Last night I attended a Smita Patil tribute show at a local
theatre and was left spell
bounded by the aura of this actress. It was a show conducted by the Maharashtra
Government to a fully packed hall; so much was the crowd that people actually
saw the show sitting on staircases in the hall while others stood all through
the 4 and half hour show. The authorities had to restrict entry due to security
reasons. Seeing the long line of people waiting to get in, the authorities were
forced to put up additional screens and speakers outside the theatre. Such was
the enigma behind this gem of an actress.
People of my generation and the one’s following might be
wondering – ‘What’s the fuss about Smita Patil? After all she was not that
famous as her other counterparts with the likes of Hema Malini and Parveen Babi
and Zeenat Aman’. Even I was thinking, more or less, on the same lines. But not
after coming out of the theatre. After watching almost a biopic of sort, I was
an altogether different person. The crowding was totally justified.
Smita Patil, born in Pune, Maharashtra to a politician
father and a mother who was a nurse by profession, was cracker of a person. Her
father, ShivajiRao Patil, was a staunch Congressman and an Ex CM of Maharashtra.
She also had a sister who was a doctor. Hailing from such a typical
Maharashtrian family, young Smita always wanted to take up a different career
option. A larger part of her upbringing can be credited to the Rashtriya SevaDal, a social work organization started by Sane Guruji. She completed her
education from the St. Xaviers College, Mumbai. Being a daughter of a well know
politician, she could have easily led an easy life. But she chose acting and
her first tryst with the camera came on Doordarshan as a newscaster.
Her first break came with Charandas Chor (1975) directed by
Shyam Benegal which was followed by Nishant (1975). And then there was no
looking back. The strengthening of the Parallel Cinema movement in the 70’s was
mostly attributed to directors like Benegal who came up with movies like
Manthan (1976) and Bhumika (1977). For company Smita Patil had other FTII colleagues
such as Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana Azmi and Om Puri who largely contributed to
this movement. These were the movies which brought out the daily life of
upcoming India on the big screen. And then there was Bollywood – the mainstream
commercial cinema which took people away from reality by portraying their
dreams on the screen – A larger than life approach. People liked to see things
which they thought were possible only in their dreams – something which the
parallel cinema community stayed away from. They wanted to highlight the social
causes on a larger canvas. They always believed that cinema can be used in a
better way, instead of just entertaining the masses. They believed that the
audio-visual medium was an effective way of socio-economic transformation – a
need of not just those turbulent times of the Emergency but also of today.
This portrayal of stark reality demanded an out-of-box
approach towards life, which attracted Smita. She always thought that she
should do things which she believed into. And she believed that cinema can be
used to bring in a social change. Her dark skin but definitive features put her
into an altogether different league of actresses. Her roles were mostly
feminist in nature, highlighting the causes of Indian women; women from almost
all sections of the society – from a slum dweller to a social worker. Her roles
in Bazaar and Mandi were much appreciated by the intellectual audiences. Smita
refused to remain confined to a particular set of roles offered to her. Her
films broke all sorts of barriers such as languages. She did films in Punjabi,
Gujarati, Bengali, Kannada, Tamil, and Marathi etc. She even did a few commercial films such as Shakti and Namak Halal with Amitabh Bacchan who were blockbuster movies.
One of her breakthrough performances came with a Marathi
film called Umbartha directed by Jabbar Patel in which she plays a housewife.
Her character – Sulabha Mahajan was a typical Marathi girl, who after her college
education, is married off in a rich Marathi household. Her husband - Subhash Mahajan, portrayed by
noted playright and actor, Girish Karnad, loves his newlywed wife very much and
in course of time the couple conceives a baby girl. Life is going smoothly, but
under the skin Sulabha starts suffocating. She feels her education is getting
wasted and admits this to her husband. Much to the chagrin of her in-laws,
Sulabha applies for a job as the Head of a woman’s rehabilitation center in
rural Maharashtra, which required her to stay away from home. Although, her
in-laws were against her, Sulabha’s husband was supportive. He agreed to take
care of the baby girl who is no more an infant.
On beginning her career as the Superintendent of the Centre, Sulabha
encounters a totally different world - a world, where women are treated merely
as commodities. The Centre was established to rehabilitate women who were
outcastes of the society – the so called moral human beings. These consisted of
criminals, women left by their husbands, druggists and even lesbians – a
subject considered a taboo even in today’s Indian society. As every day passes,
Sulbha starts realizing that the staff of the Center treated these women in the
most disgusting way. The administration of the Center never gave its
inhabitants a chance to improve. They were labeled as a vestige of the society
and hence thrown up in one dark corner of the world. Many of these women were
victims of rape; lured by men promising them better lives in cities like Mumbai
and Pune. But all they got to see was the shanties, the slums, the dirt, the
sewage, the scum; women who were kicked out of the house by their in-laws just
because she failed to conceive a boy, lesbian lovers, rag-pickers, women who
killed their drunkard husbands in self defense, girls who ran away from their
homes because they feared that they would be traded by their own parents for
money.
The film underlines Sulabha’s struggle for improving the
administration of this rehabilitation center that was more or less controlled
by politicians. The administration board consisted of old men who absolutely had
no long term vision and of women who were busy in kitty parties. She tries her
level best to improve the lives of these women by teaching them importance of
cleanliness, introduction of daily prayer sessions, not for religious purposes,
but for emphasizing and imbibing the power of goodness on the burnt souls and
destructive minds. And when good and bad meets, there has to be a powerful
reaction. Such was a reaction that Sulabha’s personal life starts taking a toll.
At times she even risks her life. After many efforts to handle her married and
professional life, Sulabha decides to sacrifice her home. She remains married
but moves away from her home permanently and dedicates the rest of her life
towards the cause of women emancipation.
Smita Patil, more or less, lived the life of the characters
she portrayed. After her romantic involvement with Raj Babbar, a married man,
she was labeled as a housebreaker by the same feminists who lauded her social
efforts. She lived in her character of Arth. Emotional turmoil brought her to
the brink of extinction, until she bore a baby boy, Prateek. Her joy of
motherhood was however, short-lived as she passed away within 2 months in
December, 1986. She left behind a legacy of films such as Chakra, Jait Re Jait,
Mirch Masala etc. A prime example of a true rockstar, who did what she believed
in, she believed in her passion. She had a character of a tornado, sweeping
away everyone who met her in her; an epitome of raw, rustic beauty, a high
level of thinking and at the same time living a very simple life, gathering
moments of happiness and satisfaction in the humblest of things around; a
character so rare today, that none of the current lot of heroines can be
compared to her. Such was the enigma behind this complex yet simple character,
that actresses like Sonali Kulkarni, Chitrangadha Sen, Konkana Sen Sharma try
so hard to emulate her. Smita Patil was among the first few Indian actresses
who, in spite of acting only in Indian cinema, had a global audience hailing
from Europe and Latin America. Such was the innate talent she had that she
surpassed all boundaries of religion, caste, creed and language. In today’s
world of meaningless cinema, an actress like Smita Patil is truly missed by the
saner class of audiences. Smita Patil – you are truly Tejomay!
