by MAITHILI RAO
Smita Patil in Mirch Masala PHOTO/IBN Live
The iconic Smita Patil would have been 60 this week. A new biography traces her life, her untimely death and her glorious, meteoric career. Excerpts.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of light, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” It is tempting to see analogies of Smita’s career in these lines. We most certainly had great expectations from Smita and she lived up to them gloriously. Many landmark films were made in the 1980s. She added to her repertoire a few others that were socially significant, even if it was the male lead who essayed the protagonist while she played an important role. Some of these films were decent enough, though they fell well short of cinematic excellence or innovation. A lesser actress would be proud of them but then, we are measuring them against Smita’s best. We would even be justified in feeling cheated or betrayed by some of the films she did. She had made the choice to straddle two worlds, the parallel and the mainstream. The 1980s saw a dive to a particularly low point in formulaic films. It was a period when the industry churned out the good, bad and ugly with unequal fervour. The good were very few, the bad were many, and the ugly were overwhelming.
It was an uneasy ride through the decade, balancing the epochal impact of films like Bhavni Bhavai, Chakra, Umbartha, Arth, Tarang and Mirch Masala against the mindless mediocrity of Badle Ki Aag, not to speak of an execrable Haadsa and Kaanch Ki Deewar. Luckily, there were the in-between exceptions and exceptional forays into regional films, like Aravindan’s Chidambaram. Smita’s very presence commands us to source and scramble, to find forgotten films like Anokha Rishta and Anand Aur Anand. So, to paraphrase Betty Davis’s famous warning—fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy six-year ride. To follow a strict chronological order is confusing because sometimes, you have films of all kinds made in the same year. Trying to find a pattern in the choices she made is impossible.
The decade began brilliantly. Smita was cast in a Satyajit Ray film, though her role was not central. She got the recognition that most actors working in art cinema so ardently desired, even if they shied away from expressing it openly. Piroj Wadia, interviewing Smita, asked her soon after Bhumika if she would like to work with Satyajit Ray. Piroj remembers how she let out an audible gasp of joy: “I’d love to, and after all, he’s the ultimate in any actress’s ambition.” An ambition she was to realise soon enough. Ray made the first telefilm, Sadgati (1981), in Hindi for Doordarshan. Ray, the critic, had keenly watched the rise of parallel cinema, so much of it directly inspired and indirectly influenced by his own pioneering work. The relationship between the master and the next generation who owed him an immense debt is rather ambivalent, because Ray was also one of the best film critics in the country who did not spare even his own acolytes when they went wrong. For his short film based on Munshi Premchand’s story, he picked two of the finest exponents of the Indian New Wave. Sandip Ray says his father too wanted to work with Smita after he saw Bhumika and Manthan. He was fond of her acting, and this fondness soon extended to Smita as a person. “It was a dream to work with her. She was absolutely professional.” Encomiums indeed from Ray, father and son.
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