Chhuti (1967)

Actress Arundhati Devi’s directorial debut is a lyrical melodrama. When Bhramar’s (Maliya) father (Bannerjee) remarries, she does not get on with her stern stepmother Himani (Sen), who is a disciplinarian and a moralist, and who helps the story become a critique of protestant ethics. Bhramar falls ill but hides her illness, which develops into tuberculosis. Into this family arrives Amal (Mukherjee) and the two fall in love. In the end Bhramar is taken to hospital and Amal, aware she is terminally ill, promises to wait for her. The elegaic film is set in a Christian community in Bihar, whose sylvan landscape, where the tragedy is played out, serves to comment on the contemporary - both geographically and generically, as it distances itself from the tradition of popular romances addressing similar themes of terminal illness - by a literal process of exclusion.