Ghosts and relics in Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam

Two things prompted me to revisit the 1962 Abrar Alvi-Guru Dutt classic Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam this week. One was a viewing of Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Sahib Biwi aur Gangster, a reasonably well-made (and very well acted) film that takes some of the character types from the original and recasts them in a contemporary north Indian hinterland noir. The other appetite-whetter was an excerpt from a book that I badly want to get my hands on now – Vinod Mehta’s biography of (and unabashed fanboy tribute to) Meena Kumari, published shortly after her death in 1972. The chapter in question centres on Kumari’s iconic performance as the tormented Chhoti Bahu in Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam, driven to alcohol (an unthinkable sin for a married Hindu woman in her milieu) in a last-ditch effort to make her husband stay at home.

(More about the Mehta book in a later post.)

Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam is one of Hindi cinema’s most vivid treatments of a transitional period in India’s social history – the dying days of the landed gentry, their decline (and their continuing mulish wastefulness in the face of that decline) contrasted with a working class that is making its way in the world through education and personal initiative rather than through inheritance squandered. This contrast is presented mainly through the character of Bhoothnath, a young lower-class man who becomes confidante and emotional ghulam to Chhoti Bahu, while being both fascinated and repulsed by what he sees of life in the mansion.

But the story operates on other levels too – as a reflection on the responsibilities thrust on women in traditional settings, for example. Chhoti Bahu is doubly condemned, stifled as an individual and saddled with upholding the family’s “honour” (something that doesn’t much concern the menfolk who sleep during the day and spend their nights outside with dancer-prostitutes, or otherwise pass the time getting pet cats elaborately married). The result is that when her facade breaks down, it’s intolerable for everyone around her. Her existence is necessarily one of extremes: when cast as the virtuous lady, which is her principal function, she is nothing less than Lakshmi incarnate; but when she transgresses even slightly, she becomes a creature fallen so far beyond redemption that her fate is to be murdered and buried without honour or ceremony in a secret grave.

One of the film’s saddest, and most telling, scenes for me is a little moment towards the end. Talking intently with Bhoothnath, Chhoti Bahu suddenly sees her husband’s older brother watching them from the foot of the stairs. She reflexively covers her head with her pallu and moves into a doorway out of his sight (as she has always been conditioned to do), but being drunk she staggers clumsily while doing this. No one watching her would be fooled about her condition, but appearances must be unthinkingly maintained.


There is an obvious comparison to be made between Chhoti Bahu and the film’s other main female character Jaba (Waheeda Rehman), who is allowed to have a mind of her own – and be a multifaceted person – without being judged for it. Educated, playful, moody, given to bantering and flirting with Bhoothnath but also capable of making a steely decision at a time of personal tragedy, Jaba is alive in a way that Chhoti Bahu isn’t.** And this is one reason why I can’t help thinking of Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam as a ghost story, though its narrative is presented in realist terms.

One late scene links the heroine's skeletal remains with the ruins of the house she was entrapped in, but even when Chhoti Bahu and the haveli are both “alive” there is something otherworldly about them. The mansion – gloomy and claustrophobic – is like a purgatory for restive souls, from the nearly deranged badi bahu who obsessively washes her hands to the watch-keeper who yells that time no longer has any meaning in this place. Chhoti Bahu herself is a wandering spirit and her scenes with Bhoothnath seem almost to be set in a time continuum, with past and future in uneasy but sympathetic collusion. The relationship can be seen as a brief encounter between two people who belong not just to different classes but to different dimensions.

But of course, the past never really loses its grip on the present; in the film’s very last shot we see that the middle-aged Bhoothnath, though long married to the earthly Jaba, is still haunted – perhaps marked for life – by Chhoti Bahu’s memory. The scene reminds me a great deal of the closing shot of another major film made that same year in another part of the world – John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, with Senator Ransom Stoddard and his wife in a train carriage together, emblems of a forward-looking world but forever beholden to a man who was a relic of a past age. Much like that film about the passing (and the simultaneous romanticising) of the Old West, Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam is a reminder that however much we progress or change, bygone worlds still cast a long shadow.

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** One of the achievements of Meena Kumari’s performance is that it doesn’t take much effort for us to imagine the very different sort of person Chhoti Bahu might have been – just as vivacious and independent as Jaba, perhaps – if her circumstances had been otherwise.


P.S. I had only a very dim childhood memory of this film (and it isn’t the sort of movie I would have found particularly interesting back then) - so a much better print would have been nice. If you look at the classy cover of Moser Baer’s DVD – with the words “Platinum Series” and “Collector’s Item” overlaid on crystal-clear stills from the film – you’d think this was some sort of beautiful restoration. Far from it. In addition to being scratch-ridden and jerky, with poor sound, parts of the print are so dark that you can barely tell what’s on the screen. One of my all-time favourite song sequences, “Bhanwara Bada Naadaan Hai”, with the stunningly beautiful Waheeda Rehman, is badly mangled. The picture quality in this YouTube video is good, but my DVD manages to darken almost the whole of the sequence so that all one sees of Rehman is an expanse of forehead. (It's a lovely forehead, but still.) Pitiful, really.