Bandini

Bandini (film)

Director: Bimal Roy

Review writer: Dr Usman Latif Khawaja

Cast: Nutan, Ashok Kumar, Dharmendra

Music by: Sachin Dev Burman

Cinematographer: Kamal Bose

A Bimal Roy production

Awards:

• 11th National Film Awards
 ◦ Best Feature Film in Hindi

• 11th Filmfare Awards
 ◦ Best Film: Bimal Roy
 ◦ Best Story: Jarasandha
 ◦ Best Actress: Nutan
 ◦ Best Director: Bimal Roy
 ◦ Best Cinematographer: Kamal Bose
 ◦ Best Sound: Dinshaw Billimoria

Bandini is a romantic triangle by Bimal Roy where a self-confessed nurse, played by Nutan, murders the wife of her ex-lover intentionally in a cold, calculating manner and is serving a life sentence in a prison in the British Raj!

Her ex-lover, Ashok, a freedom fighter who sings a song with her and is then ordered to marry a highly placed woman to extract information to free India, is absolutely shocked.

But the prison is actually a boon, as Kalyani, Nutan, sings with other prisoners and finds the dashing, handsomest-ever prison doctor in Dharmendra, who favours her and falls in love with her inexplicably!

A flashback: We are shown Kalyani living in a riverside village, where she is a lively girl with a father who is quite poor. She falls for Ashok, a terrorist freedom fighter, and both Dad and he refuse the marriage. After Ashok leaves Kalyani, the only daughter, runs away to the city and becomes a nurse!

The melodrama thickens as Daddy comes to the city to search for her and meets a fatal accident!

Kalyani wails and sheds mountains of glycerin, just as when Ashok leaves!

As a nurse, she is responsible for looking after Ashok Kumar's wife, but in anger and jealousy, she poisons her. Under the unyielding statutory codes of the British Raj, a forensic reality check confirms that the state would have absolutely, definitively marched her straight to the gallows!

When you check the absolute structural and moral core of the lega...