Madhumati was Bimal Roy’s biggest commercial success, a rare genre film from a director known for his realism and his socialist approach  to  cinema. Its romantic tale of reincarnation, ornamented with haunting songs and atmospheric visuals, was influential in establishing a sub-genre of Hindi cinema. The film tells the story of an engineer who takes shelter in an ancient mansion one night, only to realize he has been there in a previous life. He recalls that life when he worked for the lord of the mansion, and fell in love with the beautiful tribal maiden Madhumati.

A  Creature  of  the  Mist
Madhumati‘s striking achievement lies in transcending the conventions of the Gothic horror/suspense film to bring in a wholly Indian belief in reincarnation and rebirth, as well as elements drawn from folk and tribal lore. Kamal Amrohi’s Mahal (1948) was perhaps the first significant film to explore this territory, but Madhumati goes further in placing the genre – call it Indian Gothic – within the hybrid tradition of Hindi cinema, complete with melodrama, leering villainy, folksy humour and intermittent song-and-dance sequences. The film’s narrative provides several satisfying twists and turns, besides taking some intriguing risks – there is a positive infestation of doppelgangers, for instance, from Madhumati the tribal maiden to her ghostly apparition, her look-alike Madhavi, and her reincarnation, Radha.
It is Bimal Roy’s skill as a filmmaker that keeps all these juggling balls in the air. An acclaimed master of social realism, he also succeeds in delineating the hierarchies of Madhumati’s world quite precisely. We observe the representatives of an oppressive feudal system, the hill people it has dispossessed in its greed, and the urban educated class, represented by Anand, which sympathizes with one side, but must serve the other. The tragic fate of the film’s heroine is indeed ‘an allegory for India’s indigent tribal population’ (as Jyotika Virdi describes it). Her revenge – the revenge of the land against its exploiters – is necessarily outside the realm of the real.
Madhumati’s story was written by the Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak, whose own contemporaneous work reveals an almost ethnographic fascination for the world of the Indian tribal: one speculates how he would have presented the heroine, had he directed the film. As for Bimal Roy’s Madhumati, she is something of a familiar archetype: an innocent who personifies nature itself, like Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, like numerous other nymphs from Indian literature and cinema. This worn-out abstraction can  become  something  startlingly  immediate in Roy’s hands. Throughout the film, one senses a search for the truth of Madhumati’s elusive, protean nature, evoked most sublimely in the sequence where Anand follows her fugitive figure into the mist, drawn on by the music of her anklets. At this level, the film suggests that we are witnessing an eternal game of desire and yearning, stretching across centuries and lives. As always in Hindi cinema, it is the lyric writer who grasps its mystical essence: Main nadiya phir bhi main pyaasi / Bhed ye gehra, baat zara si. I am a river, yet I am thirsty / Simple words, but a deep mystery.

Rajesh Devraj