An actor with gravitas

Noted academician and columnist Maithili Rao undertakes a journey to understand Smita Patil beyond her screen image. Her book explores smita’s life, from her childhood to her untimely death, and how she inspired a generation of filmmakers and actors

It is no secret that often times writers wait for their muse to strike some unknown nerve, compelling them to write. For veteran academician and columnist Maithili Rao, her inspiration was Smita Patil, who inspired a generation of filmmakers and actors in India and abroad. At the recent launch of her debut book Smita Patil — A Brief Incandescence, Maithili wondered why she never got down to writing a book all these years and confessed, “Maybe I was waiting for inspiration and Smita ‘pathed’ my imagination.”

The book, which aims to shed light on the late actor’s life and times, from her childhood to untimely death, is more in the tradition of film studies than a biography of a star. Maithili clarifies that her book is not a conventional biography, she says, “The heart of the book is the critique of her work in her major films.” But the author has tried to keep it less esoteric and accessible to non-specialised readers as well.

Ten years ago, Maithili had started working on a different project on Smita’s life and works. “It was a series of small books. Nothing was in great detail. And not much about her personal life at all except that I did meet her mother, talked to her sister and some friends. But nothing happened to it,” she recalls.

But as she revisited her subject after more than a decade, she seems to have entered the threshold of newer meanings of Smita’s work. “The biggest thing that I can see is my response to Arth because at the time when the film was released (1982), we all saw it and most of us thought that Smita was cast against her typical earthy woman, like the girl next door, who was playing this high strung actor and most of us saw it as a feminist film where the betrayed wife doesn’t enter her room, finding her own identity and that’s really the majority reading of Arth as such. But when you see it again there are layers to her performance, and then there is such whole fragility of her relationship and her insecurity for which I had to revise my initial opinion and found that it was a great decision on Smita’s part even to take on that role. Because when you know that the entire audience’s sympathy is going with the wife’s character.

In fact, Shabana (Azmi) was very frank about it. She said that once Smita entered the role, the script had to be changed because one had to justify her role.”As she continues her thoughts on Arth, she adds, “Mahesh Bhatt says Smita was always his first choice and he had gone with his relationship with Parveen Babi. So he almost sees a certain kind of conflict that Smita must have been going through at the same time because of her relationship with Raj (Babbar) — he doesn’t say it in so many words but he hints that he must have drawn on her personal experience also, her dilemma, her conflict to bring to this role.

Otherwise most of the other films stand by their first reading — at least my first reading of the films. But then I think Arth forces one to examine the chemistry that she brought to her role and the vulnerability that she portrays. Her breakdown scene something is riveting there, you can’t take your eyes off her performance in that scene.”

Maithili had never met the actress while she was alive, which she personally deeply regrets, but thinks as a biographer that has helped her to stay objective. “I wonder if I had known her, I might have been so charmed by her frankness and spontaneity — everything that people told me about her. Had I known her, maybe a lot of my personal empathy would have come in the way.”

Maithili feels the book has been her journey to understand the woman that Smita was beyond her screen image. And through her journey she has found a Smita who was much different from what anyone would have imagined. “We all knew her as the woman with gravitas and intensity, the actor, her social work, the kind of roles she played and the kind of pitfalls she had in Badle Ki Aag, Kasam Paida Karne Wale Ki and all that. But when I was working on Badle Ki Aag, I did spend some time on that film, I found the semiotics of the dark skinned versus the fair skin and in terms of the desirable quality, something that she was conscious of, made me speculate on that. But the discovery for me was her great love for adventure. I knew about her drive from Delhi to Mumbai but that she wanted to ride a bike, that I came to know only from Hitendra Ghosh and how it came about.”

The tougher task for Maithili was, however, to refrain from writing everything that she discovered. “There were certain things that I knew that I couldn’t write in the book. The whole thing was a conscious decision because she is not there to defend herself or tell her point of view,” she says, “and it would be not fair for me to rely on recycled gossip that went around.”