How to treat a doctor

My Mirror column: 

As part of the ongoing series about doctors in our cinema, a look at humanitarianism and humility in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's earliest film about a doctor: Anuradha (1960)

Leela Naidu and Balraj Sahni in a still from Anuradha (1960)

Almost exactly twenty years before Bemisal, which I wrote about last week, Hrishikesh Mukherjee directed another film about a doctor. Unlike Bemisal, Anuradha (1960) was about a good doctor, a great doctor, with a humanitarian vision to match his mastery of his profession. Balraj Sahni's Dr. Nirmal Chaudhury is the sort of medical man that Vinod Mehra's reformed avatar tries to become in Bemisal: deeply committed, cycling through his remote rural area, treating zamindar and poor alike – or rather, treating them differently, because he does not charge impoverished patients. Asked where the doctor is to be found, a local responds: “Doctor wahin hoga jahan gandagi hogi, jahan makkhiyan bhinhina rahi hongi, jahan 15-20 mareez baithe khaaen-khaaen kar rahe honge... [A doctor is found where there is dirt, flies buzzing around, and 15-20 patients sitting around coughing...]”

But Mukherjee's concerns in this film are more personal. Sahni's Nirmal is a lovely man who falls for Leela Naidu's Anuradha Roy, a well-off young woman who is not just beautiful but artistically talented, singing and choreographing her own performances (the film's delightful music is by the late Pt. Ravi Shankar). Having wooed and married her, however, Nirmal and she move to the village, and he becomes the classic workaholic husband: out of the house most of the time and preoccupied even when in. 

Sachin Bhowmick's script uses the figure of the distracted doctor to indicate a man who always has bigger things on his mind. Small details suggest this from the start: even when Nirmal is courting Anuradha, he almost misses the start of her show. Where could he be, wonders Anuradha's brother. “Doctors are always late,” says the woman he's with. That line presages what is to come: Leela Naidu's disappointed face as her husband fails to pay her the slightest bit of attention, or even keep his word about the rare promise of time together.

Nirmal is no fool. His passion for medical science apart, he has enough emotional intelligence to notice other men's connection or disconnection from their wives – but apparently not his own. Nirmal's patients include one man who is mocked because he acts out his wife's every illness, his body mimicking the symptoms that his mind so empathises with. (The man who does the mocking is the bus conductor for whom ignoring his wife is mardaangi: even if she throws the kitchen tongs at him.) Another patient never notices that his wife is ill until it is too late, and Nirmal berates him:“If you can't take care of her, why marry?”. But his blindness to his wife's malady is an unspoken analogy for Nirmal's own obliviousness to what ails Anuradha.

What, in fact, does ail Anuradha? Naidu, never much of an actress, with her stilted Hindi delivery, relies on her expressive eyes to portray the profound emptiness of the woman who has lost her music and with it, her identity -- gaining a marriage that offers her none of the companionship it seemed to promise. Her tiredness in the scene in which Sahni returns hours later than promised and goes straight to his home laboratory, intending to spend the rest of the night looking for a cure for a local water-borne infection, presages another put-upon wife's (Shabana Azmi) sorrow and bafflement and frustration with her preoccupied doctor husband (Pankaj Kapur) in Tapan Sinha's Ek Doctor Ki Maut (1990).

The problem, both films seem to suggest, isn't so much the drudgery, which might have been the same for any other woman in any other comparable household. It is the exhaustion that comes from cooking and cleaning and taking care of a man who is entirely oblivious to your presence – and yet expects everything to be in perfect order, so that he can carry out his duties without a hitch. The fact that these duties happen to be to humanity at large helps hide what is equally true – that they serve the doctors' own sense of self. That these blissfully patriarchal husbands happen to be good doctors, I'd argue, is meant to underline their indomitable egos, the unshakeable sense of higher purpose that tars their wives' completely legitimate domestic desires as petty and ungrateful and limited.

These men may start by loving a talented woman as an equal, but the woman inevitably finds herself reduced to being a doctor's wife. Even at the very end of Anuradha, when Mukherjee inserts a nascent women's rights speech -- about the good doctor's sadhana and tapasya being nothing compared to the devotion and penance of “our wives, our mothers, our daughters” -- that speech must come from a senior doctor (Nasir Husain). In Bemisal two decades later, Vinod Mehra's cockily unethical gynaecologist learns his lesson only from his doctor best friend (Amitabh Bachchan). Apparently, it needs a doctor to teach another doctor anything – especially humility.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 18 Oct 2020.