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By Deepa Gahlot, May 15, 2007 - 01:53 IST
As Anurag Basu's Life in a Metro, gets set to release - a film set in a modern metropolis, where personal relationships in a middle-class scenario undergo various kinds of stress and strain-it starts a fond reminiscence for the time when urban India started changing. Very few films captured the cracks in the structure of conservatism and Anil Ganguly's underrated gem Humkadam was one of them.
Obviously inspired by the Satyajit Ray classic Mahanagar (1963), which was set in Calcutta, Humkadam shifted the action to Mumbai or Bombay as it was called then, but the story is about financial problems and a woman's reluctant independence causing damage in a middle-class marriage.
Indu (Rakhee) and Shekhar Gupta (Parikshit Sahni) live happily with their young son and manage to make ends meet, till his parents and his unmarried sister decide to move in with them in their small flat. Shekhar does not earn enough to maintain the extended family, so Indu is forced to go out to work, which causes much unhappiness in the family, particularly irking her father-in-law Raghunath (AK Hangal).
Indu gets a job as a saleswoman, and after initial difficulties, manages to learn the work and earn a decent sum of money. Everyone is reconciled to the situation, and even happy about it, except Raghunath, who resents that Indu is now unable to devote all her time to the family.
The father-in-law sees Indu with a man in a fancy restaurant and succeeds in instigating his son's suspicion. Quarrels between husband and wife lead to Shekhar demanding that Indu quit working, but then he loses his job and the unpleasant status quo has to be maintained. Shekhar gets increasingly frustrated, and it looks as if the breakdown in the marriage will reach a point of no return.
A lot of films captured slices of Mumbai life from the noir inspired crime thrillers from Dev Anand's Navketan, to middle-of-the road cinema of Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Basu Chatterjee, Sai Paranjpye, to more contemporary gangster films, but Mananagar and by extension Humkadam took a sympathetic look at the changing dynamics of the middle-class family and when traditional breadwinner-homemaker roles started changing.
Indu could well be Shikha (Shilpa Shettty) of Life in a Metro, twenty years later, who is tugging at the leash because after experiencing a well-paying career, she is bored with the role of fulltime housewife and mother forced on her by her husband.
Humkadam, like the original, took the wife out of the home and saw her as employee, friend, independent entity, catching a conservative society going through the throes of transformation. In a film like Life in a Metro, the transformation is almost complete.
Interesting Trivia:
- Humkadam was produced by the Rajshris and now Rajshri.com
is distributing Life in a Metro on the net.
- The music of Humkadam was by Bappi Lahiri, one of his sober scores.
- Raakhee is reported to have said that this was one of the four films that revolved completely around her. She played a somewhat similar role of the sacrificing family breadwinner in Tapasya also produced by the Rajshris and directed by Anil Ganguly.
- Helen played the role of an Anglo-Indian girl in Humkadam, one of her few performance-oriented roles.
- One time Hindi film hero and Bengali star Biswajeet played the role of Raakhee's boss.
- Anil Ganguly's daughter Rupa Ganguly is a TV star today and is most prominently known for her portrayal of the character of Draupadi in the epic TV-series Mahabharat.
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