ARADHANA
(“adoration, worship”)
1969, Hindi, 180 minutes
Produced and Directed by Shakti Samanta
Story and screenplay: Sachin Bhowmick; Dialogue: Ramesh Pant; Lyrics: Anand Bakshi;
Music: S. D. Burman; Art Direction: Shanti Das; Cinematography: Aloke Das Gupta
When thinking of
the dynamics of gender relations in India, I sometimes recall Garrison Keillor’s
description of his fictional hometown of Lake Woebegone, Minnesota: “…Where
the women are strong and the men are good-looking.” This
could serve as a kind of summary-sutra for ARADHANA, a weepy
drama of female self-sacrifice, buoyed by a famous Bakshi-and-Burman score,
that casts
Sharmila Tagore as the ill-starred heroine Vandana (a name that, like
the film’s
title, connotes “praise” or “worship”) and Rajesh
Khanna in the double role of her lover and then son. Its dramatic success
as a “golden
jubilee” film (one that played for more than fifty weeks in major
urban centers) made Khanna a superstar and led to a string of hits in
which he starred (many directed by
Samanta or by Hrishikesh Mukherjee) between 1969 and 1973—when
the actor’s
career went into abrupt decline due to the advent of the Next and Bigger
Thing, Amitabh Bachchan.
As the credits roll, we see a radiant, white-clad Vandana being denounced
in a courtroom, and (after tearfully refusing to speak in her own defense)
being
sentenced to life imprisonment for murder. One need not have taken Hindi
Cinema 101 to grasp that she is doubtless Innocent, but the film will
defer explaining
her “crime” for its first half, which unrolls as a flashback
from her lonely prison cell. As it opens, Vandana is returning from college
to her hill-station home, where she lives with her father, Gopal Tripathi,
a medical doctor and
widower. As
she rides the narrow-gauge train through the mountains, she hears a young
airman, Arun Varma (Khanna) on the adjacent motor road singing the amorous
song Mere
sapnon ki rani (“Oh Queen of my dreams, [when will you come
to me?]”)
while he eyes her flirtatiously. Their paths soon cross in her hometown,
where Arun begins to woo her more ardently; and although she is the very
model of maidenly
modesty and deferral, her jovial and progressive father proves to have
no objection to a “love match.”
Soon, with the further blessing of Arun’s avuncular boss Air Commodore Ganguly (Ashok Kumar), the engagement is sealed (and celebrated with the sun-drenched love songs Kora kagaz tha, “My heart was like a blank page,” and Gunguna rahe hai, “The bees are buzzing,” both performed against a backdrop of forests and snow-covered peaks). But before the planned nuptials can occur, Arun and Vandana pay a visit to a Shiva temple where, at the prompting of a cheerful priest, they impulsively exchange garlands and “marry before God.” A sudden storm then forces the lovers into a nearby bungalow where they doff their wet clothes—she substituting an artfully wrapped blanket for her soaked sari, and he building a fire. The blanket is red, and the firepit resembles a Vedic altar; eyeing each other hungrily, they circle the blaze while (substituting for a mantra-chanting priest) an amorous young man in an adjacent room sings the sultry Roop tera mastana (“Your beauty intoxicates me”).
The film’s most erotic
song picturization thus simultaneously manages to encode the key elements
of a perfectly
dharmic Hindu marriage ritual, although it necessarily remains a scandalous
secret, unsanctioned by family and “society.” The obvious
ensues (off-camera, of course) and though the virtuous Vandana worries
about
it the next morning,
Arun assures her that they will be formally wed in just a few days,
when he returns from a flying trip to Delhi.
But alas, Fate is cruel, and the young airman’s plane crashes. He survives
only long enough to remind the weeping Vandana, at his bedside, of
his dream of having a son named Suraj (“sun”) who, like him, will
become a pilot and range the skies; he extracts from her the promise to make
this dream
come true. Soon after his death, the distraught Vandana indeed discovers
that she is pregnant, and reveals to her shocked father—who could arrange
a face-saving abortion—that she intends to keep and raise the child,
dedicating her life to the “worship” (aradhana) of her
lost love. Despite her father’s blessing, Vandana’s plight now
grows grimmer. Arun’s
family (eager to inherit his property) mocks her tale of a secret “marriage” and
denounces her as a loose woman, and soon after this her father
expires. When she gives birth to a beautiful son, a lady doctor advises
leaving him at an orphanage
door and then coming the next day to “adopt” him—the
only means by which she can salvage respectability as a single mother.
But this plan too
goes awry, as the baby is accidentally given to a prosperous couple,
the Saxenas, whose own child was stillborn. When Vandana contacts
the husband and attempts
to retrieve the boy, admitting the real facts behind his birth, Mr.
Saxena convinces her to join the household as a nursemaid, so that
her son can grow up with the
advantage of the family’s wealth. Thus begins Vandana’s
long, worshipful “penance” for
her romantic indiscretion, as she nurtures the child, indeed named
Suraj, maintaining the illusion that he is someone else’s son,
while nevertheless forming a close bond with him, celebrated in the
lullaby-like song Chanda hai tu (“You
are my moon [and sun]”).
Worse trials lie ahead. When the greasy, foreign-returned brother
of Mrs. Saxena, Shyam (Madan Puri) tries to rape Vandana, eight-year-old
Suraj
comes to her
defense. She now gladly accepts a jail sentence for murder rather
than
endanger her child.
When she is released on good behavior after twelve years, she learns
that Mr. Saxena has died and his wife and son have moved to an unknown
place.
Homeless
once more, she accepts the invitation of the kindly jailer (himself
a widower and about to retire) to come to his house in Delhi as his
adopted
sister
and assist in the raising of his spirited teenage daughter Renu (Farida
Jalal). It is not long before Vandana learns that, like her “aunt” before
her, Renu too has a weakness for daring young men in flying machines,
and in fact
is in love with a twenty-year-old pilot named….. Ah well, watch
the movie—keeping
a hankie or two handy—and everything will (in time) be revealed.
The songs of Aradhana were very popular and several remain
well known today. Although most are romantic duets performed
by Lata Mangeshkar and Kishore
Kumar or Asha Bhosle and Mohamed Rafi, the film's most haunting
tune is perhaps the bhajan-like Kahey ko roye (“Why do you
weep?”),
unusually and soulfully sung by composer Burman himself as a voiceover
commentary on Vandana’s
many trials.
Despite its suffocating patriarchal morality—which condemns a young woman
to a lifetime of solitary adoration of a dead fiancé and
self-effacing nurture of the son who is essentially his clone—this
is a female-centered film, graced with a memorable performance
by Sharmila Tagore. Her character’s
two decades of tribulations recall those of two classical heroines
celebrated in the Mahabharata, Shakuntala and Draupadi.
Like the former, the innocent Vandana, associated with nature
and
the hills, is ardently pursued and
eventually seduced by a more sophisticated urban lover, who then
leaves her; their informal marriage is unrecognized
by society and she is scorned and humiliated because she bears
his child, yet she devotes herself to the boy’s
upbringing so that he may one day inherit his patrimony (here,
the “kingdom” of
the now conquered and militarized sky). And like Draupadi in
the epic’s
Book of Virata, Vandana, in order to achieve her object, disguises
her identity and takes employment as a maidservant in a wealthy
household, wherein (in the
absence of a male protector) she is sexually harassed by her
mistress’ brother,
who finally pays for this crime with his life; the blame for
his death then falls on her. Yet the outspoken assertiveness
of the two epic
heroines
contrasts
sharply with the passive and stoic endurance expected of the
modern and respectably middle-class heroine, whose resistance
to injustice is here largely expressed through self-imposed suffering.
[The Sky Entertainment DVD of ARADHANA features a good quality
print of the film. Optional English subtitles are, happily,
provided for
all song lyrics as well
as for dialogues.]