There is something about marital dramas that has fascinated filmmakers in Hindi cinema down the years. It may have something to do with the fact that a lot of Bollywood love stories end with the lead couple just about to start a married life and living happily ever after. Marital dramas present the temptation of being a little different but still offering the potential to move the audience with the emotional scenes between husband and wife. By and large, these types of films have been very melodramatic particularly in the 1970’s and 1980’s when stars like Jeetendra starred in an onslaught of such types of films with heroines as varied as Reena Roy, Moushumi Chatterjee, Sridevi and Jaya Pradha. The genre quietened down in the 1990’s due to the huge success of pre-marital love stories like “Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge”. The post-“DDLJ” period saw a different type of marital drama emerge wherein filmmakers attempted to merge the heady romanticism of Aditya Chopra’s classic into the stories of marital problems such as Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s “Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam”. Even recent films in the marital drama genre like Aziz Mirza’s “Chalte Chalte” exert a DDLJ influence. I consider Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s “Abhimaan” to be one of the finest films made in the genre.

Subir Kumar (Amitabh Bachchan) is a very famous singer and he has lots of adoring female fans who sit by the radio and just drown in the soul of his voice whenever one of his songs is played. Out of all his admirers, the only one he pays attention to is Chitra (Bindu) whom he flirts with often at the annoyance of his manager/agent Chandru (Asrani). One day, Subir receives a letter from his aunt (Durga Khote) who raised him when he was little. He runs to her home for a reunion meeting. There he encounters and falls in love with Uma Devi (Jaya Bhaduri) who is his aunt’s grand-daughter. Uma is also a very talented singer and after their marriage, Subir vows that he will only sing with Uma from now on (her voice is praised by her husband’s friends when she sings at a party). That promise is quickly broken when a film producer approaches Subir to request Uma to sing for the lead heroine in a film. Subir happily accepts and Uma reluctantly obliges to sing on her own. Offers pour in and Uma’s star begins to shine brighter than her own husband’s. Subir is then consumed by jealousy as his own stardom begins to fade.

Marital upsets can be quite dull to watch because the things that disturb the couple are often quite trivial or petty. If it’s not that then filmmakers try to liven it up by bringing in something very over the top (like an ‘accidental’ one night stand as in Dharmesh Darshan’s “Haan Maine Bhi Pyar Kiya”). “Abhimaan” works because of the small details that Mukherjee creatively adds to the picture. At the beginning, Subir’s vain personality is shown in his conversational scenes with Chitra (you can tell he adores the way she looks up to him) and in the manner he swaggers on the stage at his concert. His forceful and straightforward personality also means that he cuts short to the chase and gets Uma to admit that she likes him without pretending that he has no idea. This act of being sure that Uma likes him a lot strikes as being quite bigheaded. These character traits mean that it is very believable when he later becomes jealous of his wife’s success. You just know that his ego will not be able to take it.

The crumbling of the marriage is shown in subtle ways. Subir is signing a fan’s book but while doing so his wife enters the room. The fan then snatches her book from Subir who hasn’t completed what he was writing and runs away to Uma. His hurt is visible because he is so used to adoration from female fans that he does not even expect their adoration to wane one day. He is annoyed by their over-the-top declarations of love and compliments but once they stop pestering him, it bothers him. Clearly, one does not know how much something is valued until it is taken away from him. Interestingly, at the start of the movie, most of Subir’s fans who are shown enjoying his music are females. Mukherjee cleverly shows in a subtle way how Subir is more used to girls fawning over him rather than actually rivaling him in any way. This is what upsets him about his wife.

In the honeymoon period of their marriage, Subir often looks at his wife affectionately in the morning when she wakes him up. But the morning after the autograph incident, that attitude changes. When Uma wakes her husband up in her usual jovial morning mood, she is met with a cold response from him. For a woman whose life revolves around the love of her life companion, that cold gesture has a devastating effect. Thus a chain of events is set in motion where the marriage deteriorates even further.

Amitabh Bachchan’s portrayal is such that one can feel the pain of his character. Potentially, the character of a jealous and moody husband could have been very unlikable. But he acts so well in the scenes where he realises that his wife is becoming more popular than him that you feel that you can understand his predicament. Jaya Bhaduri is just simply excellent. She moves from being a shy new bride to a victim of shock with ease. Bachchan and Bhaduri have such a nice onscreen chemistry. They look cute in the song, “Loote Koi Mann Ka Nagar”, where they exchange flirtatious glances while singing in the film studio. Bindu and Asrani offer good support in their roles as friends of the married couple. Durga Khote is a little melodramatic but otherwise offers sturdy support as the wise elder.

With a team of S.D. Burman and Majrooh Sultanpuri, you can expect nothing except lovely music. My personal favorite songs are the Lata Mangeshkar duets with Manhar Udhas in the lovely “Loote Koi Mann Ka Nagar”, with Mohammad Rafi in the enchanting “Teri Ye Bindiya Re” and with Kishore Kumar in the emotional “Tere Mere Milan Ki Yeh Raina”.

Mukherjee has always been a character’s director. He knows how to make a character fascinating or likeable for the audience (one of the many reasons why he is often on the wish list of many ambitious actors). His direction and handling of the story ensures that viewers cannot help but care about what happens to Subir and Uma’s marriage. The director establishes Subir’s popularity among fans in a likeable and heartwarming sequence of brief scenes at the beginning where different girls react individually to his song playing on the radio in the middle of their everyday life. One is stroking the star’s picture on the cover of Filmfare magazine, another is applying lipstick while in another house, little girls dance excitedly. I also like the nice way he ends the initial Subir-meeting-and-falling-in-love-with-Uma scenes by showing us a point of view shot of Uma looking down at her feet. The feet indicate the steps that she is taking on her new journey with her new life partner.

Where the story falters is the ending. The melodrama seems out of synch with the mood in the rest of the film. The musical ending with everybody watching the characters onstage seems slightly forced. But Mukherjee probably wanted it that way because music is one of the key themes of the film. So he ensured that “Abhimaan” begins with a song and ends with a song. Rajinder Singh Bedi’s dialogues remain in your minds because they etch out the characters clearly. When an adoring fan screeches that her name is “Radha… R-r-r-adha!”, Subir’s sarcastic reply is “Waah! Bara classical naam hai (Wow! What a classical name)”. From this, we know that the character approaches his fans with a detached sense of cynicism and sarcasm.

Revisit “Abhimaan” and see how marital dramas should be made.