| Director | Shyam Benegal |
|---|
Bhumika depicts the life of an actress, Usha (Smita Patil), the granddaughter of a famous female singer of the traditional Devadasi community of Goa. Usha's mother (Sulabha Deshpande) is married to an abusive and alcoholic man. Following his early death, and over her mother's objections, Usha is taken to Bombay by family hanger-on Keshav Dalvi (Amol Palekar) to audition as a singer in a Bombay studio: the first step in a process, watched approvingly by Usha's doting grandmother and with horror by her mother, that will eventually carry her to on-camera adolescent stardom, and to an ill-fated love marriage with Keshav. Usha's motives for stubbornly pursuing this relationship (culminating in a pre-marital pregnancy) with the unattractive and much older Keshav — who appears to have lusted after her since her childhood — are not spelled out. Presumably, she either feels indebted to him for his loyalty to her family (of which he frequently reminds her) and for her own worldly success; or simply views him as a means to escape her abusive home. She is also a headstrong woman who enjoys her acting career and is bent on challenging her uptight mother (who opposes the match because Keshav does not belong to their caste, just as she opposes cinema itself because of its presumed disrepute).
Once the two are wed, Usha is shocked to find Keshav continuing to act as her "business manager", arranging starring roles for her opposite heartthrob Rajan (Anant Nag), who himself has (unrequited) love for her. Since Keshav's own business is unsuccessful, he remains entirely dependent on Usha's earnings – a fact that Keshav resents. He thus becomes both a jealous husband with a fragile ego and nasty temper, as well as a greedy pimp who compels his wife to take risqué work despite her dislike of her co-star and her protests that she "only wants to be a housewife" now that their daughter has been born. Not surprisingly, the relationship becomes increasingly poisoned, particularly by Keshav's suspicion (fed by star-magazine gossip) that she is having an affair with Rajan, which is partly true.
Verbally and physically abused by her husband and periodically obliged to live in a hotel, separated from her daughter and mother, the desperately unhappy Usha eventually instigates two unsatisfying liaisons: with the nihilistic and self-centered director Sunil Verma (Naseeruddin Shah), with whom she plots a double-suicide (which he foils), and then with the wealthy businessman Vinayak Kale (Amrish Puri), who keeps her as a pampered mistress on his palatial estate. Here Usha briefly finds a kind of "respectability" as a de facto second wife, earning a measure of love and admiration from Kale's mother (Dina Pathak), son, and bedridden wife — but (as she learns one day when she tries to take the boy to a nearby fair) at the cost of even the most rudimentary freedom. Unable to abide by Kale's feudal patriarchal rules, she finds her only hope of escape in the intervention of her still-legitimate husband, the hated Keshav, who promptly brings her back to a Bombay festooned with billboards of her own face, and to the same drab hotel and lonely prospects. Kale's bitter wife remarks to Usha as the latter prepares to leave, "The beds change, the kitchens change. Men's masks change, but men don't change." Usha's daughter, now grown-up, invites Usha to live with her and her husband, but Usha refuses. The movie ends with Usha, alone in her hotel room, receiving a phone call from Rajan.