Tell It Again #9: 1977 — Bhumika, Godhuli, Swami
Welcome to ‘Tell It Again’, a newsletter about the life and work of Girish Karnad.
This week we wrap up our theme about the creative trio of Karnad, Shyam Benegal and Satyadev Dubey, and their milieu. In Parts One and Two, we looked through their work on film and on stage.
Now we look in on a single, outstanding year. For Karnad — then 39 years old — 1977 was a demonstration of his ‘triple threat’ in the film world: as a writer, a director, and as a star.
Writing Bhumika
Karnad’s third joint undertaking with Shyam Benegal was a striking departure from the director’s oeuvre so far. Bhumika was based on the life of Hansa Wadkar, a star of early Marathi and Hindi cinema, and her autobiography, Sangtye Aika (Listen, and I’ll Tell).
After using Karnad as an actor in starring roles, Benegal and Dubey asked him on as a co-writer for Bhumika, in part because of Karnad’s background and familiarity with the Marathi culture and milieu of the 1940s.
The film scholar Ashish Rajadhyaksha wrote to us about the film, and its team of writers, which “provides a rich source for speculation, given the work of each of the figures involved.”
“There is some evidence that they [Karnad, Benegal, Dubey] more or less thought the project up together,” he said, “as a combination of cinephilia, social history moving away from the more familiar areas of feudal oppression, and a role for Smita Patil.”
In that latter respect, it was certainly a success. It won Patil the prize for Best Actress at that year’s National Awards, as well as winning Best Screenplay for its writers.
(Soon after, they reprised their team effort and wrote Kalyug — a return to Karnad’s most beloved source material, the Mahabharata — produced by Shashi Kapoor. Read our newsletter on Karnad’s relationship with the epic.)
Reflecting on Karnad’s influence on Bhumika, Rajadhyaksha thought of a particular sequence in the film, shot in monochrome, showing us Wadkar’s childhood:
“Set in Sawantwadi, coastal Maharashtra — culturally close to Uttara Kannada, where the young Wadkar learns singing and acting amid a tyrannical and ambitious family of kalavantins [devadasis] — one imagines that this cultural context would surely have been Karnad’s contribution to the film’s imagination.”
At the same time, Rajadhyaksha has written about how Bhumika’s lead character arc fit a dreary pattern in the New Indian Cinema of that time, of “female protagonists seeking independence through various kinds of social engagements, failing, and then “going away.”
Bhumika might be guilty of what the critic Susie Tharu noted about another defining film of the era, Jabbar Patel’s Umbartha. (This had Karnad acting alongside Smita Patil — read a guest post by film critic Aseem Chhabra on our Instagram.)
In the Economic and Political Weekly, Tharu wrote:
“The filmic focus … establishes her as the central character as well as the problem (the disruption, the enigma) the film will explore and resolve … it is clear that to search herself is, for a woman, a tragic enterprise. An enterprise in which she is doomed to fail, but can fail bravely and heroically.”
Directing Tabbaliyu Neenade Magane, or Godhuli
Almost immediately after the shooting for Bhumika, Karnad paid a visit to Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri to cast them in a new film, one that he was going to direct.
After their Vamsha Vriksha (1971), Karnad was teaming up again with BV Karanth to direct a second adaptation of a novel by SL Bhyrappa. This was Tabbaliyu Neenade Magane (Son, You’re An Orphan Now), or in Hindi, Godhuli.
The film, about a young man newly returned to his village from America with a white American wife, would be filmed simultaneously in Kannada and Hindi. Naseeruddin Shah was cast as a priest in the Hindi edit.
Life on set in that era was full of surprises, and one was in store for Shah: the actor playing his role in the Kannada version had backed out. He would have to do both.
In his memoir, Shah recalls “the nightmares I had memorizing words I hadn’t heard before and whose meaning I barely understood.”
In later decades, Karnad would regret Godhuli’s themes, mainly its handling of the villagers’ reverence for cows. (This article on Scroll.in examines the film’s subject and changing political resonance.) Karnad developed a strained relationship with Bhyrappa’s work, too, as the novelist joined the bandwagon of Hindu nationalism in Karnataka.
Acting in Swami
The cultural writer Aryama Sen, going by the handle ind.igenous, wrote for our shared post about Basu Chatterjee’s Swami.
“The story, adapted from a Bengali story by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, is the tale of a young, intelligent, well-read woman who is in love with a man, but ends up being married off to another. She finds it difficult, almost impossible to come to terms with her circumstances, but also lacks the agency to make choices of her own. It is an understanding husband [Karnad] who finally brings her comfort.
At its core, Swami was about a woman’s freedom and choices — and while one might find several flaws when viewing it through today’s lens, it was rare that a film dealt with such themes during its times. While the New Wave of cinema had already arrived... Swami was among the more popular, mainstream films to handle such a theme.
Girish Karnad had been associated with parallel cinema ... but Swami was a huge commercial success. Karnad was lauded for his acting, although the fact that he had never set out to be an actor was something he talked about in multiple interviews. But Swami established his position as one, with a stream of offers coming his way over the next few years.
So much so, it started worrying some of his fans. In fact a 1981 interview by Ahmed Rizvi and Nandan Nilekani began with the question, “Why is Girish Karnad Selling Out?”
This was a long, provocative interview in Debonair magazine. But what the interviewers (and yes — it was that Nandan Nilekani) asked was: “We may as well begin with a question that is worrying a lot of people sick. To put it in a sentence: “Why is Girish Karnad selling out?”
Laughing in response, he said:
“Yeah, all of a sudden everyone seems to be plagued with this question of what the hell I’m doing in commercial films.
I have never taken the commercial cinema seriously, it’s been more like a windfall. … I’ve never worked towards acting the way I’ve worked towards being a playwright or a good film-maker. … I’m going along with it as far as it will take me. I can only say anything [about] my work by the sole yardstick open to me, which is the degree to which it has satisfied me.”
Toward the end of the interview, which you can read here, Karnad also said:
These three films got Karnad a sweep of the awards circuit. In 1977, Bhumika received the National Award for Best Screenplay, and Godhuli won for Best Feature Film in Kannada (along with Best Sound Recording, to SP Ramanathan). Godhuli also won the Filmfare Award for Best Script, shared with BV Karanth.
For his role in Swami, Karnad won the West Bengal Film Journalists’ Association Award for the Best Actor of the Year. At the 1978 Filmfare Awards, Bhumika competed with Swami and Manthan for Best Film, and won it.
Archival staff at the National Film Archive of India have been kind enough to share images of posters, lobby cards and film stills from all three films — a big thank you to Leenali Khairnar and Iyesha Geeth Abbas for their efforts.
This newsletter and the Instagram and Facebook pages it is tied to are part of an open archive of Girish Karnad’s life and work conceived by Raghu and Chaitanya as a way to keep his wide legacy alive and in public view. Its curator is Harismita.