Bandini (1963) has been touted as a woman-centric film by acclaimed director Bimal Roy. It was his last film, set in the pre-partition milieu, possibly the 1930s. Roy passed away quite prematurely in 1966, just three years after the release of Bandini. And since then, Bandini and Sujata (1959) have been grouped as women-centric films, made at a time when such films were rare. That rarity continues even today. And so do films like Bandini, which are women-centric but not necessarily women-empowering.
I know I risk judging a 60-year-old film through the modern lens of the third wave of feminism, postcolonialism, or postmodernism. But my defense is the implications of such films across four generations, from my grandmother, who might have been a young woman in the 60s, to Gen Z, which struggles to understand love, marriage, relationships, and the ever-complicated gender dynamics in such a hostile world. The film was screened at the Bhubaneswar Film Festival as part of the Bimal Roy retrospective. And I went in as an excited modern feminist who is married and struggles with an identity crisis in a world of lay-offs and job insecurity.
The best part about watching such films at a film festival is being open to all types of commentary and watching the film objectively and in context, juxtaposing it with modern thought processes. And that’s where my view comes into the picture, because I can see the after-effects of decades of such depiction of women on screen on women in real life.
Bandini is not the name of the titular character. And herein begins the contrast. I kept searching for Bandini in the film because I thought it was a name. But it’s a quality usually desired in a woman — bondage. Kalyani (played by the ever-amazing Nutan) is an all-sacrificing, delicate yet spiritually sturdy village woman who faces tragedy and death with stoic dignity. Her gracefulness pervades the film regardless of what happens to her.
She is lodged in a women’s prison, serving an eight-year prison sentence for murder. She is enigmatic to her prisonmates, who laugh at her yet marvel at her stoicism. She is mysterious because she never reveals what happened to her. She comes forward to care for a fellow prisonmate who, in all likelihood, is suffering from tuberculosis, because she has no fear of contracting the disease. She claims she has no one, and hence, she is not scared of death. Her mystery is enchanting to Dr Devendra (played by then newcomer Dharmendra), who marvels at the aesthetics of her caregiving nature, “Tum kaam karte hue achi lagti ho” (You look so beautiful while working), which is symbolic of how men view women, a creature here to serve and support, nothing more.
The film, then, gradually enters flashback and reveals Kalyani’s story. Throughout her life, Kalyani has been serving people around her. And yet her beauty is effervescent. There are close-ups of her anklet-adorned feet as she helps a neighbor. She questions men who think women are simply goddesses for the home. She supports the revolution by doling out a letter that leads her to the doom (and love) of her life.
For women, love has always been their doom, too. It’s a prison they confine themselves to quite willingly, owing to centuries of conditioning. Kalyani is bound and tied to that love she feels for a man from a distant land who is fighting for the country’s freedom. (Also, there is an entire song sequence dedicated to a freedom fighter walking to his death sentence, reminiscent of the era the film depicts).
And it’s not just Kalyani. The other prisonmates are suffering women, one of whom is a soulful singer who misses her home too much. As an audience, you want to know her story, but she and her fellow prisoners seem like mere background figures, even though they are powerful characters in the film.
As a film, Bandini feels so conflicting. It seems to me that Bimal Roy was perhaps confused about the portrayal of women. Or maybe he wanted to make a point through his female characters about the invisible shackles women deal with all their lives and are forced to choose between their own good and benefiting others, especially the men around them. In the end, when Kalyani chooses to be Bandini to Bikash (Ashok Kumar) instead of moving on to Dr Devendra and his mother, who so willingly want to accept her despite her criminal past, you are taken back to all those films where female characters often return to the men who wronged them, abandoned them, or broke their hearts and left them to nurse their wounds alone.
I was expecting to see Devendra and Bikash standing on either side of Kalyani, and her being made to choose between them in a dramatic scene. But I was more disappointed to see Bimal Roy making a safe choice, as so many filmmakers do to this day, and keep Kalyani as the same self-sacrificing, goddess-like image men often want women to be.
It is worth noting that Bimal Roy was a Bengali born in pre-independent India, much like Ashok Kumar, who plays Bikash, the freedom revolutionary in the film. Ashok Kumar was also a superstar back in the day, whereas the newcomer Dharmendra appears only in the first few scenes of the film. Maybe it was a business decision to retain Ashok Kumar’s male-hero image and let the woman choose him over the more progressive character, who a newcomer plays.
Ashok Kumar’s character, Bikash, earns the audience’s sympathy because it is revealed to Kalyani that he abandoned her for money. Not money for himself, but for the revolution. The revolutionary party decided to get him married to a rich woman (who is in a nursing home because she suffers from hysteria), whom he does not love, because he is in love with someone else, aka Kalyani. And that rich woman happens to be the hysterical patient with temper flares whom Kalyani serves when she chooses to work in a nursing home for food and lodging.
Previously, Bikash promised to marry her and even asked for her hand in marriage from her father, but left and never returned. Letters written to him either returned or were left unanswered. When Kalyani learns that the man has married someone else in another city, she decides not to hurt her father anymore and simply leaves. It’s a typical Hindi film drama we have seen, loved, despised, and loved again in different formats for generations now.
When Nutan’s niece, actor Kajol, was asked about her character’s decision to pick a selfish Rahul (Shah Rukh Khan) over Aman (Salman Khan) in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), she said it was her choice. Many women defend such female characters in movies, dubbing it a woman’s choice to be with whoever she wants. But what circumstances or social conditioning dictate those choices is debatable. Choices don’t exist independently; they are always influenced. As a teenager, I made certain choices in my relationships with men, which were socially approved choices of being the more understanding, compassionate one and suffering through the selfishness of the men I liked. I now understand how deeply these choices were influenced, without my realizing it, by the women I saw on screen.
Women somehow always choose to be bonded, tied down, and subjugated by love. Their love for their man becomes their prison. In Bandini, Kalyani never becomes free. She suffers through her mother’s loss in childhood, her brother’s in early adulthood, and, finally, loses her father before poisoning Bikash’s wife (the hysterical patient) in a fit of rage — a rage most women identify with when they are denied what is rightfully theirs.
Maybe, to Kalyani’s mind, Bikash is what she considers hers rightfully, while Devendra was just a compromise. She didn’t love Devendra. He wasn’t a revolutionary fighting for the motherland but a government servant under British rule. To her, he was the safe choice. And Kalyani never believed in playing it safe. For many women, that bondage is their choice, their freedom, their idea of femininity. To them, it doesn’t matter whether other women across generations would agree with them or not. If bondage is freedom, so be it.
Bandini is Nutan’s film through and through. Women actors continue to struggle for more screen time and better pay to this day. Bandini and Sujata were both landmark films in this regard. You watch the film for Nutan. No matter how powerful a star Ashok Kumar is or how handsome Dharmendra is, Nutan overshadows all of them. Her acting range, facial expressions, and oscillation of emotions from sorrow to joy to quiet yet dignified resignation to her circumstances are a trademark of women’s lives — colorful, interesting, yet dominated by tragedies and pain.
As Kalyani’s friend and the sister of a revolutionary says, “Stree ka toh janm hi dukh sehne ke liye hota hai, (A woman is born to endure pain). On the other hand, Bikash says, “Stree ko mardon ke saath kandhe se kandha milane ki zarurat nahi hai. Wo ghar ke andar reh kar bhi aadmiyon ki madad kar sakti hain, (Women don’t need to walk shoulder-to-shoulder with men. They can help men from the confines of their home.) Two sides of femininity are depicted by two characters, yet no resolution is in sight over the man-woman relationship, in films and in our lives, to this day. The struggle between choice and conditioning continues as the idea of femininity keeps changing.
Looking back at Bandini in 2026, perhaps its greatest achievement is not that it offers answers but that it continues to ask uncomfortable questions. It remains a remarkable film for placing a woman’s inner life at the center of the narrative when Hindi cinema rarely did so, even if that inner life is ultimately steered towards an ending that feels stereotypical and predictable.
Bandini is a reflection of Kalyani’s resilience while also questioning the social norms that could envision freedom for the nation but not quite for its women. Her name was never Bandini, yet history, cinema, and society repeatedly make her one. More than sixty years later, as conversations around women’s agency become louder than ever, Bandini survives not merely as a classic to be celebrated but as a cultural continuity that still struggles with women’s agency and autonomy.
Retrospective Courtesy of Neha Jha
Feature Image Credit to Bimal Roy Productions