4. Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam - 1962

• It’s the only Guru Dutt film to win Filmfare best director (for Abrar Alvi, in 1962).
• Guru Dutt’s first choice for Bhootnath was Shashi Kapoor, then Biswajeet.
• A sequence where Chhoti Bahu puts her head on Bhootnath’s lap on a journey was cut because the audience did not accept it.
• Also cut was a scene that showed Meena Kumari pleading with her husband to allow her to drink for one last time.

Adapted from a Bengali novel by Bimal Mitra, the film charts the decay of the Chaudhuri family through the eyes of young educated villager Bhootnath (Dutt). Meena Kumari gives one of her best performances as Chhoti Bahu, the middle-class wife of the youngest son (Rehman), who finds a kindred spirit in Bhootnath. Neglected by her kotha-habitue husband, she ends up a dipsomaniac. The pain and pathos in her enactment of the ‘Na jao saiyaan’ song sequence in which she, miming a courtesan, pleads with her husband to stay with her that night brought a sexual explicitness never really seen on the Indian screen before. And seldom since.

The film not merely captures a society in transition but also effectively juxtaposes the personal with the social. As he witnesses the end of an era, Bhootnath too changes—from a village bumpkin to a well-rounded man of the world. The Brahmo Samaji family of Jaba (Waheeda Rehman) provides the contrast to the Chaudhuris’ feudal decadence. She and her father represent the emerging westernised and entrepreneurial upper middle-class. It’s this perfunctory reference that brings out the spirit and mores of the new dawn.