Kolaveri Girls

Amitabh is single in his mind

Amitabh grew up in a middle-class ethos that made romance and marriage congruent and sneered at bigamy, adultery and extra-marital affairs. Amitabh’s mother Teji, who was his guiding force, was well-connected and extremely active in the social circuit. When Amitabh chose Jaya, she too had similar qualities. I read somewhere that in a party Amitabh flirted with Mousumi Chatterjee not knowing that she was already married and tried to cultivate Sharmila Tagore, unable to recognise her as the great star. Interestingly, all the women were Bengali and petite. So he was looking for a ‘Jaya type’.
After Zanjeer and Deewar, Amitabh rediscovered himself anew. By then he became a big star and changed his social milieu. He shifted from the Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Desh Mukherjee world into Yash Chopra, Prakash Mehra and Manmohan Desai camp. The last three were totally mainstream cinema. I think that here Amitabh suffered a kind of a split within himself. As an angry young man he overcame certain barriers of his ‘repression’. I think that in this moment in which he discovered a new kind of a liberated self after the success of Deewar and Zanjeer, he ‘fell’ for Rekha, a new woman for a new self.
I think Rekha’s adulation boosted Amitabh’s ego. For Jaya, such undying devdasi kind of adulation was not possible. But Amitabh would have never married Rekha — she was the daughter of a bigamist and therefore not ‘culturally right’, she also was not the ‘middle-class’ that he was in. But his heart was with Rekha and in an interview Jaya said that it was not possible to control anyone’s mind, probably referring to her husband’s mental involvement with the other woman.
Amitabh has an adventurous mind. He is interested in the fact that women get attracted to him. His frequent visits to Parveen Babi and their listening to music together appear to me to be more of inquisitiveness on Amitabh’s part, something that Indian men have of progressive and liberated women. Amitabh does not seem to have been really emotionally entangled with Parveen. Like Rekha, Parveen’s hopes too were raised by Amitabh’s attention because when Parveen returned stark mad back to Mumbai she accused Amitabh of stalking and trying to kill her.
It appears to me that Amitabh has two minds, one free, solitary and even asexual, a sign of geniuses and the other a typical middle-class socialised into believing in the nuclear family based on monogamy and romantic love that necessarily culminates into marriage. Both these ‘selves’ have existed in his marriage. This is why even without Rekha, Amitabh would have appeared to Jaya to be sometimes there and sometimes to be not there and never quite wholly belonging to her. Amitabh has the mind of a single man, he looks after his family because it is his dharma.
As I could observe, and at that point of time I was nearly 20 years younger, Amitabh and Jaya were ideologically apart. For Jaya, there was a distress about why Amitabh did the films that he did. The change in the power position within the marriage as Amitabh became successful also changed the soft, intense and emotional romance which Jaya and Amitabh had.
As a father and now as a father-in-law, Amitabh has been doting. Shweta was pampered and her father made sure that she had everything. In Jaya’s words, in a television interview, Amitabh now tries to compensate Shweta’s absence in the home through Aishwarya. I feel his idea of the perfect woman is fulfilled by Aishwarya; the perfect woman as an image and not for consumption, something like a daughter would have done.