Khaniker Atithi and Zindagi Zindagi: Two Sides of One Coin

Tapan and Sunil Dutt during the shooting of Zindagi Zindagi (Source – Sukumar Roy)

In 1925, Rabindranath Tagore had written a song, Hey khaniker atithi, that was published in the Shantiniketan Patrika. It’s a whimsical song, its sweetly welcoming tone cloaking the threat of impending sorrow, of a departure that must follow on the heels of this arrival. As Chaitali Sengupta translates it: O ephemeral visitor/Who do you visit at dawn… O unfeeling one! How you deceive! In the guise of union you bring separation…

To anyone who is somewhat familiar with Hey khaniker atithi, it is not difficult to see this dilemma mirrored in the emotions of the lead character of Tapan Sinha’s Khaniker Atithi (1959). This man, a village doctor, finds himself suddenly faced with the past when the woman he once wanted to marry comes back into his life, now a widow and with a disabled child in tow. Meeta has nobody to turn to; this doctor, the man she had been in love with some years back, is her only hope. He is the only person she can trust to cure her son Babu, who—ever since he tumbled down a flight of stairs as a baby—has not been able to walk. Meeta’s distress about Babu’s plight is perhaps not just the sorrow of a mother for the child she loves; there might even be some lingering feeling of guilt here. Meeta, newly widowed, had moved into a small upstairs room with baby Babu, and had left him there while she went out to work… and the infant, crawling out after his mother, had fallen down the stairs. Meeta’s carelessness may have played a part in Babu’s accident.

Meeta, riddled by guilt at her part in Babu’s disability

Other factors too play a part in Meeta’s decision to come to this small, rather poorly-equipped little rural hospital. One major factor is that she, once a wealthy young woman, has now nothing to fall back upon. She is so short of funds that when the doctor realizes that he can do only so much for Babu and must take him to Kolkata, Meeta refuses to come along: it will be an unnecessary expense, she says.

The other reason for her choosing to come here is obvious in the doctor’s reaction when Meeta first appears at his doorstep. There is a gentle warmth in his welcome, neither the awkward shyness that might be expected of meeting an old lover, nor the sudden hope that there might be the chance of a rekindling of affection. He is sweet, he is matter-of-fact, he is caring: and in his demeanour, we see something of why Meeta has come all the way to this forgotten corner of rural Bengal in search of treatment for Babu.

The doctor, with his patients in the ward

The doctor’s gentleness and caring attitude—a good bedside manner, really—is what also endears him to the people who are in-patients, admitted to the small ward at his hospital. This is an eclectic lot, ranging from local villagers to a young army officer, Lieutenant Ratan Lal who tries to show off his (assumed) urbanity, by playing a harmonica and spouting broken English now and then.

There is a man who is more often heard than seen: he lies on his bed, battling tuberculosis with the help of the haunting songs he sings. Every day, without fail, comes a silent young woman named Shyama bringing milk for this man. She stands beside his bed, and even when he tries to tell her to leave him and go live her life, Shyama does not budge.

A touching portrait of love: the stoic Shyama and her consumptive lover

And, taking centre stage among this motley crew of sufferers is Madhab, an ambitious and outspoken man who is in the running—for a consecutive term—as local union board president. Two old friends occupy the beds on either side of Madhab’s, and between the three men, there’s ongoing talk, banter, even leg-pulling. A warm camaraderie.

Juggling these patients with an array of out-patients, helped only by an overworked compounder named Bipin, the doctor somehow pulls along. Until the day Meeta arrives with Babu, and the doctor, a hospitable and kind man, accommodates them in the small house he lives in, beside the hospital.

The doctor takes Meeta and Babu to live in his own home

In Khaniker Atithi, this simple act—a doctor opening his home to a woman friend (whom he describes, however, as a ‘relative from Kolkata’)—goes unremarked. Everybody takes it in their stride, nobody questions it or points fingers.

Not so in its remake.

In 1972, thirteen years after the release of Khaniker Atithi, Tapan Sinha released its Hindi remake, Zindagi Zindagi. The story followed the same basic pattern as Khaniker Atithi: the doctor, his patients, and most importantly, his relationship with Meeta and how he finds himself deeply invested in curing little Babu.

The doctor, Babu, and Meeta in Zindagi Zindagi

Like Khaniker Atithi, too, Zindagi Zindagi explored two important ideas relating to human society. For one, humanity: the idea of selfless love, of respect for others, a concept of universal brotherhood. This is what makes the doctor go on looking after his patients (being even more patient than them, if I may be allowed the pun). Even when they are recalcitrant, when they won’t take his advice: he never gives up. It is an emotion which shines through, too, in other, often easily overlooked interactions: in Shyama’s quiet tending to her beloved; or in the light-hearted ribbing of each other by the men in the ward.

The men in the ward, at daggers drawn but the best of friends

The second aspect of society and social interactions that is common to both films is that of casteism. Here, however, Tapan Sinha reveals two distinct styles of film-making, both geared not just to their own specific eras (late 1950s as opposed to early 1970s), but also to two different milieus, Bengal and Hindi heartland.

In Khaniker Atithi, the idea of casteism is dealt with in a subtle, barely-there way. We see it in a passing aside which reveals that Shyama is of a lower caste, while her consumptive beloved is not. In a more pivotal scene, shown as a flashback, the doctor, then wooing Meeta, goes to meet her uncle. The uncle knows the doctor; knows, too, that he and Meeta are not just friends but hoping to get married as well. In this scene, when the doctor perhaps is hoping to have Meeta’s uncle’s blessings, the older man shatters his hopes—basically, by letting the doctor know that his (the doctor’s) low caste compared to Meeta’s, comes in the way of their match. At no point is the uncle rude or boorish, even though his message is clear: Meeta’s family are of the bhadralok, even if (as he admits to the doctor) they are now fallen on hard times.

Meeta’s uncle tells the doctor that he cannot marry Meeta

By the time he made Zindagi Zindagi (and of course keeping in mind the rather more in-your-face emotions that are typical of Hindi cinema), Tapan Sinha must have realized that a Hindi film called for less realism, more drama. Here, Meeta lives with her uncle and aunt, both of whom are extremely greedy, casteist, and classist to boot. The uncle, initially impressed by the fact that Meeta’s friend is a doctor, changes his mind as soon as he realizes how poor the doctor is—and by the time he refuses to let Meeta marry the doctor, it’s obvious that both uncle and aunt only think of their own ambitions, their own avarice. They are rude, selfish, devoid of humanity.

Meeta’s aunt and uncle in Zindagi Zindagi, a stereotypically nasty and greedy couple

This larger-than-life sense of melodrama is carried through into other aspects of Zindagi Zindagi too. The casteism, for instance, comes through loud and clear, in several scenes. Shyama, for one, is derided again and again by one particular character (more on this one later) for being untouchable, and well below the status of the man she loves. Near the beginning of the film, the doctor calmly admits to being an untouchable, in response to an upper-caste out-patient’s complaint about having to stand in a queue with God knows who, of God knows which caste.

The cruelty dished out to Shyama for her caste comes mainly from one character: Shiv Prasad, the hot-headed son of Choudhary Ram Prasad. Ram Prasad is the equivalent of the Madhab character from Khaniker Atithi: the man running for president of the union board. In the Bengali film, he’s an ambitious but good-hearted man, his son a little pushy and eager to get his father elected once again. In the Hindi film, the son, Shiv Prasad, isn’t just pushy, he’s outright obnoxious. He has no qualms about using underhand means to campaign for his father, and is a nasty, sexist lecher too. Shyama is at the receiving end of his offensive behaviour and his casteist remarks (though she gives as good as she gets), and—in what leads up to the climax of the film—Shiv Prasad too is the one who questions Meeta’s living at the doctor’s home, and accuses her of immorality.

Shiv Prasad, the villain of the piece

Zindagi Zindagi is recognizably the same story as Khaniker Atithi, but the treatment is very different. Khaniker Atithi is very subtle, its tone muted. A good deal of the emotion is expressed through silences, through expressions, even through dialogue that obliquely hints at what Tapan Sinha is trying to convey. There is gentle symbolism. For example, two different scenes, in different times, that mirror a motif: in the past, the doctor and Meeta walk along Howrah Bridge, and even as they agree that they cannot have a future together, the temple bells ring out from the nearby math. In the now, there’s another frame in which the doctor walks down a long, rickety village bridge with Meeta by his side and Babu in his arms. Further on into the film, the doctor takes Babu to Kolkata for treatment, and in their free time, they go sightseeing—and in one scene, the bells ring at that very same math, startling the doctor into what is presumably a memory of another day…

Two scenes on bridges, featuring Meeta and the doctor: an echo of the past

There is another scene, silent but poignant, which stands out as an example of the understated subtlety of Khaniker Atithi. Meeta, despondent and not very hopeful of Babu’s recovery, wanders under the trees in the village. Some children are at play, racing about around her, and Meeta glances at them with sorrow in her eyes. Nothing is said; nothing needs to be said to show how she feels.

Meeta, running children, and a silence that speaks

Zindagi Zindagi, by contrast, is all about saying everything out loud. The humour (the banter between the patients in the ward) is louder. The discrimination, the quarrels, the insults: all are spelled out loud and clear, with nothing left that a character (or the audience) might be expected to interpret for themselves.

Tapan Sinha with Kishore Kumar and SD Burman

In their own ways, both films try to be true to their time and their place. They are too, both, marked by good musical scores: Hemanta Mukherjee’s for Khaniker Atithi included the haunting Ke tori bahe (sung, too, by Hemanta himself) and SD Burman’s for Zindagi Zindagi was marked by poignant songs like its title song (sung by Burman himself) and Kishore Kumar’s Tune humein kya diya re zindagi.

Zindagi Zindagi was commercially a failure; despite Tapan Sinha’s attempts to tailor the story and style for a newer audience, perhaps this was just too old-fashioned a film (and Sunil Dutt and Waheeda Rehman a little too old to play a romantic couple in a decade typified by Bobby?). Perhaps another reason for its failure was that its core too palpably reflected a Bengali ethos of an earlier age: despite Sinha’s attempts to pep it up, it was not really representative of Hindi cinema of the late 1960s and beyond.

In that sense, Khaniker Atithi is more successful, because it fits: it fits the time it was made in, the space it was made in. It reflects Bengal and Bengalis well, and its lack of melodrama suits the cinematic culture of which it is a part.

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