Gulzar’s Mere Apne talks about the epidemic of loneliness that swallows people of all ages

Movies with political undertones aren’t a strong suit of present day filmmakers. With the political climate in the country, and also the swift-footed boycott trends and their real-world consequences, makers believe it is best to not engage in anything that might even seem remotely political. However, that wasn’t the case always. Until a couple of decades ago, arts frequently questioned and called out the governments through their art. Depending on the people at the helm, this was either understood or suppressed. Be it the fading optimism of the post-independence decade in the 1950s, the ill effects of war in the 1960s, and the extreme anger that the youth was starting to wear like a badge of honour in the 1970s – films embraced them all. One such film that spoke about the issues of the time, while merging them with an equally horrifying realisation of exential crisis in the form of loneliness was Gulzar’s Mere Apne.
Releasing in 1971, Mere Apne starred Meena Kumari in one of her last film roles, along with Vinod Khanna and Shatrughan Sinha, who were both fairly new at the time. In the five decades since, a lot of discourse around Mere Apne discusses the film’s political stance. The severe unemployment that brought the youth to the streets, the manipulative politicians whose agendas served no one, and the deep-rooted casteism that the society around us has embraced as its second nature. But apart from all of this, Mere Apne spoke about the epidemic that has impacted our society — loneliness.

Gulzar’s Mere Apne follows the story of an old woman named Anandi, played an excellent Meena Kumari, who longs for a family. With her husband passing away when he was relatively young and no children, Anandi has lived a solitary life. So much so that the moment someone tells her that they care about her, she is ready to leave her life behind just so she doesn’t have to be alone. As Anandi finds out that the promise of a family does not guarantee happiness, she is back in her lonely void where she meets Vinod Khanna’s Shyam. He thrives on his machismo, but in fact, has been rejected the society. Shatrughan Sinha’s Chhenu too lives a purposeless exence that pushes him to create conflict, even when there is none. Anandi and Shyam are complete strangers until one day, he calls her nani maa, just out of respect, and she finds her family in him. The larger arc of Mere Apne follows these incomplete individuals who are constantly on the lookout for the missing pieces of the puzzle.
Shatrughan Sinha and Vinod Khanna in a still from Mere Apne. (Photo: Express Archives)
The film has Shyam and Chhenu at loggerheads with each other. In a significant scene, one of the boys from Chhenu’s group is beaten up Shyam’s friends. As Anandi bandages his foot, she tells the boys to live like brothers because after all, they are all her sons. It is here that you realise that all she wants is a united family, and even though the boys can’t manage to say it, they crave it too.
Mere Apne’s soul lies in its title song ‘Koi Hota Jisko Apna’ music director Salil Choudhury, sung Kishore Kumar and written Gulzar. While the film presents it in a romantically tragic context, it summarises the theme of the film – the need to not be lonely.

Mere Apne was the Hindi adaptation of Tapan Sinha’s Apanjan and became the first film that Gulzar directed. On the film’s 50th anniversary, Gulzar shared with The Quint that he had originally written the Hindi version for Sinha but after he dropped the idea, Gulzar was called for a script narration the producer where he asked if he could direct the film. He shared that with Meena Kumari’s frail health at the time, he dropped a song from the film as she was in no condition to come to the sets. The film also marked the debuts of Danny Denzongpa, Paintal, Dinesh Thakur, Asrani and Dinesh Thakker, who later became popular in the movies.
Mere Apne was a commercially successful film at the time and was appreciated widely for its storytelling. More than 50 years later, the germ of the film’s idea still makes sense even though many of its minor elements have become dated. In Gulzar’s later works like Aandhi, Maachis among others, there has always been strong political commentary and it appears as though with Mere Apne, the director had found the right tone to mix socially conscious storytelling with the emotional journey of its characters.