She'll Cry Us a River

Early post-independence Hindi cinema’s image of the sorrowful woman—who suffers the slings and arrows of fortune in service of the ‘greater good’—is caught in contradictory narratives. A thing of beauty that poignantly enlivens a bleak horizon, she also serves as a reminder of deep fault-lines and violent fissures in the contemporary social and political landscape. As popular Hindi cinema loads the figure of the stoic and sorrowful woman with tremendous metaphorical significance, it endorses the idea that while bold might be beautiful, melancholic is no less magnificent.

The collection of film ephemera at the Museum of Art and Photography affords an opportunity to explore some of the contours of Golden Era Hindi cinema’s figuration of the melancholic woman.

The figure of the pained and suffering woman is directly implicated in melodramatic excesses.

As she weeps, her body becomes a site of excessiveness, leaking forth emotions that are meant to rouse similar feelings in sympathetic audience members. Her suffering also enables her to be easily cast as sacred and virtuous within the melodramatic juxtaposition of good versus evil: she is perceived as distilled by suffering, and purified by pain.

The characterization of the suffering mother, ubiquitous in popular Hindi cinema, has been pivotal in the process of turning the feminine into the sacred center of the nationalistic project. In Mother India (1957), Radha (Nargis), who appears as a metaphor for the nation, wrestles with immense hardship to raise her infant sons into young men.

As she labours on a flooded field and persuades other villagers not to abandon their farms after a storm, Radha displays her rootedness by literally nurturing the soil of the country. When the village eventually builds a dam, she is called to inaugurate it as an old, almost mute woman. Venerated by the villagers as a sacred maternal figure emblematic of the virtues of traditionalism, she also becomes pivotal in the ushering in of modern technological innovation.

This figure makes an iconic reappearance in Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam (1962). Adapted from Bimal Mitra’s Bengali novel Saheb Bibi Golam, Abrar Alvi’s film centers on the unfulfilled desires of Chhoti Bahu (Meena Kumari), who lives in a palatial home as the wife of a wealthy zamindar (landowner), but languishes for her husband’s affection. Her degenerate husband, however, is enamored by a courtesan.

Chhoti bahu is convinced that the only way to get her husband’s attention is to sing, dance and drink alcohol in his company.

While the woman waits for her lover, she is also often required to suffer her father’s censure. In Bharosa (1963) Gomti (Asha Parekh) is pushed into grief and helplessness by her father, who refuses to understand why she would prefer a good-hearted but bumbling villager over an urban, educated sophisticate. Unable to stand the conflict with her father, Gomti eventually runs away to the city.

In Bandini (1963), Kalyani (Nutan) and Bikash (Ashok Kumar) fall in love while he is visiting her village. He promises to return to her after his work in the city is done. However, the village eventually learns that Bikash has married another woman, and Kalyani’s father is subjected to harsh judgment and censure. Unable to bear her father’s anguish, Kalyani runs away to the city, where she serendipitously encounters Bikash’s wife.

When she is mistreated by his wife, her repressed grief gushes out in a bout of helpless anger. Unlike the quiet sorrow of the archetypal grieving woman whose eyes tear in quiet grief, Kalyani’s suffering erupts forth in a violent torrent as beads of sweat on her forehead.