Ghosts of the rich

The dominant image of Luchino Visconti's 1963 film The Leopard - set during the Italian Risorgimento, when aristocrats began to be supplanted by the rising middle classes - is that of the old prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster in a super performance) wandering about his palace, contemplating the end of a world he once bestrode like a colossus. Satyajit Ray's Jalsaghar, about a music-loving zamindar living his last days alone in a mansion, has similar depictions of fading grandeur - a spider scuttling across a large portrait of royalty, a disused chandelier collecting cobwebs and dust. More recently, in Vikramaditya Motwane's lush Lootera, set in the post-Independence years, another old zamindar tries to maintain his composure and dignity as the government reclaims treasures bequeathed to his ancestors by the East India Company 200 years earlier.

These are all gorgeous-looking films about once-rich people in the process of losing their privileges, being swept away in the face of a more egalitarian, less genteel world. In principle, the change depicted in these movies is a welcome one for anyone with a liberal sensibility - it symbolises the coming of equal opportunity, democracy, even soft socialism. It is worth wondering then: how do these films succeed in evoking a quiet, melancholic sympathy for the fall of billionaires and their lifestyles?

One answer is that human responses to such things are complex; regardless of one's ideological position, it is possible to feel a small aesthetic pang about the withering away of grand havelis and the dispersing of valuables that seemed to belong together in a special treasure room. More important, these films are ultimately about people whom it is possible to relate to at an individual level. The landlords and royals shown here may have benefitted from excessive privilege throughout their lives, but they also have likable human qualities - appreciation for music and the other arts among them. And they were, after all, to the manor born. Having only ever known one way of life, they are now - at an advanced, vulnerable age - seeing that way of life slipping away. Even with the most meritocratic worldview, one can still feel for their personal predicaments. Underlying this is the bitter pill of the knowledge that even the beneficiaries of the new order - the people who might appear to deserve their place in the sun - can become just as corrupt and exploitative; that this change doesn't mean a final victory of good over evil; obscenely affluent people will always be around anyway.

Some films about the old rich and the nouveau riche circling each other tentatively are also doomed love stories, which adds to their human appeal - while reminding us that denizens of an old world can become like ghosts when the new world arrives. Lootera has a great shot of the disconsolate zamindar, shortly after he learns he has been deceived, framed at the entrance of a tunnel dug by crooks who were posing as archaeologists - it is visual shorthand for a man in his grave, and it is the last time we see him in the film. Simultaneously his daughter is betrayed by a young man who is a symbol of modern times, and though the film does everything it can to convince us that they really do love each other, one constantly gets the sense that these two people don't even exist in the same dimension - they come from such vastly different backgrounds, their destinies are so unlinked.

There is an even subtler relationship in Abrar Alvi's Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam. The tragic protagonist Chhoti Bahu (Meena Kumari) - daughter-in-law of a zamindar family falling on bad times - forges an emotional bond with a lower-class man named Bhoothnath (Guru Dutt), but there is never any pretence that this relationship has a future, or that they can even acknowledge romantic feelings for each other. Chhoti Bahu eventually comes to a sad end, but even when she and her haveli are "alive", there is something otherworldly about them - much like the prince of Salina in The Leopard watching the young people dance around him, or like the zamindar in Jalsaghar gazing into an unpolished mirror with a puzzled expression, as if wondering if the great days of his past were an elaborate dream.

Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer