Two-time national awardee and recipient of the Padma Shri, Smita Patil is often touted as one of the greatest actors in Indian history. Known to be a staunch feminist, Patil often challenged the depiction of women in cinema, particularly through her roles in narratives around female sexuality. However, her career was tragically short-lived due to her early death in 1986, at the age of 31.
In this extract from her book A Brief Incandescence, film critic and author Maithili Rao revisits a scene from director Mahesh Bhatt’s 1982 movie Arth. The central characters in this film were played by Patil and Shabana Azmi. Azmi plays Pooja, whose husband Inder has an extramarital affair with Patil’s character, Kavita. The scene, according to Rao, is one instance of many that “justify her [Patil’s] unassailable position as a great actor.” The book releases today, on the occasion of Patil’s sixtieth birth anniversary.
Bhatt explains why the scenes with Kavita are filmed in that particular way and the shades of grey in the mise en scène. “Spatially, I wanted to keep her in that desolate opulent space. Not cluttered, but where there is a kind of emptiness. She looked desolate in that space.” About her quicksilver changes of mood, he says: “That is the seesaw of emotions. People who have bipolar ailment are vulnerable to this biological malaise. They have these mood swings. Smita understood it. It was a pleasure to work with her. It was a brilliant extension of the fire that was there in me. That was a moment of catharsis. She was the vehicle through which one exorcised a buried dark space.” About the long takes, he has his reasons: “It is a sort of timeless space, for what is perceived as sin. You wanted both in an interrupted sort of space. She was the kind of actor who would just become that entity. She brought a lot of inner journey into that scene. She wanted a baby, that’s what she pined for. I can still remember her looking at him, of her dream of spending her life with him, growing old together. It was a very sincere performance.”
Casting Smita challenged Bhatt to revisit his tumultuous relationship and widen the narrative ambit to explore Kavita’s neurosis. Arth is still the story of how Pooja, an orphan who is emotionally, financially dependent on Inder, goes through the trauma of rejection. She gradually gathers the tattered cloak of self-worth after discovering the strength to live by herself. The essence of Arth is Pooja’s journey into finding herself and Shabana’s once-in-a-lifetime performance resonated with a whole generation of Indian women. Finding herself had not yet become a feminist cliché in the early 1980s. The film is more than India’s An Unmarried Woman (Paul Mazursky’s ironic, sometimes humorous 1978 film on a divorced woman finding her self-worth, starring Jill Clayburgh). Kavita brings a new dimension to the story and underlines the extreme fragility of relationships under the weight of mental illness. This makes Arth a landmark even after thirty years. Films about a middleclass woman carving out her own destiny, growing out of societal and culturally sanctioned need for male support, are no longer a rarity in our cinema. It is almost yet another ‘progressive’ formula.
But the portrayal, stripped of sanitising sentimentality, of an unstable woman’s search for absolute love is such a challenge to an actor’s ability and courage that there has not been another Kavita in our films. Smita bared her soul and depths of vulnerability to portray a woman who has to struggle to find acceptance from an audience that is rooting for Pooja. In the few, carefully designed and insightfully written scenes, Smita sucks you into a vortex of teeming emotions. She is implacable, hard and unreachable – a large mirror reflects that cold, withdrawn mask – when Pooja begs her on the phone to give Inder back to her. Bhatt reveals that this scene was added later. “My sister who had come to the preview said I don’t think the wife has done everything to save her marriage. I asked, what should she do? She said Pooja should beg her. Then it struck me that she had tried almost everything but there is something more she could do. So I shot Shabana in close-ups and Smita was rightly put in her make-up room when she looks hard at herself … it is amazing. She had to bring that cold, almost brutal side. I thought that was very important.”
Kavita’s ruthless ultimatum to Inder, tell Pooja about me, or I will, is delivered with deadly finality. Ruthlessness and agonising fear; they are the alternating extremes of the emotional scale. She is often hysterically afraid – Inder mumbles Pooja’s name when he wakes at his usual departure time after a night with Kavita. “A wife is a wife is a wife,”she rants, her voice hissing with helpless pain and angry accusation. She might not make you care for her but you want to know what drives her to this brink of desperation.
Bhatt summarises: “Smita was a sponge. She just absorbed. She would just look at you, inhale you and add something, bring up a cocktail. It became a deadly cocktail. Why she became so extraordinary in Arth was because she was living that life simultaneously. She would come looking tired in the morning and sort of relive the aftershocks of private misery … then she would get into the cinematic space and exhale the essence of what was captured in those scenes. You could not leave an impact like that without being there. She was in that space.”
Bhatt plays fair. He gives both his women two tremendously explosive scenes. The first is Pooja at the party where she just explodes at Inder, with Kavita in a black and gold dress, hair up in a smart chignon, clinging to his arm. Kavita is the star yet she is the classic clinging ivy in public. In contrast, Pooja wears a silver grey unembellished sari, a lone marauder venting her grief and rage. She rounds off her tirade about all that a woman is supposed to be, with bistar mein randi (a whore in bed). Those words, distorted deliberately, echo and re-echo in Kavita’s minimally stark mansion. It drives Kavita to swallowing sleeping pills. It is an enormous physical struggle for Inder to make her spit them out. She fights like a cornered animal.
When Smita gets her big cathartic moment, she is magnificent. Kavita’s breakdown is the most remembered scene. Bhatt says: The physical gesture was pulled out from memory – that was Parveen Babi’s. As is the anguish she felt, that she was suffering, the guilt that was tearing her. The director’s reference point might be Parveen Babi. What happens on screen is Smita at her most ravaged intensity. You see her sitting on the sofa, a small mirror in hand, touching her face as if examining it minutely, humming softly to herself. She is composed when Pooja enters, bids her sit down politely. When Pooja enquires how she is, the dam bursts. Haunted eyes in a gaunt face, agitatedly walking in her black kaftan, Kavita’s composure unravels before our riveted eyes. She comes and sits by Pooja, both their faces in profile. Her words come out in abrupt sharp bursts. Those agonised words are burnt into memory when she accuses Pooja of deliberately, stealthily coming into her house and crying … crying that only she can hear. “Do I look mad to you,” she asks with the deadly calm that presages a storm.
She walks away, and thrusts the offending sheets at Pooja, berating her for coming between Inder and her in bed. There are long takes of Smita’s agitated pacing, with brief cutaways to Pooja’s quiet, compassionate face. Smita’s voice is like a whiplash: Don’t you feel any shame to sleep beside another woman’s husband? Notice how she insinuates that Inder is her husband and Pooja is the interloper. The lashing voice quickly turns into an agonised, whispered cry, as she talks of the mangalsutra’s scattered beads pricking her feet, her voice breaking when she says how tired she is of cleaning it up all day and night. Finally, she brings an imaginary bead in a hand extended to Pooja. Then comes the remorse, as she sits at Pooja’s feet, asks for forgiveness with hands folded. And the confession: I loved Inder, not your husband. I wanted to make a home, not break yours.
Shabana sits quietly and generously lets Smita give the scene her all. You can watch this scene again and again, marvelling at the calibrated emotions pouring out of Smita. You get goose flesh every time.
An extract from Maithili Rao’s A Brief Incandescence, published by HarperCollins Publishers India.