MADHUMATI
(1958, Hindi, B&W, 154 minutes)
Directed by Bimal Roy
Screenplay: Ritwik Ghatak; Dialogues: Rajinder Singh Bedi; Music: Salil Chowdhury;
Lyrics: Shailendra; Director of Photography: Dilip Gupta
Bimal Roy’s most successful film and ostensibly his most blatant concession
to mass tastes, MADHUMATI is an overdetermined but compelling mystery-romance
involving reincarnation and a haunted mansion, set in the Himalayan foothills
and ornamented with lovely (and famous) songs. It boasts a screenplay by famed
Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak, and dialogues by Urdu novelist Rajinder Singh
Bedi. The film begins, as they say, on a dark and stormy night, as Devendra
(Dilip Kumar) and a companion are enroute through the rain-lashed mountains
to meet a train carrying Devendra’s wife and child. When a landslide blocks
the road, the two men take shelter in a ruined mansion, which Devendra finds
unaccountably familiar – he knows his way around, and recognizes a portrait
of the mansion’s former owner, Raja Ugranarayan, as his “own”
handiwork. Soon he begins a long flashback to a previous life, in which he came
here one sunny day as the young clerk and amateur artist Anand, to supervise
the timber estates of the arrogant and cruel Ugranarayan (Pran). In his establishing
song, Anand exults in the beauty of the mountain landscape and reveals his poetic
temperament (Suhaana safar aur yeh mausam haseen, “a pleasant journey
and this beautiful season”). Defying the Raja by venturing into a forbidden
tract of forest, Anand falls in love with the vivacious and uninhibited Madhumati
(Vyjayanthimala), the daughter of a local chieftain whose son was earlier murdered
by the Raja’s henchmen. Anand’s own egalitarian progressivism, coupled
with his sympathy for Madhumati and her family, soon sets him on a collision
course with the Raja, who takes revenge through a malevolent scheme.
The story, punctuated by plenty of dark cloudbursts, sustains its suspense through
complications that include a flashback within the flashback, a trainwreck in
the frame story, and no less than three different embodiments of the heroine.
Comedy is provided by Anand’s drunken servant Charan Das (Johny Walker),
and Roy’s social-realist eye is apparent even in this fantastic setting,
capturing plausible portraits of some of the laborers on the Raja’s estates.
The film has affinities with Hitchcock’s REBECCA (1940) and VERTIGO (1958),
and the initial meeting of hero and heroine closely resembles that of Raj Kapoor’s
later RAM TERI GANGA MAILI (1984), wherein (as here), woman stands in for nature
and unspoiled folk tradition and the villain for exploitative (capitalist) culture,
with the hero as intermediary. The film’s eight songs include the haunting
hit Aaja re pardesi (“Come, O stranger”), by which Madhumati
first summons Devendra. Kumar gives an appropriately haunted performance as
the two incarnations of Devendra/Anand, and Vyjayanthimala is alternately earthy
and ethereal in the various permutations of the title character.
[The Yash Raj Films DVD of Madhumati includes subtitling for the songs, and
offers a viewable but less-than-ideal print of the film. That better copies
survive is apparent from one of its bonus features – a portion of a documentary
about Bimal Roy by Nasreen Munni Kabir, which includes crisper and less-scratched
footage from the film.]