Aniruddha Roy Choudhury brings back his directorial baton to direct a full-length Bengali feature film in Dear Maa. He proved his ability to tackle very delicate and fragile relationships in his earlier films Anuranan, Antaheen and Buno Haansh which gave a completely new cinematic image to Dev.
But none of these films focused on the ‘mother’ which becomes the focus and the central thesis of his latest film Dear Maa which unfolds certain unusual perspectives on motherhood by the mother herself, portrayed so beautifully by Jaya Ahsan one of the most talented actors we have today in Bengali cinema on either side of the border.
The drama opens with the 12-year-old Jhimli goes missing and her mother, Brinda, a single mother who has adopted her, is crazy with worry. Though this might appear to be a sort of melodramatic beginning to a basically humane story, it is used as a framing device which closes with Brinda being found in the end who walked out of her home in a fit of anger and went to sleep on the staircase of the very complex they live in. The story happens between these two points.
Dear Maa strips motherhood of its romantic illusions, ideological trappings and emotional touches to dig deep into the mind of a woman who does not really want a child, biological or adopted, as she does not feel the need for a child and is more focused on her career.
Mothers today include a variety of groups – full- time mothers, surrogate mothers, adoptive mothers, working mothers. Looking back we learn that amongst one of the many quandaries women face in India, motherhood could be considered to be one of the most imperative, given the patriarchal ideology that extolls motherhood as women’s prime objective and accomplishment in life.
This ideological notion and its deconstruction is the subject of Aniruddha Roy Choudhury’s Dear Maa. We learn that Brinda (Jaya Ahsan), a driven professional, is a very successful working woman whose career ambitions leave little room for pregnancy and early childcare. After a brief but determined session of couples counseling, she and her husband decide to adopt.
But Brinda’s inner conflict – her fear of not being able to fully embrace motherhood – sets the emotional tone for the rest of the film. Her husband Awrko (Chandan Roy Sanyal) a successful photographer, however, is desperate to have a child in any manner possible. So when they decide to adopt a child, they go together, fulfill the legal and other needs and adopt a little girl who grows very close to her playful father. Though the mother tries to be close to Jhimli, there is a strange mutual but very subtle distancing between the mother and the daughter.
Scenes of filial togetherness between and among the three on a beach invests the film with a beautiful mood heightened by the superb cinematography of Avik Mukherjee which extends to scenes where Awrko feigns a faint and Jhimli shakes him up. Then, one fine day, Awrko fails to get up. Avik Mukherjee, the cinematographer and editor Arghyo Kamal Mitra underscore this absence simply by showing Brinda stepping into Awrko’s dark room and slowly removing the photographs and the negatives from the wires and from the chemical liquid in the trays beneath.
The possible melodrama around death is entirely absent which strengthens the emotional graph of the narrative. The cinematography capturing the lit streets of the city, Jhimli confiding in her friend, trying desperately to catch up with her biological mother, are mesmerizing to say the least.
The songs with the music scored by Bickram Ghosh and the title song by Papon are beautiful add-ons to the richness of the film. The lyrics by Tanveer Ghazi and Anindya Chatterjee are emotionally resonating, enriching the ambience of the film. However, bringing in the example of the mother being the umbrella on a rainy day somehow dispels the very message the film carries.
The return of Shubha Mudgal’s rich voice and wide range rings a nostalgic bell for those who are familiar with her musical talents. This, by far, saawan ru aayo banwariya is the best number in the entire film.
The film repeatedly tries to strip the notion that being a mother is another birth for most Indian women, it changes their outlook - in most cases from romantic notion of marriage to responsible mothers, and also changes their status. But Dear Maa dispels this as a long-cherished and socially conditioned myth.
Dear Maa goes to great lengths and depths to underscore that motherhood seems to have evolved into a new role from a biological reality, literally and symbolically fixed within the private effective sphere. Jhimli, (Ahana as the little one and Nandika Das as the teenager) very close to her father, can in some way sense her mother’s somewhat lesser than the emotional attachment her father has for her, demonstrative in his affections which Jhimli loves to live within. This accepted social equation gets shell-shocked by the sudden and tragic death of Awrko, the father when Jhimli is still little.
Roy Choudhury intelligently steers away from the shock of Awrko’s death and its impact on Brinda. What comes out in strong relief is Jhimli’s constant hot-and-cold response to her mother’s attempts to get close to the daughter who she now comes to love dearly. The housemaid Nirmala (Anubha Fatehpuria), very close to the family is excellent in her underplaying of the character strict about eating discipline in the home.
Since the adoption centre’s advice included telling Jhimli about her adopted identity, as a girl stepping into her teens, she becomes increasingly inquisitive about her real mother because she has constant problems with Brinda. Does she succeed in finding her natural mother? If she does, in what way does this change or not change the equation between Brinda and Jhimli?
This is the very first feature film in Indian cinema and one needs to congratulate Aniruddha for contextualising motherhood differently from the one we have been learning and been made to understand through centuries.
Matrescence is a term coined by medical anthropologist Dana Raphael to refer to the developmental process of becoming a mother. She argues that childbirth is merely the opening act, not the culmination, of becoming a mother. There is no biological switch flipped at delivery, and the transition to motherhood unfolds at a variable pace across cultures. This challenges the idea of a universal maternal instinct and the simplistic notion that biology dictates motherhood. Nancy Russo argues that the pervasive societal pressure for women to bear and rear children portrays motherhood as not merely a choice, but an expectation deeply ingrained in social customs.
Jaya Ahsan brilliantly demonstrates through her very understated performance, a slight look at her daughter, preparing for her presentation at Hyderabad are achieved almost with magical precision. The conflict of not wanting the responsibility of motherhood on the one hand and beginning to miss motherhood when she finds Jhimli slipping away from her love and her life on the other invests the film with a strange emotional depth not seen in Indian cinema so far.
One sorely misses the presence of the charming Chandan Roy Sanyal soon after the film begins making one wish that perhaps putting off his demise to happen a bit later would have charmed the audience.
Saswata Chatterjee puts up the appearance of a no-nonsense police officer but turns out to be soft inside and sincere in his investigation of the missing Jhimli sticking around till she is finally found. Dhritiman Chatterjee lends a listening ear and the invisible shoulder to Brinda as her mentor though what kind of ‘mentor’ he is remains ambiguous.
The sole drawback of this film for this critic is the needless footage spent on Jhimli’s real mother (Padmapriya) her husband and her very cinematic explanation for her having placed her newborn (Jhimli) with an adoption centre. Why the need to justify a wrong step with a melodramatic story?