Preetam also gets a monthly stipend for staying married to Anita but amidst all the chaos, they fall in love and, of course, Preetam refuses to divorce her. Seeta Devi unanimously decides to marry Anita off to Preetam (Guru Dutt), an unemployed cartoonist, but under the condition that he would divorce her when she demands it. Anita is torn between feminist ideals of her aunt and the society’s demands of being a housewife. But Anita is a traditionalist who falls in love at the drop of a hat and doesn’t care about her large fortune. She believes that with Anita becoming an heiress, depending on a man for a living is not required anymore as she can truly live however she wants. Her aunt Seeta Devi (Lalita Pawar), who is fighting for women’s rights, calls this arrangement lunatic. The film opens with Madhubala’s Anita who has come into a huge fortune but will only get access to that money if she gets married the next month. Starring Madhubala, Guru Dutt and Lalita Pawar in pivotal roles, Dutt’s 1955 film paints feminism as the curse from the western world that’s corrupting women’s minds and distracting them from their ‘duty’ of serving their husbands and making babies. While Amy knew that embracing a life as a married woman was her only choice, Madhubala’s Anita in Mr and Mrs 55 is just keen to get married and be a ‘grahini’ because that’s what an ‘adarsh bhartiya naari’ is supposed to do, even when she is shown a better way. Their society did not allow them to have agency of their life and thus, being married was their only option. When Amy March in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women talks about marriage being an economic proposition, you realise why women in that era had to get married to affluent men.
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