The only thing riskier than creating a women-centric movie in the early eighties of Bollywood's golden era, the era of the angry young men, was creating a women-centric movie about prostitutes, especially those whose roles weren't confined to self-pity and loathing.
Lucky for us, Shyam Benegal liked taking risks.
On the surface, Mandi is a funny, caricaturish movie about the lives of a group of women living in a brothel and headed by their madame, Rukmini Bai, as they go head to head with a restrictive, conservative society. But scratch at it some more, and you find an intricately woven mesh of society's double standards, the suffering of depraved women, and a fight for survival in a world that doesn't care about their existence.
The mother of the flock, Rukmini Bai, is a stead-fast and clever woman. When she is first introduced, she is the picturesque portrayal of what a mother should be, doting, caring, loving, and proud of her girls. Her prized possession, Zeenat, is a singer with a syrupy-sweet voice and a virginity that is yet to be broken into. And though Rukmini Bai treats her as a little, naive girl, Zeenat is well-aware of where she stays, who she stays with, and what they do.
The other girls, Kamli, Basanti, and Nadira are nothing extraordinary, and yet, contribute to the intrinsic identity of the kotha. Kamli, who is a mother, Nadira, who is a no-nonsense, blunt woman and a long-time confidante of Rukmini Bai, and Basanti, who is a silly, wide-eyed dancer plagued by envy toward Zeenat. We are also introduced to Phoolmani, a deaf and dumb woman brought to the brothel on the pretence of marriage, who starts off as the only opposition to the brothel life and ends up being the saving grace for Rukmini Bai. And though watching these women interact with each other, form dynamics of their own, and go through the daily chaos of the brothel is hilarious, when the time is right, this so-called 'family' crumbles, and we are left wondering whether everything they shared, everything between them meant anything after all?
Here is where the beauty of Shyam Benegal's layered story-telling comes in.
The end is foreshadowed quite a bit in the movie, the point where Rukmini Bai is abandoned by her girls, and though we as watchers, consider it to be sarcasm and humour at the start of the movie, thinking naively, 'how will the girls even live without Rukmini Bai?', we are ultimately proved wrong.
Keeping aside the satirical plot of politics and corruption, the one thing that Benegal highlights is the survival instinct in each woman of the brothel.
Rukmini Bai is the matriarch, sure, but she is a businesswoman at the end of the day. And if it came to selling one of her girls for a good buck, she would do it without a second thought. Rukmini Bai is protective, not entirely because of her attachment to the girls, but because of the monetary value, they hold. And when the time is right, Zeenat would face the same fate as the other girls, or rather, when the price is right.
The girls see through this, and to some extent, understand and live with it. They know that as long as they can print cash for Bai, she will keep them around. They stick around until they have nothing else. But toward the end of the movie, when Zeenat abandons Rukmini Bai, and the girls begin to find their own motivations, there is nothing stopping them from leaving Bai. Nadira, who so cold-heartedly (logically, would be the word) turns Bai away from her own brothel, Basanti, who leaves for the city with the photographer, and Kamli, who has her own two children to raise.
This brings us to the question of how much of a family the women really were. But the answer seems simple, and something unspoken, yet understood by all women in the brothel. They were fond of each other, attached to each other, and to some extent, loved each other— but only conditionally. And with this seed of thought planted in your mind, Benegal ends the movie on a rather ambiguous note.