Mum's Word Some abiding images of Hindi cinema refuse to fade with time. Think of Dev Anand, and the picture that comes instantly to mind is that of a nattily-dressed hero with an ever-nodding head. Say Pradeep Kumar, and a picture comes to mind of a man in a satin dressing gown with a pipe in hand. Talk about Nirupa Roy, and up pops a vision of the quintessential mother -- a lady with greying hair with a loving yet distraught look in her eyes and a heart of gold. But the 70-year-old silver screen mother figure has suddenly been cast in an awfully unfamiliar role - that of the cruel, dowry-demanding, wife-beating mother-in-law. Even as Chandigarh-based daughter-in-law Una filed a dowry harassment case (Sections 323/498A and 406 of the IPC) against her actress mother-in-law, the near-saintly Nirupa Roy, 'who has been unwell for a few years now,' has retreated into a shell of 'shock, hurt and disbelief.' Near-saintly only because Roy, who has been cast in innumerable mother roles during a screen career spanning about three decades, is firmly entrenched as the kind of deified mother favoured, only with slight variations, in Hindi cinema over the years. The Mumbai-based Gujarati actress, born Kokila Kishorechandra Balsara, who went on to become Bollywood's most famous mother with films like Deewar, Khoon Pasina, Suhaag, Amar, Akbar, Anthony and Muqaddar Ka Sikander, has over the years also very effectively blurred the line between reel and real personalities. On screen, Roy typified the doting, self-sacrificing mother figure. The kind who would starve rather than let her son get a chapati less. Or the kind who did everything from sewing in wretched half-light till her fingers bled to washing mountains of dishes just to keep her son's body and soul together. Significantly, Roy usually played a widow and perhaps the absence of a male romantic figure in her life only added to her chaste appeal. Off screen, it would seem, Roy indulged in pretty much the same son-doting. In the Napean Sea Road apartment building where the actress lives with her husband, two sons and daughter-in-law, Nirupa Roy is known as 'mataji' or 'Nirupaji'. There was, of course, never any need in real life to wash dishes or sew in half light as the Roys are an affluent family. 'Her husband runs an insurance business,' says actor Shashi Kapoor who played the good son in Deewar which possibly had Roy's most definitive mother-role. In the film Kapoor makes the proud 'mere paas ma hai' declaration to a wayward older brother, Amitabh. The declaration didn't just leave movie-goers deliriously happy, it also sealed Roy's fate as the epitome of the ideal mother. Kapoor, who spoke only 'very recently' with Roy about 'something to do with an insurance policy that she called up to remind me about,' says he cannot believe the dowry charges against Roy. 'Anyway you cannot believe everything you read in the papers,' he laughs, adding that Roy pretty much lived her screen persona in her real life as well. 'She is just as wonderful, fair and kind a person as she was on screen.' Daughter-in-law Una, an NRI who married Roy's son Kiran in 1992, doesn't seem to share the same feeling though. She claims that her in-laws extracted a dowry of Rs 30 lakhs and a further Rs 11 lakhs from her. She says she was asked to leave the house as she refused to succumb to pressures exerted on her to give her in-laws a monthly allowance and another huge sum of money from her uncle. Una has also alleged that she was subjected to physical and mental violence in the Roy home. Her uncle, who lives with Una in Chandigarh, says they are 'looking to the courts for justice.' While the Roys believe that the charges have been fabricated by Una, a person close to the family says that the Una-Kiran marriage was a troubled one 'and though Nirupaji is incapable of physically harming anyone, perhaps her fault lay in being the doting mother who silently supported Kiran's misbehaviour.' Perhaps for the first time, Roy is looking at the disadvantage of having created and nurtured a cultish mother image for herself. Being a doting mother could also mean turning a blind eye to a favourite son. But given that in films like Deewar, Roy chose the good son over the bad one, 'It's difficult to see the actress sitting back and doing anything so wrong as demanding huge sums of money from her daughter-in-law just to satisfy her son,' feels Kapoor. 'The public perception is that she is as perfect, as doting as she was to us, her screen sons. And even before she was seen as an ideal mother, remember she played the role of several Hindu goddesses on screen,' he says. 'Leave aside the public, I think she's wonderful and perhaps that has to do with my earliest memory of her,' he says. And that memory is of a very young Roy who played Parvati in the film Har Har Mahadev. While still an unknown face in Mumbai, Roy had often played the role of a goddess in many a Gujarati film with elan - Sita (thrice), Parvati (thrice), Taramati, Draupadi and Damayanti. Roy's move to the world of Hindi filmdom seems to have been a bit of providence actually. And her first role was the result of an advertisement her husband found in a newspaper :'New faces required for a film with Gujarati dialogue.' Apparently, Roy had not wanted to act in the film, but did so only at the behest of her husband who thought it would be the lucky break into Bollywood for her. 'Even though I cannot comment on the case as our lawyers have asked us not to speak on the matter, I can say that she is a wonderful mother-in-law,' says Nabina, married for the last 14 years to Roy's elder son Yogesh. 'She has always been a very dutiful wife, mother and grandmother,' stresses Nabina. Of course, a dutiful wife and mother need not necessarily translate into a dutiful mother-in-law. 'My mother cannot even kill a fly, how can she raise her hands on somebody, that too on a woman? Would not my wife walk out on me, if my mother was that violent,' said Yogesh when asked about the charges. But even if Roy has been a less than perfect saans, it is difficult to fight so pristine an image. It is far easier to see the actress as incapable of harming anyone, even when mothers-in-law across the country are effortlessly guilty, to some degree, of what Una says her famous mother-in-law did. 'If an actress like Lalita Pawar, (who has played a squint-eyed nasty mother-in-law in countless films) had been charged in a similar way people would have been quite happy to accept the story,' says sociologist Yogendra Singh. This is the result of stereotyping in Hindi films. 'It becomes very difficult for the viewer to discern the difference between a screen-personality, seen repeatedly in many films and the actor's real personality,' adds Singh. At the moment, her family is also drawing on the actress's screen personality to counter Una's charges. 'The reason why people who know her cannot believe the charges is because in real life she is very much like the person you have seen in films - very simple and down to earth,' says Nabina And with almost everyone else echoing Nabina, whatever the later legal verdict might be, the people's verdict is out - Nirupaji's halo still shines bright. So what if there are two sides to every coin?