Satyajit Ray’s world of trains

My column for Mirror/TOI Plus, the fourth in my series on trains in Indian cinema:

On the filmmaker’s birth centenary, a look at how the train is a motif in many of his films, including the Apu Trilogy, Nayak and Sonar Kella

A still from Satyajit Ray's Nayak (1966), starring Sharmila Tagore and Uttam Kumar.

Satyajit Ray, whose 100^th birth anniversary was May 2, is associated with one of the most famous train sequences in all of cinema: The children, Apu and Durga in Pather Panchali, standing in a field of fluffy, white kaash flowers, listening for an oncoming train. I've always thought that what makes that sequence unforgettable is the rural Bengali landscape ruptured by the sound of the machine before the sight of it. The children hear the train's vibration in a pillar before the great beast rumbles past.

The train remained a motif throughout the Apu Trilogy, acquiring more layers of darkness with each film. What Ray had originally framed as the link between the village and the city became, in Aparajito, a marker of the distance between the two, and then in Apur Sansar, a site of potential death.

The eternal train scene in Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray's 1955 debut feature

But there are two other films in which Ray put the train to less melancholic use. The first of these was Nayak, released on May 6, 1966, in which he cast real-life Bengali matinee idol Uttam Kumar as a film star called Arindam Mukherjee. When we meet Arindam, there are two items about him in the day's papers: One, a National Award he's being given in Delhi, and two, a brawl in which he was involved the night before. It's a succinct if simplistic summary of the film actor's life -- popularity and critical achievement, but alongside infamy.

Some mention is made of Arindam having left it too late to get a seat on a plane, and Ray thus successfully places his famed and shamed hero on a long train ride that exposes him to a microcosm of the Indian upper middle class – which, 55 years ago, was snootier about film stars than it is now. From the corporate head honcho who sniffs at the brawl to the old gentleman who disapproves of films on principle, the train isn't exactly filled with Arindam fans.

But what really feels completely unreal in 2021 is the degree of unguarded interaction that the train affords between the film star and his public. Arindam is kind to little girls, signs some autographs, and then gets drunk in a train toilet. When he stumbles back to his compartment, the upper middle class housewife in it is humane enough – and female enough – to help him to bed rather than, say, take a picture of his disarray. Even the snarky journalist (Sharmila Tagore) that Arindam ends up confiding in over a long pantry car conversation, decides he is deserving of her humanity and tears up her notes. The train serves, in many ways, as a filter – Arindam is on display and yet somehow he isn't quite out in the open.

On the sets of Sonar Kella (The Golden Fortress), 1974.

But by far the most sprightly use of the train in Ray's cinema is in Sonar Kella (The Golden Fortress), the first film adaptation to feature his famously-popular detective, Feluda. Released in 1974, the whole film practically unfolds as a series of overlapping train journeys.

The very beginning of the adventure in Calcutta involves Feluda, played by the late Soumitra Chatterjee (who died after a battle with Covid in November 2020), silently removing from his bookshelf a hardbound copy of the Railway Timetable for November 1973. On the other side of events, we are introduced to the film's villains by being shown their names on a railway reservation chart: M Bose (Lower) and A Barman (Upper). Bose and Barman are hot on the trail of the originary set of train travellers – a six-year-old child constantly making crayon sketches of a past birth, and a parapsychologist taking him to Rajasthan in the hope of identifying the golden fortress of his drawings.

The train is also where Feluda and his nephew Topshe first meet the man who will become the third member of their trio: The mystery writer Lalmohan Ganguly alias Jatayu. He boards their compartment at Kanpur station with his red 'Japani suitcase... imported', and proceeds to speak several sentences in rather grandiloquent Hindi before realising that his companions are Bengalis, too.

It is a remarkably orderly world that Ray maps out, in which precise calculations can be made based on train timings. If a set of people hasn’t arrived at Jodhpur in the morning, they can be assumed to arrive by the evening train instead. And if the expected villains haven't shown up on the day they should have, Feluda speculates that they may have failed to get a train booking.

Trains in The Golden Fortress are the route to excitement, transporting these parties of Bengalis into the 'dacoit-infested country' of western Rajasthan. But trains are also the possible way back to order and civilisation: In one pre-climactic moment, Feluda offers Lalmohan Babu the option of getting off at Pokhran, from where he can catch a train back, rather than proceeding to Jaisalmer with them.

In one of Sonar Kella's most memorable scenes, the intrepid Bengalis get on camel-back, and try to wave a train down across the desert. It's the one time in the film that Feluda's plan doesn't succeed. The train keeps on going.

Published in Mumbai Mirror (9 May 2021) & in TOI Plus (8 May 2021).

Good girls, bad ghosts and goddesses

My Mumbai Mirror column

Bulbbul reworks ideas from several Bengali film classics to craft a superhuman response to women's depressingly human troubles.

When Anvita Dutt's Bulbbul came out last July, several critics applauded producer Anushka Sharma and her brother Karnesh for their trilogy of films placing the ghost story in the service of feminist goals. The first of these, Anshai Lal's Phillauri (2017), featured Sharma as an early 20^th century ghost who haunts the present in the hope of being recognised as the author of Punjabi poems that everyone thought were written by her male lover. The second, Prosit Roy's Pari (2018), with a plot featuring the impregnation of women by spirits called ifrits, and the murder of the resultant half-demonic children by vigilantes, was an allegorical response to the violence of rape and forced abortion. Both were interesting ideas, but neither was executed to any real degree of competence.

Bulbbul, set in late 19^th century Bengal, might be the best realised of the three. The film is named for its protagonist, who is named for the chirpy, red-tufted bird (usually spelled bulbul, without the extra 'b'). It is no coincidence that Bulbbul is a child bride who metamorphoses from climbing trees to being the senior daughter-in-law of an oppressively grand zamindar family -- and then, in her magical afterlife, to climbing trees again.

Visually rich, almost to the point of excess, the film alternates between a glowing, blood-red enchanted forest (a bit foreign-looking, of which more later) and a gloomy, minimally styled zamindar mansion which Dutt chooses to keep underpopulated – no children, practically no servants.

While riding the global wave of 21^st century Gothic popular culture, the film is dense with Indian literary and cinematic references which are ultimately also sociological. For instance, the theme of the Indian wife's relationship with a young brother-in-law, often easier to talk to than an older, forbiddingly grave husband, has been with us long enough to be enshrined in our jokes and popular culture; a common consequence of the patriarchal system of adult men marrying virginal girls. That intimate devar-bhabhi dynamic was perhaps most vividly captured in Tagore's 1901 novella Nashto Nir (The Broken Nest), possibly based on Tagore's own early life, which Satyajit Ray transposed onto the screen in Charulata. The Soumitra Chatterjee-Madhabi Mukherjee relationship in Charulata is echoed here by Bulbbul and her brother-in-law Satya, going from hide and seek to writerly collaboration. What the sister-in-law Binodini tells Bulbbul's husband Indranil bitchily is not untrue: Bulbbul and Satya have grown up together, and are close in a way that Bulbbul and Indranil can never be. Meanwhile Binodini herself -- married off to Indranil's halfwit brother Mahendra, but in a sexual arrangement with Indranil -- is eventually widowed, in another Tagorean reference: The duplicitous, unfulfilled widow Binodini of Chokher Bali.

But Bulbbul also reminded me, complicatedly, of another Ray film. Devi (1960), adapted from Prabhat Mukhopadhyaya's story The Goddess, also centres on a child bride who may or may not have acquired power over life and death. The 17-year-old Doyamoyee (played by Sharmila Tagore under Ray's magisterial direction), beloved of her twenty-something college-going husband (Soumitra), but also a favourite of her deeply religious father-in-law, suddenly finds herself anointed as an avatar of Goddess Durga, after the father-in-law sees her thus in a dream.

 

 

Bulbbul, set in the same Shakta Bengali milieu, where female energy is worshipped as Durga and Kali, draws on that association. Mahendra's murder on Durga Puja explicitly suggests that Bulbbul's first effective use of her shakti is tied to the mother goddess. The film's iconography, too, partially echoes the familiar Durga-Kali one: Long, open tresses and an enigmatic smile. “Not a churail, but a devi,” says Dr Sudip, and the film's dead men had all been abusive, thus flipping our perception of Bulbbul's power from possible evil to a form of violent justice.

 

Watching Devi again, though, I was struck by how deeply Ray investigates the power of belief, especially the young woman's own conflicted sense of self. Perhaps the most complex scene in this regard is the one where Doya refuses to run away when she has a chance, because she has half-begun to believe in the divinity thrust upon her. And yet, even in this belief, her primary response is fear – any power she has is not in her control. “Ebhaabe choley gele tomaar jyano omongol hoye? [What if leaving this way brings you bad luck?],” she asks her husband, terrified.

 

The husband understands and takes her back, raging later to his professor in Calcutta, that “she is only 17”. He is a sympathetic character, and yet – he is an adult married to a teenager who just happens to have come of age sexually. In one of Devi's most moving moments, Doya clings to her little nephew when he is placed in her lap after ages – she accepts the task of curing him as a young woman who misses a child, but she is judged as a goddess.

 

I recently re-watched Pedro Almodovar's 2006 masterpiece Volver, also about women, male sexual violence and the possibility of a female ghost returning to finish incomplete business on earth (‘Volver’ means 'return' in Spanish). But Volver's sensibility is very different from Devi or Bulbbul; some of its magnificent easy charm lies in the idea of a ghost who bakes, helps out who hairdressing and cares for the sick and aged – as women do. 

 

Earlier in Volver, the heroine is in the middle of hiding one horrible man's dead body when another man spies an incriminating spot of blood on her neck. “Oh, women's troubles,” she says, waving him away. As long as men are the prime cause of women's troubles, I thought to myself, there will be blood.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 28 Feb 2021

Earlier in Volver, the heroine is in the middle of hiding on

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/trisha-gupta/good-girls-bad-ghosts-and-goddesses/articleshow/81251984.cms??utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Not Papered Over

My Mirror column:

New Delhi Times depicts an Indian media threatened by the growing nexus of business and politics — thirty years ago.

Shashi Kapoor and Sharmila Tagore in New Delhi Times (1986)

In Ramesh Sharma’s New Delhi Times, a Delhi-based news editor called Vikas Pande (Shashi Kapoor) is caught in a communal riot in his hometown of Ghazipur. Being driven to safety in a police jeep, he jumps out to rescue a photojournalist friend being accosted on the street. Back in the quiet of the Circuit House room, the photojournalist Anwar (played by theatre director MK Raina) tells Vikas that he’d come to shoot a photoessay on opium smuggling, but on hearing of a riot, took his camera and jumped into the fray: “Mazaa aa gaya!”

“Tumhe riot mein mazaa aata hai?” Vikas chastises him. “Amaa miyaan,” drawls Anwar, “You know what I’m saying! You get a good story, I get some good photographs: what else?” Vikas looks disturbed. He says: “You know, Anwar, sometimes I feel a strange fear – that we professional journalists simply bypass the real tragedy of whatever we’re covering. We don’t even feel it.” Anwar looks up gravely, his veneer of easy cynicism gone. “We used to feel it,” he says. “When it happened once in a while, we felt it very deeply. But now, now that it is an everyday spectacle, we feel nothing at all.”

New Delhi Times (1986) was an early portrait of the Indian media: how the growing nexus between business and politics threatened its independence. Although it won Sharma the Indira Gandhi award for the Best First Film, and Shashi Kapoor his only National Award for Best Actor, it was then seen as political hot stuff, and Doordarshan chickened out of screening it at the last minute. So much water has flown under the bridge since that Sharma’s chilling expose now doesn’t make us bat an eyelid. As Anwar puts it: “Now that it is an everyday spectacle, we feel nothing at all.”

There are other ways in which the film hasn’t aged well: Louis Banks’ background score is incongruous, and the pace often laboured. Several sequences – a hotel striptease (the plump dancer is a nicely realistic ‘80s touch), or black and white freeze frames interrupting a riot – might now seem so overused as to make your eyes glaze over.

But the strength of New Delhi Times, based on a script by Gulzar, is its web of believable characters, each one a type that somehow steers clear of seeming a caricature. And while real-life versions of these exist even today, the difference thirty years make is apparent. The urbane English-speaking editor in 1986 smokes a pipe constantly, but remembers being taught by a Maulvi saab and retains close links to his well-off UP origins. His nationalist father (AK Hangal) is still a respected figure in Ghazipur, even if his clear-eyed view of local politics makes him cognizant that their honouring him is a way of coopting him. Vikas’s genteel lawyer wife Nisha (Sharmila Tagore) fights dowry death cases but also – an Indian Mrs Dalloway – arranges the flowers herself. Jagannath Poddar, the newspaper owner (Manohar Singh) is happy to entertain a rising politician at home, but feels no need to kowtow to him in the paper.

Vikas Pande also seems from another age because of his fearlessness-—which today might be called naivety. Even after being roughed up by unidentified men, threatened by anonymous callers and having his house cat gorily killed, Pande can tell his employers that management has no right to interfere in editorial decisions. Where does this strength come from? From his belief that another paper will gladly print his piece, and his skills are valued enough for him to keep his job.

The film is clear that a fearless journalist like Vikas Pande can only thrive while there are still men like Jagannath Poddar, who not only has the financial clout to run a paper, but also the moral fibre to not treat the media as equivalent to other forms of moneymaking.

“Baaki sab vyopaar hai, vyopaar ki tarah chalta rahta hai. Is akhbaar ko main dharam maankar chalaata hoon. (The rest is business, it runs like businesses do. This newspaper I treat as my religion.)”

But generational change is afoot: Poddar’s son Jugal (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) wants Vikas’s hot-button allegations off the front page, and tries to tempt him off the paper with a new magazine to edit. And while the film does not focus on it, in the Hindi heartland, the rot has long set in: “If we publish the headlines as we see them,” the local Ghazipur editor laughs wryly, “our paper supplies may suddenly dwindle, or our press shut down.”

The Ghazipur editor may not be out and about in a curfew, but Vikas Pande will be escorted into town in a police jeep – not just because of who he is, but who his father is. While not making that the centre of its politics, New Delhi Times seems inherently aware of how networks of privilege, old and new, cocoon its club-going, squash-playing protagonists. It is the poor chowkidar, the bike-riding young reporter, the Scheduled Caste MLA who die unsung deaths. The honest bourgeois hero suffers profound disillusionment, but no palpable losses.

But Sharma’s film also points the way to our present. At one tense moment, Vikas meets his immediate boss, who laughs off any real threat to an eminent journalist like him. Vikas looks unconvinced. “Anything can happen now. These people can do anything.” he says. That may or may not have been true in 1986, but it does seem true now.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 16 Apr 2017

The hero and the human

My BL Ink column on 7 May, 2016:

A Satyajit Ray classic that turned 50 this week, Nayak seems to come from a universe that is unrecognisably distant from the one which creates films like Fan

Satyajit Ray’s film Nayak (The Hero) turned 50 yesterday. Released on May 6, 1966, it was an unusual one for Ray in several respects. For one thing, it was only his second original film script (although he had been directing for over a decade by then). For another, it featured the contemporary Bengali matinee idol Uttam Kumar, whom Ray had never worked with before, and who represented the sort of cinema of which Ray quite clearly saw himself as the antithesis.

But of course it made perfect sense — pragmatic as well as cinematic — to cast a superstar in the role of a superstar. Nayak centres on 24 hours in the life of Arindam Mukherjee, a hugely popular film star who is — somewhat grudgingly — on his way from Calcutta to Delhi to collect a National Award. What is remarkable — and risks making the film unbelievable today — is that Arindam makes this journey by train, and entirely without an entourage.

That this premise was a trifle contrived even in 1966 is made clear by the film’s initial scenes, when the star’s agent-cum-secretary points out that he’s left it too late to get a seat on the plane, or a reserved private coupé on the train. But putting the dapper, jaded Arindam on a long train ride allows Ray the perfect situation in which to combine his three stated objectives: scrutinising the life of a film star, looking into the behaviour of fans, and making a film about a train journey.

Right from the start though, it is clear that we are in a universe almost unrecognisably distant from the one which creates a film like Fan. Arindam’s arrival on the train causes a flutter of excitement, but he is not mobbed. He shares a compartment with a family, sits in the dining car by himself, ruffles a little girl’s hair. The India of 1966 contains neither swarming paparazzi nor phone-flourishing selfie-seekers. The train’s upper-middle-class clientele does contain some Arindam fans — though Ray, with seemingly irrepressible snideness, makes clear that this is a part that can only be played by children or somewhat foolish women. These may make the occasional autograph request, but on the whole the star is left to conduct his business — under their curious gazes.

The thing about Nayak that appears truly unimaginable in 2016, however, is the number of passengers who treat Arindam and his world with disdain. Their reasons for abjuring cinema combine the moral with the aesthetic. One doddering old gent, whom even the film star recognises from his name as “the one who writes letters to The Statesman”, loses no opportunity to lecture him on the immorality of actors and alcohol (especially since they go together). Another successful boxwallah type turns up his nose at the sort of person he must share space with — admittedly, upon having read the news of Arindam getting into a brawl at a party. (These old men reminded me of a story about my Nana, who spent a whole plane ride in the ’60s wondering why the gentleman next to him seemed miffed when he cordially asked him what he did. It was Rajendra Kumar.)

Even without the moral censure, there is a pervasive sense in Nayak that films — at least popular Indian films — are not art, not serious or, at any rate, not worthy pursuits for the intelligent person. And the film star, despite his fame and riches, recognises his suspect status when asked for an interview by the non-gushing Miss Sengupta (Sharmila Tagore, her seriousness signalled by her spectacles), he is quick to assume that she doesn’t enjoy Bengali films. And she is quick to retort: “Bastabikatar ektu abhaab (A slight lack of reality).”

It isn’t just realism, however, that can cure film actors of what ails them. In one of Nayak’s rather heavy-handed flashbacks, a youthful Arindam grapples with his mentor Shankar da’s resistance to the very idea of film acting. The theatre, says Shankar da, is where an actor has a real audience; in a film, he is but a puppet in the hands of the director. This notion of the film star as a puppet appeared just a few years later in another film made by a Bengali — Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Guddi (1970). There, it was Dharmendra who played himself, and Utpal Dutt (as the film-struck Jaya Bhaduri’s psychologist uncle) who offered a long exposition of how little the ‘hero’ actually participated in the heroics on screen.

The humanising of the hero — which is also part of the point of Guddi — is, in Nayak, both more intimate and more brutal. It plays out, at one level, as the classic romance narrative: the emotionally repressed hero suddenly finding a girl he can speak to freely. And superimposing that narrative onto a star-journalist interaction is an astute form of cinematic wish-fulfilment. Tagore’s character first buttonholes Arindam both out of curiosity and for professional gain. She runs a women’s magazine called Adhunika, which ordinarily doesn’t feature cinema, but an interview with Arindam, she knows, would be a big hit. But the more clearly she sees Arindam’s feet of clay, the less she is inclined to expose him.

Watching Nayak today, the film seems a little let down by its most dramatic bits — Arindam’s dreams (or rather nightmares) are too literal and too stagey at the same time, and his recounting of errors seems harsher than necessary. But it remains a striking portrait. Not so much of the star or the fan, but of that hazy figure we may have lost to history: the Non-Fan.

Published in the Hindu Business Line, 7 May 2016.

Cover to Cover

A 'Perspectives' piece for The Caravan, about books in Hindi cinema. 

"People in Hindi movies don’t read many books. When you do see a character with a book, it’s often just another accessory: as meaningless as the brand of sunglasses they’re wearing, or the kind of sofa in their living room. Sometimes the book in a person’s hand seems incongruous—think of Nushrat Bharucha’s Chiku, the spoilt, screechy caricature of an upper-class young woman in Pyaar Ka Punchnama 2, holding a copy of Marjane Satrapi’s plucky graphic novel Persepolis. Sometimes, though, book-spotting can be more fun, when the choice of title is meant to function as shorthand for a character’s personality, or as a sideways comment on a situation.

In the 1965 hit Jab Jab Phool Khile, for instance, when we meet the protagonist Raja, a poor Kashmiri boatman played by Shashi Kapoor, he proudly displays a shelf of classics in his houseboat to a guest, Rita, played by Nanda: “Ismein Tagore hai, Shakispeer … aur Munshi Premchand hai. Bahut accha log hai ismein, memsaab!” But the memsahib merely rolls her eyes. A little later, we see Rita—her high-heeled feet on a divan and a string of pearls around her neck—absorbed in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, a 1950s American novel about a man’s sexual obsession with a young girl. The besotted boatman, slate in hand, cajoles her into giving him Hindi lessons, and the two later begin an unlikely romance. But once you’ve seen that book in Rita’s hands, you know that this modern woman will soon find herself struggling to deal with this traditional Indian man.

A more recent instance of book-as-comment occurs in Imtiaz Ali’s Tamasha, when Tara (Deepika Padukone) picks up a half-read copy of Joseph Heller’s classic Catch-22 from the floor where Ved (Ranbir Kapoor) left it the previous night. Strangers in Corsica, they have embarked on a fling on conditions of impermanence and anonymity. Her quick, knowing smile on reading the book’s title suggests an internal dialogue, an unspoken note to herself on their predicament. She checks the flyleaf for a name. (If there had been one, their agreement would have fallen through—as would have half the film’s plot.) But all she finds is a stamp from Social, a fashionable “urban hangout” with branches in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. Years later, that remembered stamp becomes Tara’s clue to finding Ved.

It is a sign of the times that the book now functions merely as a form of product placement—and not for its publishers, but for a café and bar chain. But perhaps the real thing to note about the book in Tamasha is how little it matters. In a film that’s all about celebrating the power of stories, the printed word is barely a blip. It is the oral tradition of Urdu storytelling, dastangoi, as practised by Piyush Mishra’s character, that leaves an impact on our hero. And even that crabby old man tells his stories for money.

Books were not always so inconsequential in Hindi films..."

Read the whole essay on the Caravan site.

Post Facto: Rajesh Khanna and the women who loved him

From my fortnightly Sunday Guardian column:

Like everyone else, I too have an aunt who was besotted with Rajesh Khanna in her adolescent years. The day before her Higher Secondary exams, the news came that he had married Dimple Kapadia. My masi remembers spending the day of her history exam weeping bitter tears with her girlfriends – had he married Anju Mahendroo who was more-or-less his age, their logic went, that would be one thing. But if he was going to marry a teenager, then oh god, why couldn't he pick one of them?

As a teenaged old-Hindi-movie buff myself, I never quite 'got' Rajesh Khanna. He always seemed to me a little like Dev Anand: entertaining enough, but so invested in the perfect rendition of his carefully cultivated style that no performance of his ever moved me. When he wasn't being maudlin or 'disturbed', there was a twinkle in the eye whose appeal I could see. But both Khanna and Anand seemed to me like some people's preening boyfriends: if pressed, I might grant their good looks, but really they just weren't my type.

When he died, the academic Susmita Dasgupta (author of Amitabh: The Making of a Superstar) wrote a wonderful Facebook 'note', in which she explained, among other things, why she had never been a Khanna fan, despite being surrounded by people who swooned over him and copied his looks: "Frankly, I remained out of all this. Khanna invoked femininity. I was not a pursuant of such sentiments. So when Bachchan came, I took to him like fish to water. I also revelled that he, and not Khanna, was the superstar."

What does it mean to say that a hero "invoked femininity"? In Gangs of Wasseypur II, Ramadhir Singh does a neat recounting of history-through-heroes, which features the same idea: "First men liked Dilip Kumar, and women liked Dev Anand. Then men liked Amitabh Bachchan, and women liked Rajesh Khanna." If one wants to take Ramadhir Singh's idea forward, I suppose we might agree that men like Salman and women like Shah Rukh.

Perhaps there's something there. But what does such a binary make of all the women who loved Bachchan and all the men who modelled themselves on Khanna? Are they to be considered traitors to their gender: masculine women and effeminate men? Do they gesture to the possibility of many kinds of masculinity? Or is the greater identification by one gender something to do with the kinds of films in which they starred?

The more Dasgupta worked on Bachchan, the more uncomfortable she felt about not being able to analyse Khanna as a phenomenon. She eventually met the latter, and her post contains some fertile speculation about the real-life Jatin Khanna. But what is fascinating is her theory that his star persona, as first created by Aradhana and Kati Patang, was the outcome of director "Shakti Samanta's search of a lover for his young widowed mother". He was "a saviour who comes in to breathe life and loveliness into women, ignored and isolated". The tragic figure of the young widow is at the centre of both films. Samanta's father was in the air force, and died in the line of duty in 1947, like Arun Varma in Aradhana, who dies leaving a pregnant fiancé behind.

I watched Aradhana last week at a Rajesh Khanna Retrospective, and Dasgupta is certainly on to something. From scraps of childhood memory, I had imagined Aradhana to be a standard-issue romance, and I was quite surprised at how completely our experience is filtered through Sharmila Tagore's character, Vandana. The first Rajesh dies early on, having provided a few weeks of loving, the memory of which Sharmila must live off. The second appears 25 years later, as Vandana's grown-up son. The two Rajeshes get plenty of screen time, but it is always through Vandana's eyes that we see them: the perfect lover, the yearned-for husband and the adored son.

In contrast, think of the many Bachchan movies in which the mother-son relationship is absolutely crucial – even when the mother is the one who stays alive and ages through the film, the film's point of view is always that of the son. In Yash Chopra's Trishul, for instance, the narrative thrust comes, just as in Aradhana, from the figure of the unwed mother who decides to give birth to the child. But when the son is Bachchan, a mother figure as strong as Waheeda Rehman must die. She can be a symbol in whose name he can fight, but she cannot be the one whose battles we witness.

Whether you're male or female, you can only experience the tragedy of Trishul — or Deewar or Zanjeer ­— through Bachchan's eyes. In a Rajesh Khanna movie, in contrast, you always see him through the heroine's eyes. He is the ultimate hero of heterosexual romance: the man you can soothe, and even better, the man who soothes you.

You can also read this column here.