The making of Smita Patil

Reluctant Move to Beckoning Bombay

Maximum city. One that never sleeps. Paved with shards of shattered tinsel dreams. A city of gold and a city of dross. Of unlimited opportunity and doomed despair. A cityscape relentlessly churning out cheerful throngs of people, pushing them into shared communal living and atomized existence, on the path to pervasive alienation. Recycled clichés these, but as clichés come, all with an infinitesimal grain of truth. Bombay exudes its special mystique and few are immune to its charms. A formidable force unto itself, threatening to swallow the individual and reduce her to anonymity in its greedy, gaping maw, luring victims with the mesmerizing power of a siren’s song. It is a magnet that attracts and repels.

Smita resisted the lure as long as she could. She was no stranger to the pull of the place, having visited often enough growing up in Pune. She wanted to pursue her studies at Pune’s Fergusson College after finishing school.

Shivajirao moved to Bombay in 1969. Initially, only Anita accompanied him and they lived in A/4 Foreshore Road — one of the ministerial bungalows. Vidyatai stayed back in Pune for nearly a year to wind up things. She too moved to Bombay with Manya while Smita stayed with her friend Chingi on Tilak Road for her final school year. Eventually, Smita had to pay heed to the family’s call and join them in Bombay, where her father was serving as Cabinet minister.

What made her resist so long? Pune offered the warmth of the womb and the challenging freedom of the playground. Not just a comfort zone of familiarity and extended familial support but also a circle of friends who remained friends for life. For all its rootedness, Pune was not provincial. True, it lacked the cosmopolitan sheen of Bombay, but its enriching cultural milieu — of literature, drama, music and the all-important Film and Television Institute (FTII) — was a nurturing place for a creatively inclined sensibility. Smita was completely at home in the vibrant environs of Theatre Academy where, along with stalwarts like Jabbar Patel, Satish Alekar and Mohan Agashe (all founder members), many young enthusiasts formed a closeknit group. Smita used to frequent the FTII campus. PK Nair, India’s pioneering film archivist, recalls: ‘My initial introduction to Smita Patil was when she used to come to FTII to watch evening screenings, along with some of her Theatre Academy friends. She was then working in a play put up by Theatre Academy in Pune. One of her friends introduced her to me as an ardent film lover interested in serious cinema. She was a regular visitor of the archive’s evening screenings.’ Being spotted so often on campus encouraged the erroneous assumption that Smita too was an FTII alumna.

She is a graduate by association, inclination and achievement, acting in the best films of Ketan Mehta, Saeed Mirza, alongside actors like Shabana Azmi, Om Puri and Naseeruddin Shah, to name the most famous. India’s finest technicians — cinematographers Shaji Karun, Binod Pradhan, Rajen Kothari, sound recordists Paddy (Padmanabhan), Hitu (Hitendra Ghosh) — are a few FTII alumni who captured her unforgettable presence and haunting voice for posterity. Smita Patil is, veritably, an honorary graduate of FTII.

Mohan Agashe goes further back in time and remembers meeting Smita at the house of Rohini Bhagawat, Chingi to her friends: ‘Smita’s closest friend Chingi was with her at Bhave school and her house was a sort of adda for everyone. Subhya [Subhash Awchat, the painter], Mohan Gokhale, Raju [Chingi’s cousin], Satish [Alekar] … we all met there since it was a central place. We rehearsed there. Smita’s father had shifted to Bombay because he had become a minister but she was studying at Fergusson and stayed back. She was like a second daughter to Chingi’s mother. I remember that the first time I saw Smita, Chingi’s mother was neglecting Chingi and me, which she would not ordinarily do. All her attention was focussed on this ordinary-looking dark girl, plying her with a lot of questions about her well-being in a very intimate tone. Obviously, I must have been a bit jealous. I asked, who is this Kali? Everyone called her Kali — you must have heard it from others. With her Seva Dal background, she was not new to the stage and part of the group that would come to rehearsals. She acted in a play, Suhas Tambe’s introduction of Beej. It was the common bond of friendship, with a bit of fighting, arguing, like all friendships are. Soon after, she had to go to Bombay. It was around 1972-73. Ghashiram had opened, and of course, there was the controversy. Chingi’s house continued to be the adda and there was a lot to talk about.’

A later friend, sound recordist Hitendra Ghosh, who truly discovered Smita the actor, says that she loved the stage, and when he first met her in 1974, films were far from her mind. She took him to see many Marathi plays whenever she came to Pune and he was at FTII. Though Ghashiram Kotwal was a settled unit with the cast in place, Smita hankered to be part of it; she even badgered Mohan Agashe, who was the lead player and star, to get her into a play she loved for its musical structure. Jabbar Patel, who directed this landmark theatre production that won Satyajit Ray’s praise, was widely invited to perform at home and abroad. Inevitably, Vijay Tendulkar’s subversion of Maratha history drew the Shiv Sena’s wrath and they unleashed vitriolic hatred upon the creators of this wonderfully inventive classic of Indian theatre. Jabbar Patel and Tendulkar were destined to play seminal roles in Smita’s career.

Smita’s Pune friend circle was eclectic. While she was friends with many of her own age group, she was also extraordinarily nurturing towards her younger friends, casual on the surface but deeply caring and thoughtful. Ravi Deshpande counts her as a major influence in his life. Assistant director (AD) and documentary film-maker, executive producer on a lot of films, and an associate of Santosh Sivan, Ravi fondly remembers how giving Smita was to the gangling teenager he was at the time. She gave him her jeans — he was skinny then — and he wore them even though his parents were aghast that he wore a girl’s jeans. He used to live in a flat near Pune station that belonged to Subhash Awchat. Smita would ride up to his house on her Vespa and shout out Gundya! She would bear him off to the FTII, which was a favourite haunt. Ravi fast-forwards in time to Smita the star. She saw him devour Satyajit Ray’s Our Films Their Films, totally in thrall of the master. She took the gawky seventeen-year-old to the location shoot of Sadgati (it was near Raipur) as he watched at work, awestruck, the young woman who mentored him and the great film-maker. He also observed her on the shoot of Jabbar Patel’s Umbartha.

Ravi recalls another endearing quality of hers — the way Smita personalized her gifts, right from the time she was a teenager, be it a photograph she clicked or a sketch she made or a book. She always wrote something special, to make the moment something to be cherished. ‘It was as if she brought everything in her to be distilled into that moment of giving,’ says Ravi, searching for words to articulate an ineffable feeling. No wonder her letters and gifts are something that the receivers cherish and will not part with. It was this encircling warmth of friends that she was reluctant to leave behind for the engulfing anonymity of Bombay. 

An extract from SMITA PATIL A Brief Incandescence by Maithili Rao; HarperCollins Publishers India