life of such a person; it is a quick sketch done with the help of convention and cliche. This is not to say that the author has no sympathy for him. Such a person might even suggest nobility. Nevertheless he is and remains a type. The third convention is caricature. The major difference between typage and caricature is the lack of sympathy in the author for the latter. Caricature makes exaggerated use of the ridiculous traits of a person. Subjects which have always been caricatured in art can be transformed into characters only when the author has a compassion for human kind. Bunuel's dwarves and Genet's homosexuals and thieves have been other authors' caricatures. Bunuel and Genet turn them into characters. All the three conventions we have looked at are based on the idea of integrated personality. Those artists who do not work for this basic assumption of character must be judged by criteria other than those of realism. * * * * * * In Indian cinema, the woman is generally a caricature. When a woman smokes and is influenced by Western ways, then she is the moll, the vamp, the spoilt rich girl. The only other kind of woman is the ideal mother, wife or sister. But Chhoti Bahu in Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam is the creation of an artist who has a deep compassion. Who or what is Chhoti Bahu? She is proud and falls at her husband's feet. She is chaste and becomes her husband's prostitute. With no help but liquor at the end, she is pure as driven snow. She is faithful to her husband and sheis Bhootnath's beloved. She is an ascetic who drenches herself in every kind of sensuous pleasure. Voluptuous, marble-skinned, ebony-haired, dressed in gold and silver, she has unfathomable eyes,and a voice that arouses every pore in the skin. She is limpid but also a skeleton, surreptitiously hidden away underground. She is the life force irresistably drawn to its own death. Amongst the innumerable cardboard women in Indian art, idolized as goddesses or exploited as objects, enshrined or raped, Chotti Bahu stands out, a vibrant, living combination of contradictions, exposing the hypocrisy that lies at the root of the creation of all other women. And in the feudal ethos in which she lived, such contradictions become tragic. In none of Guru Dutt's other tragic-melodramatic works does the conflict between historic circumstance and personal compulsions emerge as powerfully as it does in this film. 62 January - March 1983