I first saw Bhumika when I was in my college. Now, last week I saw it again from a DVD. And the movie actually is haunting me still. This is not about Usha, not about just the 'Role-playing' (like say, the Gita motif is going to hit you hard: that this reality is nothing but a show, where everyone is just going to play on and on and on everyone's role), it is a movie, that most probably went beyond what Benegal wanted it to be. It is extremely dense, multilayered in its depiction and enactment of coloniality. The colonial subject, Usha, suffering from the colonial lack of self-esteem goes on trying to discover and rediscover herself, only entangling herself into a new layer of coloniality. Why I am calling it 'colonial'? Just see the movie to understand it. Only a newer and more dense power can pluck her out of the older tangle. And that is just a new drama where she plays a new role. Nothing else. And some unfathomable depth and sublimity has come into the film, that is always beyond the conscious scheme of an artist. Great makers can wait for the moment of creation of a movie like that, but, one cannot ever know it before making a film like that.
