50 Yrs of 'Anubhav': A Brilliant Film That Explores the Journey That is Marriage

If you are a Hindi film fan, you know that most of them end with a happy union of the lovers, and an impending marriage. The last image we see is “and they happily lived ever after” - and there is a strong reason for it. The idea of marriage, both in cinema and life, has been fed to us as this great destination, post which things will remain rosy and peaceful, more or less. Very few films have chosen to explore the concept of marriage rather as a journey with all its complexities which are sometimes too heavy to be confined to a 2-hour narrative.

Basu Bhattacharya’s Anubhav is one of the earliest Hindi films that attempted one of these explorations. Released in 1971, Anubhav arrived at a time when parallel cinema was gaining some ground, with directors like Basu Chatterjee, Mrinal Sen, Mani Kaul exploring newer narratives; mainstream Hindi cinema, meanwhile was all about formula, a regular hero-villain tale. The parallel filmmakers who followed also focused on socio-political issues, with more real antagonists at the center. Few films delved into the middle, a greyer zone where conflicts emerged from within or someplace else.

In Anubhav, Basu Bhattacharya sees the ideas of the city as a barrier, a conflict in the way of a happy marriage.

Here, a city is a place with too many things to do, too much time spent on commute, and very little silence, someplace where it becomes easier to lose your sense of being and priorities.

Bhattacharya brilliantly establishes this cold universe in its opening scene as we jump in the middle of a bustling house party - there is a lot of revelry and mingling - so much so that we don’t know who are the hosts; Everyone feels like the same. Yet, there is an air of indifference to it all, which becomes evident as we soon see a child walking around, unattended and looking lost. At such a point, we see Meeta (Tanuja), the host, go and pick up and caress the child.

That child could be seen as a symbol for their relationship - the one between Meeta and her husband Amar (Sanjeev Kumar) which is equally lost and seeking shelter amidst all the bustle and chaos.

Amar and Meeta comprise an elite middle-class couple in Bombay who have enough monies nonetheless to go on extended foreign trips, make friends with people there, and host get-togethers upon their visit. Yet, they don’t have time for each other, it seems - which reflects in the evident lack of intimacy between them, though they have been married for 6 years.

We see little of the actual city landscape but its energy is omnipresent, reflecting in the way characters behave indoors - in how Amar fails to turn up for lunch in time, how he finds it totally normal to work till 2 am, how he is always talking about work-related things, or how he puts his left shoe in the right foot while getting ready in the morning. At one point when Shashi pleads to go home after work is done, Amar tries to convince him saying, “Ghar hi to Jaana hai..” - suggesting that there is little life left beyond work and sleep anyways.

Anubhav is about that urban space where lines get blurry between work life and personal life, an idea which we have grown conscious of in the last two decades in particular - Basu Bhattacharya captures the time when its early seeds were sown.

In the middle of it is Hari (A.K.Hangal), an aging loyal servant, in some ways the father figure of the house who doesn’t hold as much power but is concerned about the visible dents nonetheless. He cannot wrap his head around a marriage where the spouses often sleep in different rooms and are at peace with the distance.

Some of the initial scenes look dystopian - a large space owned by two people but managed by five servants, who have too much free time and spend it gossiping about their employers, about how the master doesn’t even know the servant’s name, the separate bells for each kind of order. On the first morning after the party, as Amar leaves for work, we don’t see him even looking towards Meeta. It seems like a functional, automated world - And Basu Bhattacharya’s scathe is evident towards it. (The message occasionally feels on-your-nose, like when Meeta expresses at one point how their house is like a hotel, where you get everything except for a personal connection.)

We are never told much about how these two people came together and under what circumstances, but it’s fair to assume their marriage was arranged, considering how little Amar knows of Meeta’s past.

Even though we don’t see the partners speak to each other much, there is barely any silence as Bhattacharya beautifully uses the sound of radio which is always shown playing, and we constantly hear jingles and PSAs filling the air with a false sense of warmth and communication, distracting the couple from the inherent vacuum in their lives. However, for the viewers, it only underlines the silence between them.

There are some echoes of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anuradha (1960) here, which too was a tale of a busy husband and a neglected wife. While Anuradha was more forgiving of the husband who was portrayed as this benevolent doctor for whom the villagers’ medical needs surpassed his own by a great margin. Anubhav’s Amar, however, is more of a workaholic who does his job with all sincerity - but not for any greater need, but because of his own obsessive drive. And the narrative puts Amar in a self-aggrandizing position of a news editor, an opinion-maker who clearly perceives his work in very high regard. At one point, Meeta lets her anger out when she confronts Amar saying how he has an opinion about every important person in the city, but no guidelines to manage his own marriage - and Amar stays silent because he knows it’s true.

There is one brief discussion between Amar and his colleague where they ponder over the unique hurdles faced in marriage, unlike other relationships. And even though Amar is largely at fault in this relationship, he points out one important thing about marriage - how sometimes two good people too can not make a good couple with each other. And even though it is the men we hear speak more, Anubhav is clearly told from Meeta’s point of view, as she seeks her identity and challenges the status quo, showing great willingness to take charge of her life - for it is Meeta, not Amar, who has understood how she serves more like embellishment to her marriage, instead of being an integral part of it. Such is Meeta’s longing for a ‘normal’ marriage that she even accepts the patriarchal framework it usually calls for, brightening up when Hari refers to her as “Bahu.” There is a very melancholic quality to Meeta’s joy when she enthusiastically asks Hari how Amar usually takes his tea, even though they have been married for 6 years. A similar feeling erupts later when Amar learns about Meeta’s singing prowess from someone else.

Keeping in sync with the couple’s attempt to rejuvenate their marriage, Bhattacharya shifts to a happy, rose-tinted view to trace their progress. There is a distinct dreamy quality to the film (photographed by Nando Bhattacharya) from this point onwards, which becomes most evident in the song sequences (composed by Kanu Roy and penned by Gulzar and Kapil Kumar). In one particularly neat stroke, he captures the before and after imagery of the home, by panning to a large mirror at two different points in the story. The first time he pans, we see a bunch of bored servants gossiping about their bosses whereas the next time he does, we see Amar and Meeta entertaining a few select guests with all the open-heartedness and warmth.

In a lovely segment later on, Amar takes a complete break from office works from home for a few days as he recovers from flu - and there is a different kind of casualness to it, with extremely mundane things happening on screen - like playing cards and taking medicines - set to an equally evocative “Koi Phool Khila”. It’s also a touching moment when we hear Amar stop his colleague from talking shop outside of the office, and remember his previous love for late-night work from home. This journey of a house and a relationship that prioritizes calm above bustle is what is the most heart-warming about Anubhav.

At one point, the film introduces Shashi (Dinesh Thakur), Meeta’s ex-beau who coincidentally joins Amar’s team as a journalist, promising to play on a love-triangle. However, it belies our expectations as after their first meeting, there is never any sexual tension built between Shashi and Meeta. The film beautifully uses this development though, as Amar harbors doubts over Meeta’s character upon learning of her past with Shashi, which gives Meeta finally the space and chance to share her story - as she expressed the quiet sorrows of always having led a life as instructed and advised by others.

Through this monologue, Anubhav throws a sharp critique on patriarchy, underlining how it is found acceptable to evoke a woman’s past, without reason and with convenience.

It is also in this scene where Meeta rejects the functional monotony of marriage, explaining how she felt more joy in the few hours she had spent with Shashi back then than she has in 6 years of her marriage with Amar - in complete contrast to a pragmatic, calculating Amar who argued with Hari at one point about how he will have less time to work if he sleeps for full 8 hours.

When not mired in confrontations, the film often looks and feels like a dream, peaking at two different points. One of them arrives with the song “Meri Jaan, Mujhe Jaan Na Kaho” - which also is Bombay romanticism at its best, where two preoccupied people finally get some space of their own as it pours down, leaving hazy hues on their window glass and garden plants - it is the closest these two have come to loving their world and themselves and each other. For a while there, they are disconnected from everything outside as Bombay rains create a cozy cocoon for their rekindled intimacy, as Amar discovers the soothing singing talents of his wife, who is singing especially for him.

And in what’s definitely one of the most erotic shots of Hindi cinema ever, we fade at one point into an extreme close of Amar and Meeta sleeping, coiled into each other - and all we see is their skin. For that moment, there is no room for anything else and everything looks perfectly uncomplicated - just that it took them 6 years to reach that moment of bliss.