It is half a century since you made your debut on the Hindi film screen with Shyam Benegal’s Nishant. And 39 years since you are gone. Was it only 11 years that you worked in film? Why does it feel like you have been here with us ever since? That you see us, and show us what we are and what we could be, like you were here?
My dear Smita,
It is 50 years since we first saw you on the Hindi film screen, and 39 years since you have been gone. The difference between those two years feels startling when written out like this: was it only 11 years that you worked in film? Shyam Benegal’s Nishant, where you were formally introduced alongside Naseeruddin Shah, Kulbhushan Kharbanda and Mohan Agashe, released in the long year of 1975. Your first performance on screen came in the Marathi film Raja Shiv Chhatrapati the year before, IMDb informed me, but given that 72 of your listed 82 acting credits on IMDb are associated with Hindi films, marking 1975 seems germane.
2025 is a landmark year for many significant things—50 years of the Emergency, Sholay, Deewar, Naseeruddin Shah, you, 100 years of the RSS, the Communist Party of India and Ritwik Ghatak. Given the hierarchy of public importance in the Indian subcontinent, most news space will be devoted to remembering (or shuddering at) the Emergency, the RSS, and then celebrating two of Amitabh Bachchan’s iconic films—first, politics, and then the grand salt and pepper haired patriarch of Hindi cinema. Then comes Naseeruddin Shah – I have celebrated his half century in a previous piece. And now, the one who left too soon—you.
Nishant is an unusual project—both for your relatively subdued performance, and Benegal’s penchant for quiet novelistic treatment. I read the story as an adaptation of the Ramayana, set in the backdrop of the Communist Telangana rebellion of the 1940s (distinct from the movement for separate statehood), which mobilized farmers against powerful landowners holding continental tracts of land, and running tyrannical fiefs of their own. You play Rukmini, wife of the youngest brother Vishwam (Naseeruddin Shah), of one such brutal landlord family. Vishwam is cowardly and sweet at first, easily bullied by his cackling, cartoonishly villainous older brothers, whose hobbies are drinking, sexual harassment, rape and kidnapping women. They kidnap Shabana Azmi’s Sushila, the Sita figure in the film, wife of the local school master, because they see Vishwam ogling her. It is articulated as a gift for their youngest brother, but it is clear that all the brothers intend to have sex with her. As the film progresses, Shah’s Vishwam grows increasingly creepy as he falls for Sushila, and becomes more and more like his strange, cruel family.
Clockwise from top: Smita Patil and Shabana Azmi (silhouette) in Nishant (1975), Naseeruddin Shah and Smita Patil’s introduction credits in the film
Your Rukmini, an obvious reference to Lord Krishna’s ignored wife, is unlike the feisty, self-willed characters you would become famous for essaying, eyes blazing through the screen—with defiance (Mirch Masala), or laughter (Mandi), or annoyance (Manthan), or empathy (Bhumika)—onto our memories. My favourite example of this is Govind Nihalani’s Aakrosh where you appear on screen for perhaps a bit more than a minute. A shot where an extreme close-up of your eyes is juxtaposed against the swaying flame of a lamp at the corner of the frame is unforgettable. It sums up the relationship between you, the film camera and us, her fans—the flame is the camera, and it quivers a bit before the intensity of your gaze. When I think of you, about the many, many terrific films that you gave us before you left suddenly at 31, it’s the eyes I remember.
Left: Smita in Manthan (1976) directed by Shyam Benegal. In Mirch Masala (1986), directed by Ketan Mehta
In Nishant, you don’t turn the full force of that gaze onto us often. Rukmini is a sullen presence, the wife who suddenly finds her place in the world upturned when her mousy husband begins to be infatuated with Sushila (Shabana). Your performance is perfectly competent, but this is Shabana’s film—she is the Sita whose kidnapping will lead to the burning down of the nasty, brutish, feudal order. (Like Sholay and Deewar that year, Nishant too expressed the complete disenchantment with the existing order, the impotence of law enforcement, the rot that had set in everywhere.)
Later that year, you are much more the actor we would come to know in a sensational cameo in Benegal’s Charandas Chor, eyes flashing with haughtiness. What a delicious impression you leave as the imperious queen of an impoverished kingdom, clapping your hands to summon help, parking your nose at an incline several centimeters above the average resting spot of the human nose, and sends our eponymous hero thief to the gallows when he turns down your orders to marry you. It’s the rare Smita performance that is all idiocy and no empathy, and you are marvellously comic.
Bhumika, and the gift for sincerity
Your great gift, though, is the sincerity you bequeathed your characters, many of them being what would conventionally be considered complex. By sincerity, I mean the opposite of naivete—not a lack of understanding of the world, but rather the absence of knowingness. An open-heartedness to the world, rather. Taking whatever life has brought forth in good faith, choosing not to be weighed down by the baggage that has accumulated. It gave your work a lightness—through the lack of knowingness, and an unexpected capacity for joy.
A poster of Bhumika (1977) in Shyam Benegal’s Mumbai office. Credit: Sohini
What do I mean by this? Consider Bhumika, the film where you harness this gift for sincerity to incandescent light, playing the (semi-fictionalised life of) the 1940s Marathi film superstar Hansa Wadkar. You are married with a child, and wilfully enter into relationships with three men who are not your husband—Naseeruddin Shah, Anant Nag and Amrish Puri. In each of these relationships, you come across as earnest, in search of love, a lonely woman looking for an end to loneliness. Not cynical, nor maudlin nor indeed that potent Hindi term ‘chalu’ meaning shrewd, lustful, exploitative, deceitful all at once.
Two segments in particular are unforgettable—one, a sequence where you are playing and chatting with your young daughter, still a young girl, at home with your mother (Sulbha Deshpande) and husband (Amol Palekar) watching. When Palekar informs you that it is time to leave for an event, you ask to stay back. Both you and your daughter are crestfallen that your time together is over. The matinee idol as a happy, not tortured, mother is a lovely sliver of character shading, and precisely the earnestness that I think you could bequeath your characters.
Second, is your intriguing relationship with the patrician landlord Amrish Puri’s senior wife, confined to the bed. You are the landlord’s mistress, who tends to the ailing wife with great care, and the relationship between the two of you is gentle and generous, of sharing confidences and empathy.
Smita Patil and Rekha Sabnis (foreground) in Bhumika. A screenshot from YouTube
You gave us a film legend as a gifted, intelligent woman in search of fulfilment, in work and in love. Your rendering of Hansa Wadkar smashed open the stereotype of the successful, non-monogamous woman as a slut. No one who has watched Bhumika will be able to receive the gossip that invariably attends successful, attractive woman as anything more than just entertainment. Indeed, your work on the character has coloured my impression of every successful woman with an unusual personal life.
In fact, the potency of a great Smita performance (and you have so many) is that it can make us see people we know anew—a grandmother, a colleague, a neighbour, your mother, perhaps our own selves too. We shift what we thought we knew about a person because you show them in a light we had not seen before. Sometimes, this is our own self, a part of ourself we haven’t met or considered before.
Aakaler Sandhaney, and the Art of Seeing
Your film Aakaler Sandhaney (1981) offers a curiously lucid demonstration of this effect that your performances can have on us viewers. You are excellent as expected, but surprisingly, not the film’s stand-out performance. It’s a film that your IMDb page misses listing (the rare occasion I found a mistake on the platform). Directed by Mrinal Sen at the peak of his mastery, this is an outstanding film about a film on the 1943 Bengal famine, and the savage starvation that stalks India at any time. The film-within-a-film format allows the detailing of the process that goes into a thoughtful performance. Incidentally, Bhumika also has elements of the film-within-a-film format, being a story about a real-life screen actor.
In a video available on Youtube, the Bengali and Hindi film actor Dhritiman Chatterji recounts how you, a vegetarian, would cook your own food on location in the cavernous, beautiful rural rajbari falling to ruin. The Mrinal Sen unit was typically made up mostly of Bengalis—fish and meat-eaters—and you were unable to eat the food prepared by the unit caterer. So you would cook for yourself, not on a gas oven, but sitting on the floor on a small stove in the pre-modern cavernous old house.
Actor Dhritiman Chatterjee recounts the story of how Smita would cook her own meals on location for Aakaler Sandhaney (1981)
You are a prominent star actor called Smita (a signature Sen move to have characters share the name of the actors), who performs the role of an impoverished woman who leaves her village in the great famine of 1943, her baby dead. It was the husband who smashed the baby to death, driven to rage by the realisation that his wife had to perform sex work to feed him and their child.
The most indelible character in the film was Durga played by Sreela Majumdar, a domestic worker who serves the film crew, through whose persona you trace the village woman you are playing. When Durga watches Smita the star perform, she finds her own story coming to life. The film is set in 1942-43, the time of the devastating famine, and WWII. It is the 1980s now, there is no official famine, India is independent. Yet, this is her life that is being shown, she recognises this. Through your work, she feels seen.
Both women develop a regard for each other, drawn to each other by a sense of fellow feeling, although this is left nicely unspoken. Natural, really, across such a vast class chasm. In the film’s most electrifying scene, Majumdar screams when the actor performing Smita’s husband makes to crush the baby, bringing the entire production to a halt. The crew, like the audience, is astonished, because until that moment Majumdar had barely spoken–quietly, unobtrusively serving and picking up after the crew. The scream reveals how the gap between performance and real life has collapsed.
In a superb talk at Ahmedabad in September 2025, the dancer Navtej Singh Johar argued that it is not showing but seeing that makes for good ‘abhinaya’ (acting). If he is playing Radha, he would not invoke her through external identifiers and accoutrements (mudras as may be the case in dance, or costume and reproducing certain personal tics in acting) as much on seeing himself in her. Can he feel what it is like to be Radha, can he perhaps see Krishna winking or gesturing or calling to him. And when he can bring himself to feel what Radha does, the audience, too, would see Radha in him.
In Aakaler Sandhaney, Mrinal Sen, you and Sreela Majumdar take this argument further. When an actor tries to see herself in a character, as Smita does for her famine survivor character, drawing on her affinity for Durga who serves them on the film set. And a domestic worker who tiptoes about the world like a shadow suddenly feels seen. Incidentally, Majumdar’s larger filmic persona is evocative of you—a dark-skinned, gifted beautiful actor, she is often perceived to be channelling the Smita energy.
Mrinal Sen and Smita Patil on location for Aakaler Sandhaney
Sreela Majumdar in Aakaler Sandhaney
Her performance in Aakaler Sandhaney is special. She plays us, the audience, thrilled and shocked to see ourselves, our stories, our lives playing out on a larger canvas: Isn’t that like me? Didn’t I make the same mistake too? Should I, perhaps, now move away too, like the character in the film?
This is what you did to many of us, Smita, so many a time. You made us feel seen.
Love,
One of your biggest fans (a cohort that numbers
It is the film critic Baradwaj Rangan who has observed that it is the performers who we feel we know intimately that we call by their first names. For instance Shabana Azmi and Neena Gupta are both outstanding performers but it is only one whom we call by their first name. Ditto for Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri. Although this suggests a diminishing of Puri’s outstanding work, it is more a comment about how subjective we can be. Nevertheless, anyone who has seen a Smita Patil film will always be on first name terms with her. Indeed, even in a formal written setting like this.