How Bimal Roy’s Film ‘Madhumati’  Treats Fear As A Subject And Effect

With a Gothic tale of love and redemption couched in 'Expressionist rhetoric', Bimal Roy’s 1958 film Madhumati’s designation as horror is retrospective, and it may be argued that Madhumati exhibits only minimal relation to horror. But along with its predecessor Mahal, and its successor films such as Bees Saal Baad, Woh Kaun Thi, Kohraa, Poonam Ki Raat, Tower House, Bin Baadal Barsaat, it presents fear both as a subject and effect, and seeks to evoke the feelings of dread not through characters or plots but through crucial genre defining/defying moments. An emphasis on filmic moments instead of contiguous action, as US film historian and author Tom Gunning remarks, allows us to ‘highlights the transitions in mode and tone that occur within a short sequence of shots’ 

For Madhumati, I will dwell on two bookended cinematic moments/sequences from the film that mark an abrupt break from the realist conventions that prevail in between Madhumati’s narration but swivels the plot transiently into the realm of the (ph)antastic marking an incredible rhetorical shift to the Expressionist mode. An overwhelming fantastic quality marks these sequences and set up a cinematic duologue with horror.

Madhumati opens up on a dark expressionistic night. A car meanders precariously through a rain-drenched road and comes to an uneasy halt as a landslide has closed it. Devendra (Dilip Kumar) and his friend (Nitin Bose) seek refuge in a nearby decrepit Haveli, now the refuge of a lone old caretaker. Once inside the mansion a long pan shot heightening suspense appropriates Devendra's view who can fathom an uncanny sense of déjà vu.

A dissolve marks the passage of time and later during the night Devendra's sleep is disturbed by acousmatic screams and cries whose source remains unseen. The French critic and composer Michel Chion regards acousmatic sound ‘as the unidentified sound that makes us ask: What was that? Where did it come from? Such use of acousmatic sound drives the narrative forward by engaging a character in the film to ask these same questions, and then to seek answers.’

An expressionistically spotlighted Devendra makes his way downstairs through a long dark sleepy passage marked by deep shadows. A painting falls off the wall and brings in its wake flashes of memory. A flashback follows. Devendra recounts his previous birth as Anand, an estate manager for a womanizing Zamindar Ugranarayan (Pran). He recounts falling in love with Madhumati (Vyjanthimala) and being sent away on an errand by Ugranarayan only to find Madhumati missing on his return.

Completely dissociated from corporeality yet within a state of ordinary visibility Madhumati's translucent spirit much like Banquo's ghost, manifests itself
and exhorts Anand to exact revenge on Ugranarayan. The law enforcer promises help only when evidence materializes. The appearance of deus ex
machina Madhavi (Vyjanthimala), Madhumati's lookalike, comes to Anand's rescue. Secular ingenuity is brought to bear upon chance arrangement, and Madhavi agrees to impersonate Madhumati's ghost to help entrap Ugranarayan.

As a sequence, the climax in its singularity evokes less of the momentum of the steady genre of romance and returns to the visual conventions of Expressionism. Iconographic patterns seal off this precise moment from the rest of the narration instead of making it more archetypal and confessional to the modes of horror. Marking an abrupt break with the realist convention that had proceeded throughout the narration, these visuals script the assemblage of thematic and aesthetic stances that come together again like the introductory sequence, making a covert broad appeal to the genre of
horror.

Consider the ghost's entry into the frame which is heralded by thunder and intermittent flashes of lightning, with a howling wind on the soundtrack, curtains flapping like apparition in the breeze casting humanlike shadows on the wall, and nearly threaten to present the viewer with the phantasmic images of a tormented soul. The narration then jettisons abstract symbolism for as much overt embodiment of the spectral as the cinematic techniques of the 1950s could allow. A sudden gust of
wind through the window sends the Rocaille chandelier rocking precariously, blowing out the candles perched inside it; and immediately a high camera angle frames a silhouette against a sudden burst of lightening, bringing Madhumati into the frame. As Anand relights the candles, the camera cuts to a low-angled shot to allow the spectators to look right into Ugranarayan's terrified reaction. He recoils in horror and shouts to Anand (Dilip Kumar): ‘Ask her to go away’. An unnerved Ugranarayan flinching from the disgusting brush with the undead confesses to his crime and pays for bad Karma. The police officer privy to the confession arrests
Ugranarayan. But with Madhavi's arrival afterwards, Anand realizes he has been visited by Madhumati's ghost. Anand follows the mysterious apparition, and falls to his death, much like Madhumati herself, bringing the flashback to a closure. The two lovers united in death are reborn as Devendra and Radha, Anand's wife expected to arrive by train. 

The narration thus sealed, at the break of dawn Anand drives to the railway station to pick up Radha (Vyjanthimala), the reincarnated Madhumati. This
sequence with its aesthetic codes has now acquired a quaint familiarity of the genre, imparting powerful generic qualities to the Hindi horror cinema. With its images, tropes, cinematic vocabulary and a tale of a vengeful spirit that invokes fear, dread and disgust, recall Ugranarayan's flinching away from Madhumati is as much about fear of the dead as the disgust evoked through physical contact with the undead.

Jeanne Hall (who taught at the Ohio University School of Film) says that films are best understood in relation to the ‘periods in which they were produced and consumed.’ As an archetypical instance of secular-conscious orientations of the Hindi horror genre, Madhumati borrows religious constructs specific to Hinduism such as Karma, and reincarnation but does not engage in questions of faith or belief. When it does, it subjects the spiritual to the temporal. 

Madhumati signifies what the state-sponsored secular narrative cannot accept or recognize but must deal with by either rejecting or accommodating. Madhumati was released a decade after Independence, in an era marked by highly intrusive economic and  political actions of an increasingly centralizing state, which included the passage of the Hindu Code Bills that sought to codify, regulate and modernise millennia-old Hindu traditions of marriage, succession, adoption and maintenance. It also introduced provisions for divorce, although marriages in Hinduism are considered sacrosanct and indissoluble. Despite objections from conservative quarters, the social and the political milieu was ready to acquiesce in the subjection of the spiritual to the secular, as embodied in the ghost of Madhumati which can materialize and dematerialize at will, yet desires revenge only through the agency of the state. Anand's words: ‘Mujrim apne jurm ki sazaa payega (The criminal will be punished for his crime)’, with the police taking away Ugranarayan takes on an extra diegetic resonance. They imply the reaffirmation of the citizen’s trust in the workings of the state and its assurance of punishment for the guilty. And with a ghost that ‘abides by law’, this refusal to wreck vengeance thus allows the state's realm to extend itself not just to the temporal but also to the phantasmal and has two points of significance: first, the phantasmal recognizes the authority of the temporal and its agency the secular state as the sole arbiter, thereby reaffirming faith in its lawdispensing abilities. Second, by submitting itself to secular authority, the spiritual has elevated the temporal over and above itself and thus deified it.

Madhumati juxtaposes divergent thoughts. In Nehruvian terms, it tolerates tralatitious traditional beliefs but denies them autonomy beyond that which will bring them in conflict with the modern and the secular. In Freudian terms, that which cannot be recognized but must be dealt with has been rendered harmless and non-threatening. 

Excerpts from Filming Horror: Hindi Cinema, Ghosts and Ideologies by Meraj Ahmed Mubarki, with permission from Sage Publications 

(Meraj Ahmed Mubarki is an assistant professor in the UGC-HRDC at Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad.)