Written by Mayukh Sen
Illustrations by Hana Iqbal
Stills from Julie (1975)

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It is the middle of the night. A baby is crying. A mother wanders the streets of a village, asking for food. A passerby asks why she doesn’t nurse her wailing child. She responds with earnest desperation: Hunger has dried up the milk in her breast. The scene is from K.S. Sethumadhavan’s Julie (1975), and it startled me when I rewatched the movie recently.

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Julie eschewed the grammar of most other Bollywood smashes of that era, a relatively humanist film in a time when most moviegoers preferred to feast on popcorn masala. Its titular character is Julie, an Anglo-Indian teenage girl who has a child out of wedlock with a Bengali Brahmin man. That Julie—Christian and mixed-race—comes from a persecuted religious and racial minority compounds the shame of her pregnancy, forcing her to place her child in an orphanage. That night, from her bedroom window, she overhears the yowls of the crying baby whose mother wanders the streets. Julie is despondent, reminded of her own child. Her breast wets with milk, staining her nightie, as she longs for the son whom she cannot hold. 

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I wasn’t alive when Julie was first released; I was born seventeen years later. But it became a minor obsession of mine as a kid in the aughts. Beyond its propulsive melodramatic flourishes, its themes—of the ostracization and ridicule of an unwed teenage mother, especially one from a marginalized community—carried the scent of the forbidden and taboo. It felt like uncharted territory to me. 

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In retrospect, it’s something of a miracle that a film like Julie became such a sensation in Hindi cinema. To borrow the parlance of the time, it was a superhit. 

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Unlike Ramesh Sippy’s buddy flick Sholay (1975), Julie has no item numbers, no shootouts, no testosterone-fueled paeans to male dost. Beyond its healthy box office returns, Julie earned Filmfare Awards—a telltale sign populist appeal at the time—for its music along with South Indian star Lakshmi and the actress Nadira, who played her mother. 

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And yet, the film has had to settle for the status of cult classic—to borrow the term some Indian outlets have used—beloved by a small but mighty few. Sridevi fans might cherish it for being one of her first forays into Bollywood; already a star down South at this point, she’d play the ancillary role of Julie’s little sister in this film when she was just 11 years old. Or it may hold a special place in the hearts of 70s Bollywood music lovers, who may recognize Kishore Kumar’s swoony “Dil Kya Kare,” in which Julie’s boyfriend, Shashi, tells her how hard it is to squelch desire even if it flouts societal rules, or “My Heart Is Beating,” sung fully in English by Preeti Sagar, in which Julie takes a few swigs of whisky and dances with her family, as if portending that whatever joy they experience as a unit will be short-lived. 

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Otherwise, though, the film has slid out of conversations about that vital decade in Hindi cinema. It’s no surprise—the story’s themes, so discordant from not only 70s Bollywood but even that of modern day, are the kind that dominant memory often sidelines.

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The songs were the gateway: I first heard some of Julie’s numbers on a DVD, purchased from a local Indian video store in New Jersey that compiled the songs of Kishore Kumar. I found them enchanting, even though my parents did not rate Julie very highly. My father was a snob who preferred the output of great Bengali directors like Ritwik Ghatak to Bollywood films, while my mother thought the film was an overwrought slog. Still, my mother acknowledged the film’s importance, recalling the stir it caused in her college circles—once I watched the film for myself, it was partially her memory that helped the film hold a unique appeal in my mind. 

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Most Bollywood films I watched from subsequent eras—especially the 90s and aughts—seemed engineered for maximum family entertainment, like the indefatigably peppy products by Yash Raj Films and Karan Johar. And when Bipashu Basu bared her legs in the erotic thriller Jism (2003), this did not seem to open minds—rather, it provoked whispers of her “vulgarity” at get-togethers with other Bengali families, as if she were besmirching our people with such forthright displays of her sexuality. 

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Some of Julie’s sights, then, scandalized me: “Bhool Gaya Sab Kuch,” a precoital duet sung by Kishore Kumar and Lata Mangeshkar, features a sequence in which Julie disrobes, her clothes piling up in her lover’s bedroom before she envelops her naked body in a bedsheet. Every Bollywood film I’d seen prior to that point seemed so chaste, so timid in comparison. 

Other sequences enlightened me with their frankness about the pressures Julie faced being on Indian society’s fringes. This movie had a bracing honesty I didn’t find easily in other Bollywood films. In one of the film’s first scenes, Julie, wearing skirts that barely graze her knees, swats off the lecherous advances of a man who ogles her. He reads her Anglo-Indian identity as a sexual invitation, as if this were a signpost for her promiscuity. She has a fractious family life: Her father, who works on the railways, is an alcoholic, while her mother, feeling displaced in post-1947 India, pines to go to England, struggling to yoke herself to a firm national identity. 

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Discrimination due to their Anglo-Indian heritage, after all, is routine. Shashi’s upper-caste Hindu mother despises her. “These Christians are so filthy,” she laments. In another scene, she conspiratorially claims that the aim of Anglo-Indians is to reduce India’s Hindu population by serving them cakes with eggs. 

Julie’s pregnancy sends her life into a tailspin. Her mother, who observes religious creeds with the strictness of a schoolmarm, nearly keels over when Julie tells her that a child is growing in her belly. After deciding against an abortion, she sends her daughter off to stay with an elderly Christian lady. That auntie takes Julie in as her own daughter, mothering her through her pregnancy, often addressing her as “my child.” 

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There is a glut of tragedy—Julie’s father dies of complications relating to his addiction; Julie delivers the baby shortly after, only for her mother to shuttle the newborn off to an orphanage. Even as a child, what I found most touching, even revolutionary about this film, is how Julie did not exile its main character to a life of eternal misery—eventually, Julie finds happiness. The film is a portrait of a survivor. 

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I’ll confess that, despite my adolescent affection for the film, I hadn’t thought much about Julie until recently, when I began writing a biography of the Indian-born Old Hollywood actress Merle Oberon. Like Julie and her family, Oberon was Anglo-Indian. Julie accomplished so much of what I sought to achieve in writing this book: to portray the clear-eyed reality of Anglo-Indian life with empathy, rather than condescension or judgment.

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Coming of age in pre-independence Calcutta (now Kolkata) in the 1910s and 20s, Oberon was born into gut-churning violence. A child of rape, Oberon was raised by her maternal grandmother to avoid scandal befalling the family. She spent her life not knowing that her sister was in fact her birth mother. 

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Like Julie, Oberon had to engage in her own kind of concealment for survival. In Bengal, she was the target of discrimination from British folks who taunted her for what they termed her “chi-chi” accent—a common derogatory label for Anglo-Indians—as well as from other South Asians who considered her unassimilable, because she carried the genetic mark of the oppressor. She grew up in poverty, like many other Anglo-Indians in the city. 

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Oberon’s desire to leave India for the greener pastures of the United Kingdom and the United States grew as she became older, but hostile immigration laws abroad dictated she continue to move in stealth. By the time Oberon began her screen career in the 1930s, studio bosses forced her to disavow her roots and claim she was born to European aristocrats on the Australian island of Tasmania. Being a leading lady would otherwise have been impossible for Oberon in a time of hideous racism in Anglo-American cinema, which actively curtailed opportunities for performers of color or reduced them to window dressing (think one-scene maids or vamps).

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Oberon, despite rising above the circumstances of her upbringing in India—even receiving a nomination for an Academy Award—had a tragic life in many ways. She continued to publicly deny her heritage throughout her life. She died at 68 in 1979, a year after a disastrous visit to her fictional birthplace of Tasmania, where the absence of birth records made people suspect she was hiding the truth and resulted in a breakdown for Oberon. Her own mother died just over a year later without disclosing the truth of a teenage pregnancy, unable to tell anyone that her firstborn daughter had become an Oscar-nominated star abroad. 

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The resilience of both mother and daughter astounds me: Imagine the strength needed to get through each day while carrying a secret you were forced to keep for your survival. As I retraced Oberon’s early, difficult life in British India as well as the divergent paths of her and her mother, Julie kept reentering my mind. 

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I thought back to my childhood fascination with that film. Cinematic depictions of Anglo-Indians in Hindi film were few, especially compared to other regional cinemas like Bengali cinema. Julie was one of the notable exceptions to Hindi cinema’s general disregard for Anglo-Indian stories. 

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I rewatched Julie last year. The beauty of this film, I’ve come to realize, is that it corrects the record. By the film’s end, Julie, bereft without her son, reunites with her child, whom her boyfriend Shashi’s family scoops up from the orphanage. She and Shashi decide to get married, despite the censure that an interfaith marriage will provoke. Mothers on both sides come around: Shashi’s mother eases her prejudice towards Julie’s Christian family, while Julie’s mother decides to stay in India and embrace her grandchild. 

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A vision of a secular India, in which Christians and Hindus can coexist, is realized. Julie, in other words, had a happy ending. Oberon’s story didn’t, despite the great triumphs of her career—nor did her mother’s.

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This may be why I treasure this movie most of all now: It gave Julie the dignity that history couldn’t give Anglo-Indian women like Merle Oberon and her mother Constance Joyce Selby.

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Mayukh Sen is the author of Taste Makers (2021). His biography of the actress Merle Oberon, Love Queenie, will be out from W.W. Norton & Company in winter 2025. 

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