60 years of Jaya Bachchan, the girl next door of Hindi films, on Indian screens

Anil Chatterjee and Jaya Bhaduri in Mahanagar, directed by Satyajit Ray. (Screen grab)

In a delightful scene in Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar, released 60 years ago in 1963, a teenaged and outrageously charming Jaya Bhaduri Bachchan grins over the classified pages of The Statesman newspaper between Anil Chatterjee, who plays her elder brother and Madhabi Mukherjee, who plays her sister-in-law. It provides for one of the most recognizable images from the film—Chatterjee peering intently into the paper, Bhaduri in the middle and Mukherjee’s side profile. [To avoid confusion with Amitabh Bachchan, and because Bhaduri has a body of work preceding her marriage to Bachchan, she will be referred to as Bhaduri hereon.] They are discussing Mukherjee’s interest in applying for a job. “I’ll tell you…film star!” Bhaduri tells Mukherjee. “It would suit you so well. You’ll wear dark glasses, put on lipstick…and earn one lakh per film! And if it is a Hindi film, we’ll all go to Bombay on a plane.”

Screenshot from Mahanagar, directed by Satyajit Ray.

To want to be a film star is a marvelously progressive desire to express in a middle-class upper caste Bengali Hindu home from half a century ago, untampered by Bhadralok prejudices about respectability. But it’s also as if Bhaduri is wishing her own career into being. Debuting as a 15-year-old in Mahanagar, she would go on to study acting at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune and become one of the most successful, and improbable, leading women in Bombay’s film industry in the 1970s. And she did not, as her character Bani predicted in Mahanagar, have to lay on the lipstick and dark glasses to become a Bombay film star, so to speak. Her performances in Hindi films like Guddi, Mili, Koshish, Abhimaan, Sholay and even Zanjeer (where she has a small role), remain beloved and retain an especially loyal set of fans nearly 50 years later.

“I decided to join FTII [Film and Television Institute of India] after I saw a diploma film starring Jaya Bhaduri,” Shabana Azmi is quoted to have said.  I was taken by her life-like performance. Her work in Abhimaan and Mili continue to move me deeply.”

At a ceremony to mark 60 years of Mahanagar in Kolkata at the handsome Nandan theatre, Bhaduri corrected the moderator who reminded her of Azmi’s admiration. “I’ll tell you what she actually said. ‘Agar yeh film kar sakti hain, toh koi bhi kar sakta hai! (If she can act in film, then anyone can act in film)!”

In her films from the '70s, Bhaduri appears to wear little (or no) make-up, dresses simply in frocks or everyday saris, and looks tiny on screen next to her co-stars, both male and female. Perhaps, it was this that led to Bhaduri being called the first girl next door heroine, the most improbable leading woman of the 1970s—a decade dominated by absolute divas like Zeenat Aman, Parveen Babi, Hema Malini, Sharmila Tagore, Rakhee, Mumtaz and Rekha.

If judged by looks alone, she was less of a traffic stopper than these women. But if we consider how Satyajit Ray once described a film star, she had what it takes. “…a star is a person on the screen who continues to be expressive and interesting even after he or she has stopped doing anything,” Ray wrote in the essay titled ‘An Indian New Wave’, anthologized in the collection Our Films, Their Films.  “This definition does not exclude the rare and lucky breed that gets five or ten lakhs of rupees per film; and it includes anyone who keeps his calm before the camera, projects a personality and evokes empathy. This is a rare breed too, but one has met it in our films. Suhasini Mulay of Bhuvan Shome is such a star; so is Dhritiman Chatterjee of Pratidwandi; so are the two girls of Uski Roti.”

Although he does not mention Bhaduri here, to us as viewers, this is the effect she achieves in Mahanagar. She has spoken lines in ten scenes or fewer in the film, appearing for perhaps 15 minutes in a 131-minute film. But instinctively, we feel like watching more of her. (Or is it because of our retrospective knowledge that Bhaduri will become a major star that we have such interest?) She plays a cheerful, sweet, nerdy teenaged girl but with a willfulness that makes the sweetness never grate on viewers. Her character reflects the possibility (possibilities?) kindled by the unforgettable Arati, played by Mukherjee, who sets out of her genteel poor Bhadralok home to work at a job and changes forever. In a superb emotive moment in a crisis, Bhaduri’s Bani wants to drop out of school, saying her fees are too much of a burden for the family.

“What will you do after you stopping school,” Arati asks.

“I’ll work a job like you. I’ll find one, no?” she says.

Screenshot from Mili, directed by Hrishikesh Mukherjee.

Scouted by Sharmila Tagore and Robi Ghosh in Puri

Her performance in the film is most often described as fresh or refreshing, marked by a complete absence of artifice. This is likely because she was truly new to acting. “I had no experience, not even in theatre,” Bhaduri is quoted in the book Satyajiter Chhobitey Prothom Abhinoy (Debuting in Satyajit’s Cinema) edited by Ajoy Mishra. Bhaduri was in Puri with her father, a journalist called Tarun Bhaduri. Sharmila Tagore and the legendary Bengali comic actor Robi Ghosh were shooting there for prominent director Tapan Sinha’s film Nirjan Saikate. (Sinha is the director of Kabuliwala, the film that inspired Bimal Roy’s Hindi remake with Balraj Sahni.) Tagore and Ghosh recommended Bhaduri to Ray, who was looking to cast the part of Bani in Mahanagar. Ray called, Bhaduri went to meet him and stayed quiet, apart from answering his questions. “Sharmila di gave me lots of chocolate before the meeting,” Bachchan said

As I see it, Mahangar set the template for Bhaduri’s screen persona, particularly in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s and Gulzar’s films—an unaffected young woman, not coquettish, and one who speaks her mind. The adjective “simple” is often used for these performances, which is possibly code for someone who is not overtly sexual. It’s not an adjective I would use for her work in these films, because not only is she attractive but also, she is anything but simple in her intelligence and tendency to speak her mind. Indeed, she undoes some of the cloying sweetness of Hrishikesh Mukherjee characters, making them more unexpected than the ‘nice young women who listen to their elders’ Mukherjee’s women typically are. In Mili, for instance, where she plays a dying young woman, she never coughs to play ill—the favourite symptom of illness in the Hindi film. As if she is determined not to give in to cliché. It’s a small choice, but it lifts her performance above the maudlin tendencies of the character.

Screenshot from Sholay, directed by Ramesh Sippy.

A Career in Minimalism

Bhaduri primarily achieves this with her minimalism. For much of her filmography, her work reveals the vast riches of underplaying characters. Her performances tend to eschew dramatic or flamboyant gestures, distinctive mannerisms, cliched readings. It’s hard not to see this preference as arising from the ‘natural’ acting that Ray’s cinema is known for. But equally, she trained in acting at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in 1968-1970, the alumnus of actors such as Danny Denzongpa, Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Shabana Azmi and Mithun Chakrabarty, all of whom are celebrated for their naturalistic acting. (Chakrabarty is good at both melodrama and naturalism.)  She is said to have graduated with a gold medal.

Perhaps her most moving work comes in Sholay, where her monosyllabic young widow has the force of moving mountains inside us. It is perhaps the first realistic portrayal of what depression looks like--the brooding and rare windows of respite—on the Hindi screen.

For a career that began in 1963 and contains so many memorable films, Bhaduri has a relatively small filmography—IMDb lists 57 acting credits and this includes work such as a voiceover for the Hindi film Paa and cameos (such as in the Hindi film Ki and Ka). The bulk of this work comes in the 1970s. In the past ten years or so, she has not appeared in a full-fledged role at all but this year she is slated to return in a major Hindi film, Karan Johar’s Rocky aur Rani kii Prem Kahani.

The Social Media Meme

It would be remiss not to note that Bhaduri has been reduced to a meme in the social media age (beginning 2008 or so), featuring her work in the Hindi film Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham. It is not her performance that is bad, but that the story is set in such outlandish wealth that an emotional story of a misunderstanding that arises between a proud father, submissive mother and adoring son is rendered emotionally inert and comically grandiose. Bhaduri plays a woman who is a devoted wife and adoring mother, so crushed by her family’s patriarchy that she doesn’t dare question her husband’s decision to disown their son.

Can’t an actor choose a role that goes counter to their image? Why can’t an intelligent woman play a dull person? Of course. This is not about Bhaduri. It is the writing, the obliviousness to socio-economic realities in the film that diminishes the film’s core conflict (which is not unpromising).

But social media has, over the past few months, also given us another version of Bhaduri—scolding the paparazzi for jostling her, schooling them on manners, turning on the stern granny charm. For years, the gossip network had said that Bhaduri is taciturn and ill-tempered. But what we see on paparazzi reels on Instagram is something else—much of it endearing and entirely original.

This Jaya Bhaduri returns us to some of that old wilfulness, as if that girl Bani in Mahanagar had grown up to be a film star after all. Now, she was the eccentric diva scolding us to be on our best behaviour.