‘Gulmohar’ is a Love Note to Delhi that Once Was, and an Ode to ‘Monsoon Wedding’

Gulmohar

Cast: Sharmila Tagore, Manoj Bajpayee, Simran Rishi Bagga, Amol Palekar, Suraj Sharma, Jatin Goswami, Santhy, Chandan Roy

Direction: Rahul V. Chittella

Rating: ***1/2

Streaming on Disney + Hotstar

A Jamini Roy painting hangs on a wall in the living room of Gulmohar Villa. It’s of a woman in a white saree with a thin blue-red border. She has red lips and fish-shaped eyes without pupils. Roy titled it Nirmala.

In any other house, the painting would evoke curiosity and the question, “Print hai, ya original?” 

But in Gulmohar Villa – which sits on a large, green plot of land in a posh Delhi colony, at a considerable, formal distance from the main gate – an original Jamini Roy matches the aesthetics and class of its owners, the Batras.

Kusum Batra (Sharmila Tagore), her son Arun (Manoj Bajpayee), and his wife Indu (Simran) are the old raees of Delhi and the “print or original” question feels churlish, the sort that would make the well-appointed villa roll its eyes. 

But the film Gulmohar, which director Rahul V. Chittella has co-written with Arpita Mukherjee, will forever find itself tackling questions about its own identity.

Chittella has had a long association with director Mira Nair. Creative and production partner on The Reluctant Fundamentalist and A Suitable Boy, he is now producing the Monsoon Wedding Broadway musical. And Gulmohar‘s story, he has said in interviews, was triggered and inspired by Nair’s old Delhi house and her decision to sell it to a builder.

Chittella spent time in that house and his film is as much a love note to that house and to a Delhi that was, as it is to Monsoon Wedding which was set in that Delhi.

We meet the Batras on an evening when their larger parivaar and friends have gathered in Gulmohar Villa’s living room. Drinks and snacks are being served. Everyone is talking, at the same time. Some conversations are loud, others are hushed. We catch most of it despite cinematographer Eeshit Narain’s dizzy, distracting camera.

The Batras are Punjabi, moneyed, classy and dysfunctional in the usual ways. They have lived in Gulmohar Villa for 34 years and we gather that there’s some irritation over a decision that has been made. 

Kusum is selling the villa and they are moving to Gurgaon, to a large glass-and-granite apartment in a tall building in a gated community. The apartment has a stunning but cold view of the glitzy, hyper and dystopian landscape of Gurgaon. 

Kusum seems happy and nervous, and in between sipping brandy, she announces that she will not be moving to Gurgaon. She has bought a house in Pondicherry and is headed there.   

For Kusum, it’s the next chapter in her life, the last one. But for her son, Arun, it’s rejection, a break-up, especially since his son Aditya (Suraj Sharma) has also announced that he, along with his wife, will be moving to a rented pad. 

Like Monsoon Wedding, Gulmohar too has a lot of interest in the love lives of the help. 

From the living room, it follows the maid, Reshma (Santhy), to the kitchen area and the servant quarters. There we meet Jeetu (Jatin Goswami) the guard and Puran (Chandan Roy). Reshma is educated, Jeetu is uneducated, and Puran is the pragmatic gyaani. There’s a love ka chakkar and Puran has views he shares. 

The film often steps out of Gulmohar Villa, sometimes to spend time with Aditya as he struggles to get funding for his IT startup, and sometimes with Arun’s daughter, Amrita (Utsavi Jha), who is having a relationship and identity crisis.  

It also goes to meet Kusum’s dead husband’s brother, Sudhakar (Amol Palekar), and when he comes to Gulmohar Villa, we watch him flinch from Reshma as she offers him a glass of water. 

It’s with these characters that the film establishes its political credentials. There’s talk of Urdu, a dinner-table discussion about rightwing politics, IT companies that profit from conflict and chaos. Gulmohar is sharply secular, liberal, but it keeps it all subtle, genteel. 

As packers arrive and boxes of stuff are being loaded onto trucks, an old hand-written letter changes everything. And Arun, who calls Kusum “Mumma” and often stops on his way to work to have chai at Premi Dhaba (run by an old man played by Vinod Nagpal), begins to unravel.

Monsoon Wedding explored several things, including sexual abuse by family members. Gulmohar is about ties and rifts, blood and bonds. It explores relationships – fathers and sons, sons and mothers – and the homes we grow up in.

Gulmohar is a good-looking film, and has an elegant personality of its own. The film is often heart-warming, but it also has flaws that irritate. 

Its style, color-palate, and characters feel too familiar. Almost as if it’s the young, next-generation niece of Monsoon Wedding that wants to be like badi didi.

Gulmohar shares too many uncles, aunties, stories, clothes, memories and family heirlooms with the 2001 film. And though it manages to break out of the tall shadow of Monsoon Wedding thanks to the performances of its excellent cast, the strange thing is that Gulmohar is also most endearing when it stays close to badi didi.

Every time the film moves away from Gulmohar Villa to spend time with the next generation, Aditya and Amrita, it dips.

Sharmila Tagore, 78, returns to acting after 12 years with Gulmohar. She is luminous and her dimples still make the screen glow. But the camera treats her with too much deference, as if she were its friend’s mummy he has a massive crush on.

That’s why I loved the naughty sparkle in her eyes when she bites her lips while recalling a college romance. In that blink-and-gone moment, her character’s humanity leaps out and touches us.

Simran Rishi Bagga, who plays Sharmila’s elegant St. Stephen’s-educated bahu Indu, is excellent and looks stunning in handloom sarees. Manoj Bajpayee, as always, is also very good, though Amol Palekar’s rigid, unshakeable malevolence is more powerful. 

Jatin Goswami, Santhy and Chandan Roy are quite fabulous and are able to keep us interested in their lives despite still-fresh memories of marigold-chewing Dubeyji (Vijay Raaz), and Alice (Tillotama Shome). 

But for me the film’s best performance is by Gulmohar Villa, played by a house in Golf Links.

Gulmohar Villa is like a sentinel of Delhi that watched from its grilled windows and washed balconies not just many summers, winters, springs and monsoons, but the changing times, passing of eras.

It looked at Delhi as much as Delhi looked at it with aspiration, respect and mild jealousy. 

Gulmohar Villa is at once a part of and exemplifies what Delhi’s charm and aspiration used to be at one time, and the problematic, insular precursor to gated complexes.

Despite all its flaws, I liked Gulmohar because it is a film with a dhadakta dil. Its heart sometimes races with Arun’s rage, at times it freezes when his hands shake, and sometimes it slows down to look at Kusum as she shuts the door to her room, turning away from the house, family and life she built. 

It’s a film about the things we leave behind, the memories we take along, the past loves we try to rekindle, the broken bonds we let go of, and the new memories we are suddenly told we need to start making. 

In Gulmohar, life moves forward after tears and hugs, but as it does so, it carries in its heart a Gulmohar Villa-shaped numb spot, a part of Delhi that once was.