Subhash K Jha revists Nutan’s career and shines the light on her finest film in this special feature.
Bimal Roy made many moving movies marked as masterpieces for milleniums. Bandini remains just that bit more special than Devdas or Madhumati. Why? Just…
Nutan had almost given up films after marriage. But like Yash Chopra, who made Raakhee an offer which she couldn’t resist (Kabhi Kabhie), Bimal Roy tempted the titanic actress — and would Kate Winslet please mover over? — out of married bliss to play what the director promised would be the role of Nutan’s lifetime.
Nutan’s tempestuous performance as Kalyani embedded her name in gold in the hall of fame. Along with Nargis in Mother India, Meena Kumari in Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, and Shabana Azmi in Arth, Nutan in Bandini is the most arresting character written for a mainstream Hindi heroine of the pre-70s era.
The film based on the memoirs of a jail superintendant (played in the film by Tarun Bose) is about the prisoner named Kalyani who has been convicted for the murder of her lover, the freedom fighter Bikas Gosh (Ashok Kumar)’s shrewish wife. In a long and luminous flashback (with some of the best black-and-white photography ever by Kamal Bose), Bimal Roy takes us back to Bengal in the 1930s, teeming with revolutions and heaving with melodious evolutions (Sachin Dev Burman at his melodious crest).
Roy captures the journey from innocence to corruption to redemption of his heroine through songs—Gulzar’s first-ever lyric ‘Mora gora rang lai lay’ to express Kalyani’s first flush of love, Shailendra’s ‘O jaane wale ho sake to laut aana’ to express her disgrace and exile when she’s deserted by her lover, ‘Ab ke baras bhej bhaiyya ko babul’ to convey Kalyani’s solitude and sorrow in prison and finally — in one of the best ever climactic song expressing a woman’s dilemma between love and security—’O re manjhi mere saajan hain uss par’.
Goosebumps!
The music, lyrics, and singing by Lata Mangeshkar endow a poetic quality to the proceedings. Most important of all, there was Nutan at the vortex of the emotional conflict, lending a high-voltage luminosity to the proceedings. The look in her eyes as she prepares poison for the screechy and nagging wife of the freedom fighter remains etched in moviegoers’ minds for all times to come. The performance fetched Nutan another Filmfare award for her performance in a Bimal Roy film. Earlier, she had won the best actress award for Bimal Roy’s Sujata.
The tender relationship that grows between the bandini (female prisoner) and the prison doctor (Dharmendra) poses a peculiar moral dilemma for the script. Should Kalyani grab the doctor’s generous offer of marriage and start life anew, exonerated from her tumultuous past, or should she return to the man she loved passionately and lost to his cause and to another undeserving woman?
When finally, Kalyani breaks free from convention to be by her dying lover’s side, the nation cheered her instinctive lunge towards love. The dying moments of Bandini, beautifully directed, photographed, and performed, is now acknowledged as a rare cinematic achievement, on par with anything similarly done in the cinema from any part of the world.
Bandini remains a monument chiefly for Nutan’s award-winning performance, also for Bimal Roy’s complete and unsurpassable mastery over the medium of inner expression. It’s also the film that broke the ice between composer S.D. Burman and his favourite singer Lata Mangeshkar. The two had been on hostile terms for nearly five years. They decided to make up with ‘Mora gora ang laiy lay’. Gulzar proudly says he had a hand in the historic rapprochement.
The film was a huge success on release, cancelling Nutan’s plans to stay at home to look after her newly born son, Mohnish. Tragically, Bandini was the last feature film that Bimal Roy completed and released before the Big C stuck him down. Interestingly, Ashok Kumar was featured in another love triangle—B.R. Chopra’s Gumrah—during the same years. There, the female protagonist chose to return to Ashok Kumar instead of the other man in her life.
