‘Unishe April’ Turns 21 but Indian Films Struggle to Break Out of ‘Mother India’ Mould

Rituparno Ghosh’s Unishe April (19th April), which bagged the top award at the National Award in 1995 along with the Best Actress Award for Debasree Roy, will be celebrating its 21st birthday this year.

It not only encompasses familiar emotions like guilt, betrayal, love, and nostalgia, but also offers deeper mediations on the role of women in society and the conflicting politics of womanhood, motherhood, and personhood.

Rituparna Ghosh, who wrote and directed Unishe April, aspired to free the censored and distorted image of the screen mother from the taboos and constraints of patriarchal culture, and place it as a subject of psychological study and sociological inspiration for a feminist reading.

The plotline weaves around a single day and night, that of 19 April, as suggested by the title. It’s the death anniversary of Aditi’s (Debasree Roy) father, which coincides with the day her famous danseuse mother Sarojini (Aparna Sen) gets the news of having received a prestigious award for her singular contribution to the art of classical dance.

The news of the award sets in motion a chain of events that finally leads to a confrontation between the mother and the daughter, distanced through what on the surface, appears to be a clash of values, but which has grown over time, basically out of a slow and sure breakdown in interpersonal communication.

Aditi’s consciousness is made up of memories of a dead father, his identity, his pain, and his alienation from his celebrity-wife, reflected as a kind of a picture-puzzle through multiple pieces of fractured flashbacks that unfold from her point of view.

The mood of the film begins to change once the camera follows the two women into the kitchen, instantly adding unforeseen degrees of intimacy to the interaction. Tins are opened, an old recipe notebook is found and then there is a search for a particular ingredient which must go into the one-dish meal.

“Let’s make it without the saffron” says Aditi, the daughter. “No” says the mother, underlining her striving for perfection in every area of life. And then, one tin reveals a long-lost bottle of French perfume Sarojini believed to have been broken long ago. “I hated that smell” cries Aditi, “because it reminded me of your absence.”

The use of the kitchen further offers a perceptive insight into its own positional identity as a site of bridging woman-to-woman relationships within the home to the fore.

Despite the fact that none of the women, mother or daughter, are particularly traditionally “domestic” (neither is a housewife or adheres to typical roles ascribed to women), the fact that their tensions and contrasts play out in the kitchen underlies the inherent performativity of gender that defines characters, both in good films, or in real life, in spite of themselves.

But even though it is in the kitchen, the appearance of the perfume bottle breaks the illusion of domesticity, in a way linking both the characters’ acceptance and simultaneous defiance of gender roles.

Having played its role, it recedes once more into the background, allowing the mother and daughter to re-occupy centre-stage and reclaim their chosen personalities in the world.

The conflict is resolved in the end as truths unravel, forcing the two women to step out of their guarded silences and begin to talk.

Ghosh draws a psychological portrait of a mother-daughter relationship placed in a definite ideological, topical and social context. Aditi’s dilemma arises from the real and perceived threats her mother’s celebrity status posed to her own identity and interpersonal relationships. When her boyfriend tries to back out of a more permanent arrangement with her, she blames it on her mother’s stardom.

Her upbringing is marred by the psychological exploitation her father meted out to her in his desire to get even with a wife, whose fame, power and talent underscore his essential ordinariness as her husband.

Aditi hates the celebrity status she is heir to because of the negative associations they hold for her. In more recent years, films like Qala (2022), which drew on a similar mother-daughter plotline before diverging into a darker tale of fame and deception, and others, have tried to recreate the mother daughter dynamic, but rarely has any come close to the finesse of Ghosh’s quiet masterpiece.