The mother has a glorified place in Hindi cinema. Women cast in the roles of mothers have shaped our understanding of what mothers are – the provider, the nurturer, the glue that binds the family together. From Mother India to ‘mere paas ma hai’, the Bollywood mother has often been a pivotal character, enduring untold hardships to raise her children, admonishing her wayward son for the larger good, and placating irate daughters-in-law. The Ma is an all-weather source of wisdom, energy and hope.
But like the proverbial rule whose best proof lies in its exceptions, Hindi films have a fair share of ‘bad’ mothers, in the mould of Kaikeyi from the Ramayana and Kunti from the Mahabharata.
Mrs Gupta (Achla Sachdev) in Kora Kagaz (1974)
True, every mother loves to see her daughter lead a materially comfortable married life. But in her blind pursuit of this agenda, Mrs Gupta wrecks the home of her daughter Archana and son-in-law Sukesh Dutt who is not as well-off financially as the Guptas. The status-conscious Mrs Gupta tries to varnish Sukesh’s image in front of her relatives by making up stories of Sukesh going abroad for higher studies.
Next, she installs a telephone and a refrigerator in Sukesh’s home admittedly for Archana’s benefit, but with utter insensitivity to Sukesh as these are purchases that he cannot afford. Mrs Gupta’s snide observations about Sukesh’s paltry income, the inability to afford taxi rides, continues, each taunt widening the chasm between Archana and Sukesh. And finally, Mrs Gupta engineers the removal of Sukesh’s widowed aunt from their home. She is not done yet. She even instigates the divorce notice sent to Sukesh and suggests that Archana remarry.
Mrs Leela Bahal (Sushma Seth) in Khamosh (1985)
‘Teri maa hoon. Jo kuch karoongi tere achhe ke liye karoongi,’ Mrs Bahal tells her inconsolable teenaged daughter Minu. And what is this good that Mrs Bahal claims to have done for Minu? Never more than an extra in her acting days, driven by her thwarted ambitions as an actor, Mrs Bahal has pulled Minu out of school and pushed her to the lecherous film producer Dayal for the titular role of Shakuntala in Dayal’s upcoming film.
She also cajoles Minu into doing a rape scene in the under-production Aakhri Khoon in which the ‘villain of the film-in-film’ takes advantage of the rape sequence and molests Minu in full view of the crew. Humiliated and injured, a weeping Minu pleads to be set free. All she wants, she sobs, is to go back to school. Mrs Bahal persists with her grand vision and tries to seal the ‘Shakuntala deal’ for her daughter by blackmailing Dayal who is privy to a murder. She has her comeuppance soon enough though.
Laxmi Verma (Aruna Irani) in Beta (1992)
Stepmothers in films start with a handicap because the audience knows at the outset that she is up to no good. Laxmi Verma sets new standards to the cliché of the evil stepmother. She plots meticulously to divert her innocent stepson Raju’s (Anil Kapoor) share of inheritance to her biological son. As if that weren’t enough, Laxmi attempts to poison her stepdaughter-in-law so that a natural heir to Raju may not be born. (The cruel mother-in-law is another standard Bollywood trope – Lalita Pawar immortalised the evil mother-in-law in countless melodramas of the 1970s, becoming almost an idiom: ‘Her mother-in-law is like Lalita Pawar.’)
Laxmi Verma learns her lesson when Raju, refusing to believe that his mother could poison his wife, drinks the liquid himself and hovers on the brink of death. And heroes don’t usually die – at least not before they have narrated a couple of pages of melodramatic dialogues. Raju survives, Laxmi turns over a new leaf, and all is well.
Mrs Malti Bakshi (Waheeda Rehman) in Jyoti Bane Jwala (1980)
When a mother has to move away from the child she gave birth to out of wedlock, it comes at a great cost to herself and the child. Kunti in the Mahabharata did that. As does Mrs Malti Bakshi in Jyoti Bane Jwala. Malti’s father is guilty of discarding his unmarried daughter Malti’s newborn baby in a dustbin and lying to Malti that her child was stillborn. And Malti readily buys into the lie without verifying the child’s death.
Years later, she refuses to accept her presumed-dead ‘illegitimate’ grown-up son Jwala, whose face she instantly recognises as being identical to that of her dead fiance. Out of fear of social stigma and retribution, she chooses not to disclose to Jwala that she is his birth mother. It is only when her other son Arjun’s life is in danger at the hands of Jwala that she comes to Jwala, weeping and repentant, playing the emotional card of Arjun being Jwala’s brother. But Jwala’s cold logic shreds her pretense.
Sunita Kapoor (Ratna Pathak Shah) in Kapoor & Sons (2016)
Ask any parent with more than one child: It is almost impossible to be totally unbiased about your children. Some parents make the mistake of leaning towards the child who needs help and support, while other parents tend to overtly encourage and extol the child doing better in academics or sports. In either case, one of the siblings senses favoritism towards the other, sowing seeds of mistrust.
But what Sunita Kapoor does is something worse. She steals the manuscript that her son Arjun is working on and gives it to the other son Rahul. Why? Because she presumes that since Arjun doesn’t appear to be ambitious about a steady career, he would not be serious about getting his manuscript published either. The more sorted and growth-focused Rahul has a better chance of succeeding as a novelist, she concludes. True, Arjun is a part-time bartender with an unsteady income but is that a barometer of his potential as an author? On the other hand, Rahul’s successful career in business is no indicator of his probability of success in other domains. Not only does Sunita Kapoor draw incorrect conclusions, she also ends up treating her two sons as racehorses, moving her bet from one to the other.
Mrs Mamta Chaturvedi (Reema Lagoo) in Hum Saath Saath Hain (1999)
Beware the outsider-insider who gives unsolicited advice. Kaikeyi in the Ramayana made the mistake of not seeing through Manthara’s agenda. Mrs Mamta Chaturvedi does not learn her lesson from the epic and becomes complicit in Dharamraj’s vile advice that she convince her husband to partition the business and property among all the sons equally instead of the Chaturvedis’ eldest son Vivek being appointed as the managing director of the family business.
Dharamraj’s intent is clear – he does not want his future son-in-law Vinod Chaturvedi to play second fiddle to elder brother Vivek. Mamta Chaturvedi takes his advice and makes that demand of her husband, breaking up a loving household in the process.
(Balaji Vittal is the co-author of the books RD Burman: The Man, The Music, Gaata Rahe Mera Dil: 50 Classic Hindi Film Songs and S.D. Burman: The Prince-Musician. His latest is Pure Evil: The Bad Men of Bollywood)