Between Sangate Aika and Bhumika: Finding Hansa Wadkar

Hansa Wadkar was a popular film star of Marathi cinema, who had established herself as an actress with considerable histrionic skills, essaying a range of roles in films belonging to a variety of genres during a career spanning several decades, before and after Indian Independence. Despite the success, Wadkar’s unconventional personal life was troubled and difficult. In the early seventies her autobiography, Sangate Aika (1970), was published. Subsequently, Shyam Benegal, a stalwart of the Indian New Wave, made Bhumika (1977) broadly based on Wadkar’s autobiography. The film’s realist framework underscored by its critique of patriarchy, succeeded in bringing Wadkar’s journey into the national discourse of women empowerment. This article is an attempt to read Sangate Aika and Bhumika together with the view to “finding” Hansa Wadkar, the female professional working in mid-century Marathi film industry, even as she participated in and contributed to the imagination and the making of the cinematic modernity of the region.