ANUPAMA was a film that essentially narrated a story of various dimensions of love.
 The story, inspired in good measure by a real life cousin and her father, also worked as a psychoanalytical study.

Mohan Sharma (Tarun Bose) hates his newborn daughter as her mother has died giving birth to her. Her father makes his hate obvious through out the day. But at the stroke of nine at night (the time his wife died), he starts drinking and as he gets drunk, he progressively showers Uma with affection.

This creates havoc with her mental make-up and Uma (Sharmila Tagore) grows in to a beautiful but confused girl who can communicate with nature (stunningly depicted through that visual and musical Lata Mangeshkar masterpiece “Aisi bhi batein hoti hai”) but cannot understand human beings and is always in a shell.

Hrishikesh and his writers’ team heightened her introverted character by contrasting her gregarious and golden hearted family friend Anita (Shashikala), who is the complete antithesis of Uma and tries hard to help her. But the person who ultimately succeeds is Anita fiancé‘s friend Ashok (Dharmendra) a writer who falls in love with her. Ashok writes a beautiful book ‘ Anupama’ in which he analyzes her and projects what she can and should be.

 Uma reads the book and understands herself. She decides to be the girl in the book and accepts Ashok’s hand in the marriage. She tells her father that she is going to occupy the same place in a man’s heart that her mother occupied in his. As the train taking her away pulls out of the station, a suddenly repentant father leans against a station pillar, tears streaming down his eyes at losing the daughter he never loved for no fault of hers.

The film had the Hrishikesh Mukherjee stamp of bringing a lump to your throat without the slightest touch of melodrama. Brilliant dialogues and a feather-light screenplay that kept the emotional voltage high without lachrymosity, gloom and boredom, kept the audience involved, immensely moved and yet supremely entertained.

The script saw to it that human goodness was highlighted and weakness sympathized with. One could empathize with and feel sorry for both father and daughter, caught in a cruel game of fate that prevented their natural relationship from blooming into a bond of affection.

The performances were uniformly brilliant-Sharmila Tagore as Uma and Shashikala as Anita stealing the show with their perfectly complementary portrayals. Tarun Bose as the father was magnificent, and Dharmendra fresh from his virile ‘ Phool aur Patthar’  success was the epitome of gentleness as Ashok. The dialogues were another highlight of the film.


Hrishikesh Mukherjee belonged to the school that believed in different cinema yet cemented with commercial appeal, and ‘ Anupama’ was no different. Popular elements like songs were used evocatively and the director extracted a timeless and all hit score from the redoubtable Hemant Kumar.

Few songs have been as tenderly romantic as Lata’s haunting and piano-backed gem ‘Dheere dheere machal, ae dil-e-bekrar, koi aata hai/yun tadap ke na tadpa mujhe bar bar, koi aata hai’. Asha provided the exuberance for Shasikala numbers, ‘ Bheegi bheegi fiza’ ‘ Kyn mujhe itni khushi de di’.

And Hemant Kumar sang the icing on the score, ‘  Ya dil ki suno duniya walo’. Kaifi Azmi’s masterful lines in this hit song, ‘ Yeh phool chaman mein kaise khila/ Mali ki nazar mein pyar nahin’ poignantly underscored the pain he feels because of his deep understanding of Uma’s  psyche.

‘ Anupama’ is one of those rare films that was inspired by a real life story, was refreshingly different from the commercial trend, and yet was loved by the masses, critics and the discerning audience.

**COURTESY: STARDUST CLASSICS