Making Life More Meaningful—An Interview with Riki
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MADHU KISHWAR Making Life More Meaningful —An Interview With Rinki Bhattacharya These are extracts from an interview taperecorded with Rinki Bhattacharya in January 1984. Rinki began corresponding with Manushi about two years ago and would send an occasional report about events organised by women’s groups in Bombay. Her letters were full of energy and vitality so that in my mind I pictured her as a young woman fresh from college. Therefore, when I met her for the first time in Bombay at a meeting at the Women’s Centre, I was pleasantly surprised to see that even though Rinki is the mother of three grown up children and is not as young in years as I had imagined her to be, she is young in spirit, indeed, a woman who is just beginning her life. This I found all the more remarkable after hearing the story she had to tell. Rinki is the daughter of the legendary film director, Bimal Roy, of’Madhumati’, ‘Sujata’,‘Do Bigha Zamin’, ‘Bandini’ fame. She is married to another well known film director, Basu Bhattacharya, some of whose better known films are ’ ‘Avishkar’, ’Anubhav’, ‘Grihpravesh , and ‘Teesri Kasam’. In this interview, Rinki describes how she came to choose Basu Bhattacharya for a husband and how she was compelled to walk out of her marriage. She is now filing for a divorce on grounds of extreme cruelty. Throughout this interview, I was deeply touched by Rinki’s sense of dignity and by her lack of bitterness despite such a harrowing experience of married life. What seems most inspiring is her decision to speak out about her life so openly, even at the risk of facing more alienation and hostility from those she cares for, and her willingness to risk becoming a target of the cheap scandal mongering that is so typical of anything connected with the film industry. Today, her struggle is no more only a personal one. She sees herself as part of a much larger struggle of women in India. She is an active member of the Women’s Centre in Bombay.* How many years have you been marriage, and that this marriage was not had a lovely joint family. We lived married and why have you decided to going to work, though I had modestly. I have seen my father struggle. break off at this point? singlehandedly tried to make it work. But there was no bitterness or stress in This would have been the twenty first I also became aware that there was the atmosphere. My father’s elder year of marriage. I don’t think the marriage something more I wanted to do and brother happened to be married to my has survived. I was always under the establish in life apart from a relationship mother’s sister. My mother comes from a impression that if I confessed that my with my husband and children. very educated family. Her father was the marriage was not working, it would be Why don’t we begin with your private tutor of the Maharaja of Benares. an admission of failure. I did not know childhood upbringing, and the My parent’s marriage was something like where I had failed. atmosphere in your family? a love marriage. I have been a full time housewife and I was born in the city of Calcutta and We had a beautiful childhood in mother and, in between raising the received my primary education there. My Calcutta. Sometimes, my father would children and doing the housework, I have father belonged to a feudal family of East send for us to go and see the studios found time to be a freelance journalist. Bengal. They came as refugees to after shooting. In those days the studios Over the last two years there has Calcutta just before the partition, and my were charming places. There were been a growing restlessness in me. I think father was married to my mother in fishponds and birds and beautiful it began when, in 1980, we moved to a Calcutta. My father, his mother and his gardens. It was like a fantasy world for new house which is very similar in brother came away to Calcutta because us. My sister and I were pampered very appearance and character to the house they were thrown out of their zamindari, much by my father’s colleagues. We were where I was raised. The moment I and were cheated of their property by not aware of any glamour in that life but stepped into this house,I became. aware the other members of the joint family. I was aware of something which was not of reaching my roots again.This was also My father began working as a day to day life, that was my father’s life. the moment of realisation that there was cameraman in the legendary New Theatre We were three sisters and a brother something terribly wrong with my productions with Promathesh Barua. We but while in Calcutta we lived in a big 2 MANUSHI joint family with cousins and so on. My world who don’t even get this to eat.” because it was considered the best place father was a great disciplinarian. Very Believe me, Madhu, I have not wasted a to study. often, I tell my children that I was slapped grain of rice since then. I was told that he But my father was too fond of me only twice by my father. Being the eldest slapped me on one other occasion but I and my sister so he could not think of daughter I was very spoilt. One day, don’t remember it. sending us so far away. when I was about three or four years In 1950 we shifted to Bombay when When we came to Bombay, my old, I didn’t like the food so I threw a my father was invited to make a film for father’s colleagues often stayed with us tantrum and threw the rice on the floor. Bombay Talkies. The Calcutta film until they found a place. It was an open At that moment my father entered the industry had suffered due to the partition house. We had a beautiful family life. It house and he saw the rice on the floor. of Bengal so many film directors moved was a very close knit and large family. This is supposed to be a bad sign in a to Bombay. We were shifted to What did you aspire to do and be in Hindu house because rice is considered coeducational English medium schools, later life? sacred. He asked my mother who had after which I was sent to a convent I don’t think I can specify what I thrown the rice and she replied :“Your school. There was talk of sending me to wanted to be but I was aware that spoilt daughter.” He gave me a stern look Santiniketan where my uncle was a language was my area of expression. I and then gave me a tight slap. He said professor since the time of Tagore. All was an avid reader and I used to read “Remember that there are people in this my cousins have been educated there, almost continuously—first Bengali books and later English books. This reading habit has stayed with me and has stood me in good stead. How did you happen to meet Basu? I met him some time in the early sixties. He worked with my father in just one film, Parakh. But before that, he used to hang around the house. My mother was a kind of bhabhi to him. She liked to treat bachelors to good food and to talk to them. Our house was an open house. If she cooked something nice she would send for her favourite “brothers-in-law.” Basu was a great talker and my mother just loved that. Probably she was a bit lonely those days. My father had become very busy and all the children had grown up. Basu used to come and have long chat sessions with my mother. I don’t even remember when I first noticed him but I think one evening I heard a loud male voice reciting Tagore’s poetry on the verandah. I saw this young Bengali, dressed in a typical saffron khadi kurta and pajama, a little unkempt. This could be a scene from a Bengali film of the fifties. Something struck me though I didn’t talk to him. I had never had a boyfriend. I was the pure romantic kind and believed in all fairytale romances. Today, in retrospect, I can be honest to myself and say that I was not in love with the man but I was in love with the concept. It was so blown out of Rinki Bhattacharya proportion in my head that I was trying NUMBER TWENTY THREE, 1984 3 to fill a vacuum. It so happened that this older than I am. I think I was trying to said: “I don’t know what came over me.” man came at a time when this concept prove something, trying to justify the He was also very tense. After this, my was taking shape and he took that form. nonexistence of class. I thought I was parents stopped me from going to I think I was also overly influenced fighting for justice. college. by my father’s films which romanticised I had always had a good Do you think that the unreasonable interclass marriages. It was an obsession communication with my father though, opposition from your family precipitated with Bengali literature and films in the he usually hid behind a very stern matters? forties and fifties to show love between patriarchal image.