day) ruled Hindi cinema’s parallel world. It was a felicitous combination of the right time and climate for a different kind of film-making by directors looking for new faces to break the stereotype of the film heroine – a long-suffering Sati Savitri or the frilled, flouncy and bouncy modern miss of romance. It was time for a new film sensibility and ‘real’ faces. These new actors made forays into other languages too, and this gave a cachet to regional films.
This new credo of film-making that stressed on the truthfulness of reality demanded fresh faces to make their stories authentic and rooted. Women came into their own in this conducive climate. Film-makers like Shyam Benegal often made women the central character, as a metaphor for societal and sexual oppression while they were depicted as strongly etched individuals. And thus were born landmark films like Ankur, Nishant, Manthan, Bhumika, Mandi, Jait Re Jait, Chakra, Umbartha, Tarang, Bazaar, to name the most prominent. The Smita–Shabana success story spilled over into mainstream cinema as well. So followed Arth, Aakhir Kyon, Amrit, where the woman took centre stage even in the company of a superstar like Rajesh Khanna. Smita figures in almost all seminal films of that period. The change that Smita and Shabana wrought is nothing less than revolutionary because the ruling female stars of that time were Rekha, Hema Malini and Jaya Bhaduri who had voluntarily retreated into domesticity. Formulaic cinema of the 1970s and 1980s was unwilling to place a woman at the heart of the story. She was a decorative appendage, a victim to be avenged by a male hero, or the lachrymose mother making enormous sacrifices for the laadla beta. It was not always so in Indian cinema, as the best of the 1950s and 1960s show.
Mainstream cinema works on the association of images with mythologies old and new. In fact, it is the magic of cinema that mints mythologies for our times, dredging memories of historic archetypes and imbuing them with new, accessible meanings. Archetypes dwindle into stereotypes, for easy, undemanding consumption through overuse.
The distinguishing quality of parallel cinema is that it is more personal – in the director’s vision, in the actors’ ability to relate to us at a realistic level of emotional resonance and amplified context. Here too, new mythologies are being forged in the flux of change. It challenges a society living simultaneously in centuries, in their mind-sets and perceptions. So you have an archetype that is not a historical memory, honed or attenuated over time, but one that has immediate connect and resonance. More than any of her immensely talented colleagues who enriched this new cinema, Smita became a symbol of this new, living archetype. This translates into images through which cinema leaves its imprint. Smita’s Sonbai, crouching against the background of red chillies, or pouring water from a brass pot into the cupped hands of a kneeling, luxuriantly moustachioed Naseer in Mirch Masala, is a new archetypal image of the earth woman who leads a rebellion against injustice. It is a counterpart to the hallowed silhouette of Nargis stoically carrying the plough on her shoulders in Mother India. It wasn’t just about Smita’s enormous fund of natural talent. There was this raw urgency in her, an urgency that leaped out of the frame and grabbed you. Thankfully, the time was ripe for its efflorescence in the nurturing milieu of parallel cinema.
The artistic success of this cinema facilitated the entry of these actor–stars into the mainstream, much before the directors found wider acceptance. Smita broke the barrier between art and commerce almost at the outset in her glittering career – acting with Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri as well as megastar Amitabh Bachchan and the ex-phenomenon Rajesh Khanna. It is gratifying that accolades came to her so early in life – she was only twenty-two when she got the National Award for Best Actress for Bhumika. This seems to have had an extraordinarily liberating effect on her. Her commitment to serious cinema, to organizations that worked for women and liberal values grew strong, even as she succumbed to the lures and blandishments of mainstream cinema. It is a paradox that many find difficult to understand or even sympathize with. Raj Babbar’s influence notwithstanding, Smita had the same hunger for wider communication that many actors have felt before and continue to feel. Rewards for artistic excellence were assured. The need to communicate with a mass audience, not just the adulatory closed circle of festival habitués, resulted in good, bad and indifferent films. But even here, she continued to experiment and chose roles most glamorous actresses would not touch with a ten-foot bargepole.
It is natural that Smita’s life and career are inextricably bound together. It is a fascinating journey of rediscovery to go back to her films, to be seared by her intensity, marvel at her astonishing maturity, and to be moved by the poignancy she bequeathed us in a span of barely eleven years.
What is amazing is how in the brief incandescent life given to her, Smita shone so bright and steady. She was indubitably the pole star of parallel cinema. She also left an indelible mark in some of the mainstream films she chose to do. An astonishingly substantial body of work – over seventy films in a little over a decade – that needs to be celebrated. And critically examined from the hindsight of posterity.
This book then is not a conventional biography. Nor a collection of anecdotes. It charts her life in cinema and examines her significant films in their context and from the perspective of distance that time has given us.
As for her personal life and controversial marriage to an already married Raj Babbar, I have consciously decided not to delve into it for a variety of reasons. Years ago, when the germ of this book was conceived, I had met Smita’s mother who was open, generous and surprisingly forthcoming. I made repeated attempts to get in touch with Raj Babbar but without success. Thick in the process of writing this book, I once again tried to contact him through his daughter Juhi. An impasse, yet again. It was time to decide that I would neither use confidences shared by Smita’s friends, nor give credence to second-hand gossip and lurid speculation that are so freely available even today. Smita is not here to give her version of what happened and why. Hence, mention of her involvement with Raj Babbar, if any, is in the context of the larger point being made.
Time heals the most bitter controversies and ugly rancours. Things have the habit of returning to an even, civilized keel. Vidyatai Patil died on 7 March 2015. At the condolence meeting held at Rock Cliff, the sea-facing Bandra building where Smita’s parents live (Prateik moved out a couple of years ago), a grave- faced Raj Babbar was very much present and was later joined by Nadira Babbar, Juhi and her husband, the well-known TV actor Anup Soni. They were there to offer solace to Prateik, Anita and Shivajirao Patil. Another chapter comes to a close.