Bhumika 1977

Bhumika is a 1977 Indian Bollywood biopic film released on Nov 11, 1977. The film is directed by Shyam Benegal, produced by Lalit M. Bijlani.

Urvashi a poor and a destitute girl is liked by an influential man Keshav, who advises her to try her luck in films. She indeed becomes a star and later marries Keshav but their married life does not remain stable for long. Urvashi starts having affairs with her co stars and invites many more problems for herself.

Bhumika tells the life story of a Bollywood actress, Usha (Smita Patil),who is the granddaughter of a famous female singer of the old tradition. Usha's mother married to an abusive and alcoholic brahman.Following his early death, and over her mother’s objections, Usha is taken to Bombay by family hanger-on Keshav Darvi (Amol Palekar) to successfully audition as a singer in a Bombay studio: the first step in a process, watched approvingly by her doting grandmother and with horror by her mother, that will eventually carry her to on-camera adolescent stardom, and to an ill-starred love marriage with Keshav. Usha’s motives for stubbornly pursuing this relationship (culminating in a pre-marital pregnancy) with the unattractive and much older Keshav—who appears to have lusted after her since childhood—are not spelled out. Presumably she feels indebted to him for his loyalty to her family (of which he frequently reminds her) and for her own worldly success; she is also a headstrong girl who clearly enjoys her acting career and is bent on challenging her uptight mother (who opposes the match because of Keshav’s non-brahman status, just as she opposes the cinema itself on the grounds of its supposed disrespectability).

Once the two are wed, Usha is shocked to find Keshav continuing to act as her “business manager,” arranging starring roles for her opposite hunky heartthrob Rajan (Anant Nag), who is himself in (unrequited) love with her. Since Keshav’s other business ventures are unsuccessful, the family remains entirely dependent on Usha’s earnings—a fact that Keshav clearly resents. He thus becomes both a jealous husband with a fragile ego and nasty temper, as well as (in effect) a greedy pimp who compels his wife to take risqué work despite her dislike of her costar and her protests that she “only wants to be a housewife” now that their daughter has been born. Not surprisingly, the relationship becomes increasingly poisoned, particularly by Keshav’s assumption (fed by star-magazine gossip) that she is in fact having an affair with Rajan. Verbally and physically abused by her husband and periodically obliged to live in a hotel, separated from her daughter and mother, the desperately-unhappy actress eventually does instigate two unsatisfying liaisons—with the nihilistic and self-centered director Sunil Verma (Naseeruddin Shah), with whom she plots a double-suicide (which he foils), and then with the wealthy businessman Vinayak Kale (Amrish Puri), who keeps her as a pampered mistress on his palatial estate. Here Usha briefly finds a kind of “respectability” as a de facto second wife, earning a measure of love and admiration from Kale’s mother, son, and bedridden first wife—but (as she learns one day when she tries to take the boy to a nearby fair) at the cost of even the most rudimentary freedom. Unable to abide by Kale’s hypocritical domestic rules, she finds her only hope of escape to lie in the intervention of the hated Keshav, who promptly brings her back to a Bombay festooned with billboards of her own face, and to the same drab hotel and lonely prospects. As Kale’s bitter wife remarks to Usha as the latter prepares to leave, “The beds change, the kitchens change. Men’s masks change, but men don’t change.”

Based on Marathi scree actress Hansa Wadkars life - the film tells of the troubled childhood of Usha, who upon the death of her drunkard father is forced to marry Dalvi- a man double her age. Dalvi introduces Usha to the life of grease paint where her search for happiness makes her come across a playboy producer, a fedual and domineering Zamindar before she realises that she herself would have to come to term with her life on her own. Check out this page for more updates on Bhumika.