The film is broadly based on the Marathi-language memoirs, Sangtye Aika of the well-known Marathi stage and screen actress of the 1940s Hansa Wadkar, who led a flamboyant and unconventional life, and focuses on an individual's search for identity and self-fulfilment.

[2] Bhumika tells the life story of an actress, Usha (Smita Patil), the granddaughter of a famous female singer of the old tradition from the Devadasi community of Goa.

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.

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 is himself in (unrequited) love with her.

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.

Verbally and physically abused by her husband and periodically obliged to live in a hotel, separated from her daughter and mother, the desperately unhappy actress 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.

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.

[4][5][6] The song 'Baju re Mondar' is sung by two stalwart vocalists of Hindustani classical music, Saraswati Rane daughter of Ustad Abdul Karim Khan of Kirana gharana, and Meena Fatherpekar her granddaughter.

All music is composed by Vanraj BhatiaIn the scene after the marriage of Usha and Keshav, the song 'Ek bangla bane nyara' from the movie President (1937 film) sung by K.L.

You don’t want to live here, I’ll send you back even now.” This zamindar was a gentle, principled man who was soft-spoken but firm, as he laid all his cards before the woman, Smita Patil.