PALLAVI

1976 128’ b&w Kannada

d/s P. Lankesh pc Indira Lankesh Prod. c S. Ramchandra m Rajeev Taranath

lp Vimala Naidu, T.S. Seetaram, P. Lankesh, Pandu, Shashidhar, Shankara Swamy, Parvathavani

For his film debut, the noted Kannada novelist Lankesh tells of Shanta (Naidu), a bouncy university teenager who wants to grow her hair as long as that of Vyjayanthimala and is as idealistic as her boyfriend Chandru. The two apply for the same job, which Shanta gets. She eventually marries her boss, Jagannathan (Lankesh), but continues working. Her old boyfriend suddenly resurfaces, a fugitive from justice, and accuses her of having sold out in return for security. The film tells her life story in flashback, returning to the present to show the boyfriend being caught by the cops.

  RUSHYA SHRINGA

1976 112’col Kannada

d/sc V.R.K. Prasad pc Young Cinema st/lyr Chandrasekhar Kambhar from his play dial G.V. Iyer c S. Ramchandra

m B.V. Karanth

lp Rathna, Suresh Heblikar, Sundarshree, Kavitha, Shanta, Swarnamma

Melodrama derived from a a contemporary adaptation of a myth. In a rainless village, a demon possesses the headman and the local deity prophesies that only Balappa can solve the problem. On his arrival, Balappa embarrasingly fails until he meets his father’s ghost. When he takes on the headman, the man’s wife appears as a goddess, gives him a necklace and tells him that if he sleeps with a virgin wearing the necklace, the rain will come. Eventually Balappa does indeed bring rain and rids the village of its demon.

  SEETA KALYANAM

aka Seeta’s Wedding

1976 134’ col Telugu

d Bapu p P. Ananda Rao pc Ananda Lakshmi Art Movies sc/dial Mullapudi Venkatramana lyr Arudra, C. Narayana Reddy c K.S. Prasad, Ravikant Nagaich m K.V. Mahadevan

lp Ravi Kumar, Jayapradha, Sathyanarayana, Gummadi Venkateshwara Rao, Jamuna, K. Mukkamala, Mikkilineni, Kantha Rao, Thyagaraj, Hemalatha, P.R. Varalakshmi, Mamata

Bapu’s lavish and successful colour mythological with special effects supervised by the cinematographer and director Ravikant Nagaich and art direction by K. Nageshwara Rao, is one of the best-known 70s Telugu films in the genre. The story is the Ramayana tale leading up to the wedding between Rama (Kumar, who also plays the part of Vishnu) and the Princess Seeta (Jayapradha, who also plays Lakshmi). The villainous interloper is King Ravana (Sathyanarayana).

  SHESHA SHRABANA

1976 129’ col Oriya

d/sc Prashanta Nanda pc Shri Jagannath Films st Basanta Mahapatra’s play co-lyr Sibabrata Das co-lyr/m Prafulla Kar c Rajan Kinagi

lp Prashanta Nanda, Mahashweta, Mohammed Mohsin, Hemant Das, Banaja Mohanty

Oriya star Nanda’s successful directorial debut and the second Orissa colour film. The Brahmin woman Manika (Mahashweta in her screen debut) is rescued in a flood by the fisherman Sania (Nanda). When he takes her home, their class differences cause problems in the village. When the brutish village head tries to rape Manika, she jumps into the river and Sania goes insane.

  SILA NERANGALIL SILA MANITHARGAL

aka Some People Sometimes

1976 130’ b&w Tamil

d/sc A. Bhimsingh pc A.B.S. Prod. st/dial/lyr Jayakantan’s novel and the story Agnipravesam c D.S. Pandian m M.S. Vishwanathan

lp Laxmi, Srikanth, Y.G. Parthasarathy, Nagesh, Neelakantan, Rajasulochana, Sukumari, Sundaribai, Jai Geetha

Noted Tamil writer Jayakantan (cf. Kaval Daivam, 1969) wrote this novel as a justification for his ending of the controversial story Agnipravesham (Ordeal by Fire). The film incorporates both works. Ganga (Laxmi) is raped and the stigma condemns her to remain unmarried, living with her widowed mother (Sundaribai) where her uncle sexually harasses her. Years later she tracks down the rapist: Prabhu (Srikanth), a chain-smoking, wealthy, lower-caste businessman, married and father of a teenage daughter. Ganga insists on him being ‘her man’ although the relationship remains platonic. She refuses his suggestion that she marry an old middle-class widower. The film reproduces the novel’s long conversations but somewhat dilutes their impact: nadaswaram music, traditionally played during marriages, is played over the rape in the car, and at the end Ganga, dressed in white like a widow, is compared in a voice-over to the pure and serene Ganges. The acting by Laxmi and Sundaribai convey the force and the underlying bitterness of the story. The film was hailed for bringing Tamil film up to the level of quality literature and for showing a married man in a relationship with an unmarried woman. That he is also a rapist seems not to have been so important to the critics.

  SIRI SIRI MUVVA

1976 144’ col Telugu

d/st/sc K. Vishwanath pc Geetha Krishna Combines co-dial Jandhyala co-dial/lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy c V.S.R. Swamy m K.V. Mahadevan

lp Chandramohan, Jayapradha, Devadas, ‘Sakshi’ Rangarao, Ramaprabha, Kavitha, Satyanarayana, Allu Ramalingaiah

The first of Vishwanath’s several ‘classical’ musicals (cf. Shankarabharanam, 1979) is a love story between Hema (Jayapradha), a pretty deaf-mute dancer, and Samba (Chandramohan), a talented drummer. Their love has to overcome the prejudices suffered by the disabled woman, esp. from her stepmother. The film has 10 songs and was a hit mainly for Mahadevan’s music. Remade by the director in Hindi as Sargam (1979) starring Rishi Kapoor and Jayapradha.

  SONBAINI CHUNDADI

1976 152’ col/scope Gujarati

d/sc Girish Manukant pc R.J. Films st Kantilal Jagjivan Mehta’s play lyr/m Avinash Vyas c Rajen Kapadia

lp Dilip Patel, Ranjitraj, Sohil Virani, Narayan Rajgor, Premshankar Bhatt, Jay Patel, Ashvin Patel, Girija Mitra, Anjana, Vrinda Trivedi, Parul Parekh, Priti Parekh

Adapted from Mehta’s stage version of a gruesome Gujarati folk legend addressing early capitalism and the fragmentation of the feudal joint family. Four of the little Son’s seven brothers leave home in search of employment, leaving Son’s cruel sister-in-law Bhadra free to inflict her tyranny upon the remaining members of the family. One of her brothers-in-law, Shambhu, is killed but his ghost reappears to try to protect the defenceless Son. Bhadra and her new lover try to kill her but in the process her own son loses his life. Eventually Bhadra too dies and the seven brothers reunite. A musical melodrama with 10 songs, and Gujarati cinema’s first CinemaScope film.

  THUNDER OF FREEDOM

1976 31’col English

d/c S. Sukhdev pc Films Division, Film-20 Series made with Gopal Maharesh, Govind Maharesh, B.L. Maisuriya, M. Michael, Salim Sheikh

Sukhdev’s Emergency propaganda documentary is the best known of the Film-20 series illustrating the benefits of Indira Gandhi’s Twenty-point Economic Programme. Shot mainly in and around New Delhi, the film presents the pre-Emergency period as riddled with riots and disruptions, in which ‘almost anyone’ could bring all legal processes to a standstill. It interviews a factory owner who praises the absence of labour agitation and two noted journalists, Dileep Padgaonkar and Abu Abraham, both of whom express some doubt about the loss of fundamental human rights while agreeing that the breakdown of the State infrastructure prior to the Emergency was not a situation to which the country would wish to return.

  AGRAHARATHIL KAZHUTHAI

aka Agraharathil Oru Kazhuthai aka Donkey in a Brahmin Village

1977 96’ b&w Tamil

d/co-p/co-sc John Abraham co-p Charly John pc Nirmiti Films co-sc Venkat Swaminathan dial Sampath c Ramchandra m M.B. Srinivasan

lp M.B. Srinivasan, Swathi, Savitri, Raman Veerarghavan, Krishnaraj, S. Gopali, Rajan, Sri Lalitha, Lalithambal, Narasimhan, Thilairajan

Abraham’s 2nd feature, his only one in Tamil, is an acid satire told in an innovative, surreal narrative style making excellent use of repetitions for comic effect, on brahminical bigotry and superstition. It was shot around Kunrathur near Chingelpet and at the Loyola College in Madras. A donkey strays into the brahminical enclave in a village and is adopted as a pet by Prof. Narayanaswami (Srinivasan). Ridiculed by his caste fellows, he asks the mute village girl Uma (Swathi) to look after it. When the girl’s stillborn baby is deposited outside the temple, the donkey is blamed and killed. Guilt then induces the priests to start seeing miracles. The dead donkey becomes an object of veneration and is ritually burned. In a symbolic sequence recalling Bunuel, the fire spreads and engulfs the entire village. Only the girl and the professor survive. Although Brahmin bigots tried to have the film banned, it is more a morality fable about innocence (Abraham claimed Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, 1966, as an inspiration) and guilt, recalling parts of Ajantrik (1957) by Abraham’s FTII teacher Ghatak. Although the film received a national award, the Tamil press ignored the film. Even in late 1989, Doordarshan thought it prudent to cancel a scheduled TV screening.

  AMAR AKBAR ANTHONY

1977 186’ col Hindi

d Manmohan Desai pc MKD Films st Mrs J.M. Desai sc Prayag Raj dial Kadar Khan lyr Anand Bakshi c Peter Pereira m Laxmikant-Pyarelal

lp Vinod Khanna, Rishi Kapoor, Amitabh Bachchan, Neetu Singh, Shabana Azmi, Parveen Babi, Nirupa Roy, Jeevan, Pran, Helen, Nadira, Pratima Devi, Madhumati

Desai’s breakthrough film started his long collaboration with Bachchan and established his characteristic style: a series of episodic ‘highlights’ (as the director describes them) edited into an extravagant fantasy spectacle. Hunted by Robert (Jeevan), the ex-convict Kishenlal (Pran) is forced to abandon his wife Bharati (Roy) and his three sons who get separated by a combination of fate and villainy. The sons grow up to become Amar (Khanna), raised by a Hindu cop; Akbar (Kapoor), looked after by a Muslim tailor; and Anthony (Bachchan), sheltered by a Catholic priest. The convoluted story has Kishenlal become a crime boss while gangsters led by Robert and his sidekick Zebisco interfere in the story on various occasions to trigger more action. A close friendship develops between the three brothers and their separated parents before the family is reunited. Starting with a pre-credit sequence where, in high-angle shots, all three heroes are seen simultaneously donating blood for their injured mother, each of them unaware of their relationship with the other, the plot merely provides a formal skeleton for the narrative spectacle. The substance of the movie is not in its ostensible plea for religious tolerance but in the Bachchan-dominated star turns, esp. the famous My name is Anthony Gonsalves song (by Kishore Kumar and Bachchan) that has Bachchan step out of an Easter egg, and his drunken dialogue with a mirror reflection. The film, which on one occasion involves divine intervention (when their mother Bharati’s eyesight is restored), ends with all three brothers in various disguises (cop Amar as a one-man band, Akbar as a tailor and Anthony as a priest) pursuing the same villains. Bachchan speaks in a dialect coloquially described as Bombay Hindi, a vernacular and body language usually associated with the city’s lumpenised underclass. The masquerade presented by the film helped create an autonomous cult image for the star which, because not anchored in a coherent narrative, could be deployed henceforth as a brand image in disparate contexts. The action sequences are shot rather perfunctorily.

Kamalahasan in Avargal

  AVARGAL

aka Characters

1977 167’ b&w Tamil

d/s K. Balachander pc Kalakendra Movies lyr Kannadasan c B.S. Lokanathan m M.S. Vishwanathan

lp Kamalahasan, Rajnikant, Ravi Kumar, Sujatha, Leelavathi, Kutty Padmini

Lovers Anu (Sujatha) and Bharani (Ravikumar) separate and Anu is forced to marry Ramnath (Rajnikant), the sadistic boss of her dying father. After she has a child she gets a divorce and finds a job in Madras. Her old lover Bharani is now her neighbour and their affair is resumed. Through all of this, she is supported by a Malayali clerk and ventriloquist Janardan (Kamalahasan), who also loves her. When her former husband reappears to destroy again her aspirations for a new life, her repentant mother-in-law (Leelavathi) stands by her, getting employed as her servant. In the end, abandoned once more, she leaves to start yet another life, this time with her mother-in-law.

  BABA TARAKNATH

1977 159’ b&w Bengali

d Sunil Bannerjee, Baren Chatterjee pc Sulochana Art Int. co-s/lyr Gouriprasanna Majumdar co-s/dial Bibhuti Mukherjee co-s Shantiranjan Ghosh Dastidar c Anil Gupta, Jyoti Laha m Neeta Sen

lp Sandhya Roy, Biswajeet, Sulochana Chatterjee, Gurudas Bannerjee, Sukhen Das, Anup Kumar

Bengali hit mythological comparable with the more famous Hindi Jai Santoshi Maa (1975). The film addresses the shrine of Taraknath (a version of Shiva) at Tarakeshwar, represented by a phallic stone over which pilgrims pour holy water. The extremely simplistically presented conflict between religion and science has an urban scientist (Biswajeet) marry a devout rural belle (Sandhya Roy) against his will. An astrologer foretells much misfortune, which comes true when the scientist, fed up with superstition, returns to his experiments with snake poison and is bitten by one of his snakes. The wife saves her husband by undertaking a long and hazardous pilgrimage to Tarakeshwar, where the deity sends a snake that sucks the poison out of her husband’s body. The film adhered to the tenets of the communal mythological e.g. linking religious faith and female chastity, and evoked the popular legend of Behula and Lakhinder from the Manasa Mangal, a legend promptly filmed within a month of Baba Taraknath’s success (Behula Lakhinder, 1977). Frenzied crowds attending screenings left their footwear outside and many poured the ritual water over a make-believe shrine in the theatre lobby. The film sparked a new wave of pilgrimages to the shrine, esp. by women.

  CHAANI

1977 134’[M]/136’[H] col Marathi/Hindi

d/sc/p V. Shantaram pc V. Shantaram Prod. st C.T. Khanolkar dial Vrajendra Gaud lyr Bharat Vyas c Shivaji Sawant m Hridaynath Mangeshkar

lp Ranjana, Sushant Ray, Yeshwant Dutt, Premkumar, Gauri Kamat, Durga Senjit, Arvind Deshpande

Shantaram intended the film to be part of New Indian Cinema’s vanguard, adapting a difficult work from the innovative contemporary Marathi writer C.T. Khanolkar. The story, written in 1970 and set on the Konkan coast, features a woman born of an ‘incident’ between an Englishman and a local fisherwoman, now only discussed as a hushed rumour except by a boatman who loudly curses the girl whenever he ferries his boat across the river. Shantaram’s garish colour photography and emphatic dialogue make the story into a bizarre calendar-art curiosity with a plump, blue-eyed, blonde fisherwoman (Ranjana), a caricature of the original literary character.

  CHAKRADHARI

aka Panduranga Mahima

1977 153’ col Telugu

d/sc V. Madhusudhana Rao pc Lakshmi Film Combines p N.R. Anuradha Devi dial/co-lyr Acharya Athreya co-lyr C. Narayana Reddy c P.S. Selvaraj m G.K. Venkatesh

lp A. Nageshwara Rao, Satyanarayana, Allu Ramalingaiah, Vanisree, Jayapradha, Ramaprabha, Vijayanirmala, Jayamalini, Rajababu

Saint film featuring the Marathi poet Gora Kumbhar (Nageshwara Rao), whose devotion to his god causes much hardship to his wife Lakshmi (Vanisree). It also leads to the death of their son, whom his god, descending to earth, brings back to life. The film included cabaret items by Jayamalini, indicating changes in the genre from its pre-Independence heyday.

  CHILAKAMMA CHEPPINDI

1977 155’ b&w Telugu

d Eranki Sharma pc Gopikrishna Int. sc K. Balachander dial Ganesh Patro lyr Athreya, Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy c B.S. Lokanathan m M.S. Vishwanathan

lp Narayana Rao, Rajnikant, Lakshmi Kant, P.L. Narayana, Sripriya, Sangeetha, Seetalatha, Lakshmi, Hemsunder

Melodrama about a village girl in the city. The heroine Malli (Sripriya) prompted by a fortune-teller, sets out to seek her fortune in the city. She is seduced by Madhu (Narayana Rao), who quickly abandons her when she becomes pregnant. Madhu’s man-hating sister Bharati (Sangeetha) initially helps her, but then abandons her when she falls in love with a neighbour. Eventually a chastened Malli finds happiness with Kasi (Rajanikant), a rural simpleton who loves her. Eranki Sharma’s debut was praised for its b&w photography and rustic songs.

  DAANA VEERA SHURA KARNA

1977 233’ col Telugu

d/s N.T. Rama Rao pc Ramakrishna Cine Studios dial/co-lyr Kondaveeti Venkata Kavi co-lyr C. Narayana Reddy, Dasarathi, Thirupati Venkatakavulu c Kannappa m M.S. Vishwanathan

lp N.T. Rama Rao, M. Satyanarayana, Rajanala, S. Varalakshmi, B. Saroja Devi, Sharada, Prabha, Mikkilineni, Dhulipala Sivarama Sastry, Kanchana, Deepa, Prabhakara Reddy, Balakrishna, K. Mukkamala

NTR’s best-known film as director is a mammoth mythological about the life of Karna, a character from the Mahabharata born to Kunti, brought up among the Kauravas and eventually killed in the great battle by Arjuna when his chariot wheel gets stuck in the ground. NTR plays three roles in this special-effects-laden movie: Krishna, Duryodhana and Karna. It was later resurrected as part of the propaganda for NTR’s Telugu Desam Party. After the film’s success, he directed himself in several multiple-role mythologicals e.g. Shri Rama Pattabhishekham (1978), he plays five roles in Shrimad Virat Veerabrahmendra Swamy Charitra (1984).

  DHARAM VEER

1977 165’ col Hindi

d Manmohan Desai pc S.S. Movietone st J.M. Desai, Pushpa Sharma sc Prayag Raj, K.B. Pathak dial Kadar Khan lyr Anand Bakshi, Vithalbhai Patel c N.V. Srinivas m Laxmikant-Pyarelal

lp Dharmendra, Jeetendra, Zeenat Aman, Neetu Singh, Pran, Indrani Mukherjee, Jeevan, Ranjeet, Sujit Kumar, Dev Kumar, Chand Usmani, Pradeep Kumar

A Manmohan Desai-style fairy-tale adventure story freely mixing elements from different film genres and historical periods. A lone hunter (Pran) secretly marries the maharani (Mukherjee) of a princely state. In a scene crying out for a psychoanalytic reading, a wild tigress manifests herself during their wedding night. The bride believes her husband to have died as a result and marries a more powerful man, a prince (P. Kumar). Before the maharani gives birth to twin boys, her husband is killed; his dying wish is that the boys’ parentage be kept secret. The twins are separated: Dharam (Dharmendra) is raised by a woodcutter while Veer (Jeetendra) becomes the heir-apparent to the throne. Unaware of their relationship, the two become buddies and go through a series of adventures. Dharam woos the haughty princess (Aman) of a neighbouring kingdom and Veer falls for a gypsy girl (Singh). The maharani’s evil brother (Jeevan) provides complications to the plot and the key action scene, presided over by the haughty princess, is a jousting tournament won by Dharam. When the victorious knight is captured, Veer, disguised as a gypsy, rescues him. The end of the film includes a spectacular battle between two pirate ships. The film also features a trained hawk, which was responsible for saving Dharam as a child and which intervenes several times on behalf of the good guys.

  GHATTASHRADDHA

aka The Ritual

1977 144’ b&w Kannada

d/sc Girish Kasaravalli pc Suvarnagiri Films st U.R. Ananthamurthy dial K.V. Subbanna c S. Ramchandra m B.V. Karanth

lp Ajit Kumar, Meena Kuttappa, Ramaswamy Iyengar, Shanta, Jagannath, Suresh, Jagadish, Narayana Bhatt, M.D. Subba Rao, Gopala Krishna, S.M. Shetty, Ramakrishna

Set in the 20s in a rural orthodox Brahmin Karnataka village, Kasaravalli’s first feature tells the story of a child widow through the eyes of a young boy. The widowed Yamuna (Kuttappa) lives with her father Udupa (Iyengar), who runs a traditional scripture school for young Brahmins. The student Nani (Kumar), bullied by his colleagues, is protected by Yamuna. When she becomes pregnant after an affair with a teacher, Nani becomes a horrified witness to her attempts to induce an abortion and then to commit suicide. The climactic moments of the film show her achieve the abortion, helped by an Untouchable, to the sound and images of drunken tribals, the terror of Nani, the guilty schoolteacher leaving the village in the night, and the villagers looking for Yamuna and Nani. Udupa then imposes the ghatashraddha ritual on his daughter: breaking a pot (a metaphor for the womb) as an expulsion and humiliation ritual that leaves her isolated, clad in a white sari, banned from the village. Having thus made amends, the old Udupa ogles a 16-year-old girl hoping to start a new family. Although Kasaravalli acknowledges the influence of the Navya literary movement and Samskara (1970), this is a major cinematic achievement: the dark woods (where Yamuna expresses her sexual desires and tries to kill herself by sticking her hand into a snake’s nest) and the harrowing, torch-lit night pierced by cries of pain during the abortion while the villagers obsessively bang their drums, contain more human kindness and honesty than the glaring sunlight exposing the rejected Yamuna in her white sari, a desolate figure with shaven head sitting under a tree while her only friend, a small child, is dragged away from her. Kasaravalli’s film was anticipated in his student diploma featurette Avasesh (1975) where the little Brahmin boy first appears.

  KANCHANA SEETA

aka Golden Seeta

1977 90’ col Malayalam

d/sc G. Aravindan p K. Ravindranathan Nair pc General Pics st/dial C.N. Sreekantan Nair c Shaji N. Karun m Rajeev Taranath

lp Ramadas, Venkateshwaralu, Chinna Pullaiah, Keshav Panicker, Krishnan, Pottiah, Rangiah, Shobha Kiran, Annapurna

Aravindan’s most enigmatic film to date is his version of the Ramayana episode about Rama (Ramdas) and his bride Seeta, represented here only as aspects of nature such as the rustling of the wind in the trees or as rain bringing harmony where discord threatens. Derived from Sreekantan Nair’s play and Valmiki’s epic, the film alludes to the golden image of Seeta which Rama sets by his side for the Ashwamedha Yagya, the ritual sacrifice of a horse to Agni, the god of fire. The poet Valmiki (Panicker) is cast as a witness to the mythical events which move him to compose the story of Rama as an epic. The film’s epilogue shows Rama’s last journey as he walks into the River Saraya and becomes one with Seeta, i.e. nature. Aravindan’s nature mysticism finds expression in Shaji’s pellucid images prefiguring some of the associations of nature in his later Estheppan (1979) and Chidambaram (1985)). The director’s most daring gesture is his attempt to renovate the mythological as a genre, partly by his interpretation of Seeta’s presence but also by casting Rama Chenchus, tribals from AP where the film was shot, as the mythological figures.

  KISSA KURSI KA

1977 142’ col Hindi

d Amrit Nahata pc Dhwani Prakash st/lyr Rakesh sc Shivendra Sinha m Raghunath Seth

lp Utpal Dutt, Shabana Azmi, Chaman Bagga, Raj Babbar, Surekha Sikri, Dinanath, Rajeshwar Nath, Master Champalal

Gross political satire renowned mainly as a censorship scandal during the Emergency. The original version of the film attacking Indira Gandhi’s rule was apparently destroyed by Sanjay Gandhi’s men. Its fate was later linked to the Turkman Gate carnage in Delhi as examples of the authoritarianism of the regime. Nahata remade the film after the Emergency was lifted. The film has its villainous politician (Dutt) mouthing flowery rhetoric, usually addressing a character who stands for ‘the people’, Janata (Azmi). After several allusions to the Emergency, the politician rapes Janata. Nahata, who introduced the remake, later joined the Congress Party and disowned the film.

  KODIYETTAM

aka The Ascent

1977 137’(118’) b&w Malayalam

d/s Adoor Gopalakrishnan p Kulathoor Bhaskaran Nair pc Chitralekha Film Co-op c Ravi Varma

lp Gopi, Lalitha, Aziz, Thikkurisi Sukumaran Nair, Adoor Bhawani, Kaviyoor Ponnamma, Vilasini, Susheela, Radhamani

Gopalakrishnan’s 2nd and to many his best feature, made five years after Swayamvaram, tells of the growth to adulthood of a wide-eyed village simpleton, Sankarankutty (an admirable performance by Gopi). Affectionately treated as a fool, the man begins to come to terms with real human relationships through an encounter with a truck driver prone to most human weaknesses. Sankarankutty begins to accept that a wife (Lalitha), or indeed any woman, should not be regarded solely as a provider of food and comforts. The most tragic figure in the story is the lonely widow Kamalamma (Ponnamma) who mothers the central character but whose life is ruined by various exploitative relationships, and she ends up by committing suicide. The film has an innovative soundtrack, esp. with Kathakali drums, and unfolds at the slow, rhythmical pace of a village festival which provides the opening imagery of the tale. The main character’s maturation can be seen as a parallel to social and historical changes in Kerala: the erosion of a matriarchal system and the rise of a competitive world conventionally coded as masculine, the impact of technology and so on. Blending realism and lyricism, the film achieved both artistic and commercial success.

  KONDURA/ANUGRAHAM

aka The Boon aka Sage from the Sea aka Manas Ka Maharshi

1977 137’[H]/136’[T] col Hindi/Telugu

d/co-sc Shyam Benegal pc Raviraj Int. st C.T. Khanolkar’s novel Kondura (1966) co-sc Arudra, Girish Karnad Satyadev Dubey lyr Vasant Dev[H], Arudra[T] c Govind Nihalani m Vanraj Bhatia

lp Anant Nag, Vanisree, Smita Patil, Venu, Shekhar Chatterjee, Amrish Puri[H], Satyadev Dubey, Ravu Gopala Rao[T], A.R. Krishna[T]

Benegal’s only film in the language of the Northern AP region in which his early political dramas (Ankur, 1973; Nishant, 1975) are located. Continuing his interest in the politics of rural exploitation, this is a morality tale linking religious illusions with personal frustrations. Adapting a mystical Marathi novel, it tells of the Brahmin Parashuram (Nag) who meets the sage Konduraswamy (Puri) and receives a boon: in exchange for a vow of celibacy he receives a root able to terminate pregnancies. Parashuram’s wife (Vanisree) reluctantly goes along with her husband’s new convictions and soon he becomes known as a holy man. In his dreams, the ‘holy man’ covets the daughter-in-law of a rich scoundrel and, mistakenly assuming that the scoundrel impregnated her, Parashuram administers the abortive root to the woman with disastrous results. Disillusioned, Parashuram realises his asceticism was an act of naivety and he proceeds to rape his own wife who then commits suicide. The Telugu version ended with a voice-over instructing the audience to consider the implications of the story. The original novel, set in the culturally primitive Konkan, uses its central mythic narrative to create different states of perception so that the viewer is constantly asked to interrogate the protagonist’s experiences, leaving open the question of whether the frustrated and exploited Parashuram Tatya ever really saw what he says he saw. The film sidesteps this level of complexity and settles for a more standard political critique of feudalism.

  KULAVADHU

1977 148’ col Gujarati

d Krishnakant pc Chitrakala Mandir s Gulshan Nanda dial Harin Mehta lyr Barkat Virani, Kanti Ashok, Manubhai Gadhvi c Aloke Dasgupta m Kalyanji-Anandji

lp Asha Parekh, Navin Nischol, Rita Bhaduri, Kiran Kumar, Champsibhai Nagda, Dulari, Agha, Saroj Oza, Dinu Trivedi

Pioneering melodrama in a cinema dominated by quasi-historicals and folk legends. The rich but unfortunate Chandan (Parekh) suffers for previous sexual misdemeanours when she marries Anil (Nischol). A flashback introduces the cruel Pankaj who has an affair with both Chandan and her sister-in-law Bindu. When Bindu becomes pregnant, Chandan offers to sacrifice herself. Eventually she kills Pankaj and goes to jail. Her magnanimous husband forgives her. The film belonged to Hindi star Asha Parekh in one of her infrequent appearances in her native Gujarati language.

  MUKTI CHAI

1977 55’ b&w Bengali

d/p Utpalendu Chakraborty c Sanjay Brahma, Shekhar Tarafdar

Chakraborty’s debut was a strident denunciation of the Indian State from a CPI(ML) position. It argued that the laws of the colonial regime, against which India’s nationalists fought their freedom struggle, were then duplicated by the Indian State, culminating in the Emergency and its MISA (Maintenance of Internal Security Act) ordinance. Along with Patwardhan’s and Gautam Ghose’s early films, this is one of the major documentaries to emerge from the Emergency experience.

  NAGARHOLE

1977 170’ col Kannada

d/sc S.V. Rajendra Singh pc Mahatma Prod. st/dial H.V. Subba Rao lyr Udayashankar m Satyam

lp Vishnuvardhan, Bharati, Shivaram, Ambarish, B.V. Radha, Uma Sivakumar, Sundarkrishna Urs

Enormously popular children’s film by a director best known for violent cop movies. Madhu (Bharati) takes four children, including her son, to visit the Nagarhole wildlife sanctuary. Her son is killed by a tiger, but her husband, believed dead but in fact captured by tribals, resurfaces and saves the other children.

  OKA OORIE KATHA

aka The Outsiders, aka Story of a Village

1977 116’ col Telugu

d/co-sc Mrinal Sen p A. Parandhama Reddy pc Chandrodaya Art co-sc Mohit Chattopadhyay st Munshi Premchand’s Kafan (The Shroud) dial Veerendranath lyr Devulapalli Krishna Sastry c K.K. Mahajan m Vijay Raghava Rao

lp M.V. Vasudeva Rao, G. Narayana Rao, Mamata Shankar, Pradeep Kumar, A.R. Krishna, Krishnamurthy, Kondala Rao, Rama Devi, Siddapa Naidu, Lakshmi Devdas, D. Ramgopal, C. Ramesh, Vijayalakshmi

After the masterful Mrigaya (1976), Sen’s first Telugu film continues exploring the contradictions of resistance. Set in UP by Premchand but shifted to Telangana for the film, the story tells of old Venkaiah (Vasudeva Rao), an obstinate eccentric fighting social oppression through determined indolence, and his son Kistaia (Narayana Rao) who follows in his father’s footsteps. However, their individual resistance depends on the backbreaking work of the son’s wife Nilamma (Shankar) who desperately tries to achieve a more civilised lifestyle. The sterility of the two men’s rebellion is cruelly demonstrated when they refuse to help the pregnant Nilamma when her labour goes wrong and she is left to die in agony. Convinced they are right in rejecting society but unable to comprehend the import of their own actions, the two men sink into demented fantasies. The film replaces the end of the original story, where they spend their money drinking in a bar, with a more rhetorical style featuring the father-in-law’s soliloquy, the image of the dead woman, and a song about how only fools toil in the fields while the rich reap the harvest. Premchand’s cruellest story was adapted by the playwright Chattopadhyay and the dialogue was translated into a widely understood, non-dialect Telugu. Sen acknowledged the help of a local political activist, Krishnamurthy, in adapting the film to its regional setting. The film is dominated by the savage performance of Vasudeva Rao, chosen by Sen after seeing him in Karanth’s Chomana Dudi (1975), ‘for his coiled energy, sarcasm and fury’. The work prompted several New Indian Cinema directors from other languages to work in Telugu since that region’s displaced peasantry and absentee landlordism adhered to the stereotypes of 70s ruralist political films about feudal oppression: cf. Benegal’s Kondura (also 1977), Raveendran’s Harijan (1979) and Gautam Ghose’s Maabhoomi (1979), continuing the local trend of e.g. Bhoomikosam (1974) and Tharam Marindi (1977).

Mamata Shankar in Oka Oorie Katha

  PATHINARU VAYATHINILE

aka 16 Vayathiniley aka Sweet 16

1977 139’ col Tamil

d/s Bharathirajaa pc Shri Amman Creations p S.A. Rajakannu dial P. Kalaimani lyr Kannadasan, Alangudi Somu, Gangai Amaran c P.S. Niwas m Ilaiyaraja

lp Kamalahasan, Rajnikant, Shabir Ahmed, Raghunath, Goundamani, Isaac Senapathi, S.V. Subbaiah, Balagiri, Sridevi, Kanthimathi, Gemini Rajeshwari

Sometimes considered the second film (after Annakkili, 1976) to take the Tamil cinema out of the studio, Bharathirajaa’s debut is a love story in which a young maiden, Mayil (Sridevi), has fantasies about marrying a fashionable urban youth. Her dreams are shattered when the village idiot Sappani (Kamalahasan) she marries rescues her from the local bully Parattayan (Rajnikant). Unfortunately he kills the bully and has to go to jail but she will wait for him. The musical established Sridevi as a major Tamil star.

  RAM RAM GANGARAM

1977 160’ col Marathi

d/p/co-lyr Dada Kondke pc Dada Kondke Prod, s/co-lyr Rajesh Majumdar c Arvind Laad m Ram-Lakshman

lp Dada Kondke, Ashok Saraf, Usha Chavan, Dhumal, Anjana, Ratnamala, Master Bhagwan

Gangaram (Kondke) becomes a millionaire after the death of a rich uncle and leaves his village to go to Bombay where he has to face his uncle’s corrupt manager and his gullible, illiterate mother. Disillusioned, he gives up his wealth and returns to the village and to his lover Gangi (Chavan). Kondke’s film had a censorship problem apparently because the original version (entitled Gangaram Vis Kalmi) referred to Indira Gandhi’s Twenty-point Economic Programme during the Emergency, and the film itself was intended as a political satire. A partially re-edited version was released under this new title. Kondke’s style, however, remains intact, including the song Gangu tarunya tuzha befaam jasa ishkacha atom bomb.

  SANDHYA RAAG

aka The Evening Song

1977 159’ b&w Assamese

d/p/s/co-m Bhabendranath Saikia c Indukalpa Hazarika co-m Ramen Choudhury, Indreshwar Sharma, Prabhat Sharma

lp Runu Devi, Arun Sharma, Maya Barua, Ishan Barua, Aarti Barua, Kashmri Saikia, Purnima Pathak, Ananda Mohan Bhagwati

Saikia’s debut reveals a remarkable sense for realist, ethnographic detail in this unusually complex treatment of the cultural tensions between an impoverished village and a modern city. The two daughters of the widowed Putali go to the city as domestic servants in two upper-class households. The elder sister, Charu, is treated like a member of the family and gets used to the urban lifestyle. The younger sister, Taru, has to ward off the amorous advances of her employer’s son. When the sisters are of marriagable age, they return to their village but are unable to adjust to the poor and restricted life in the village. Charu agrees to marry her former employer’s chauffeur even though he is sexually impotent. Her mother and sister join her in the city.

  SEETA GEETA DATITHE

1977 140’ b&w Telugu

d/sc C.V. Sridhar pc C.P.R. Prod. st Balamurugan dial Ganesh Patro lyr Acharya Athreya, Arudra, Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy c Balakrishnan m K.V. Mahadevan

lp Sridhar, Chakrapani, Gavaraju, Kavitha, Bhawani, Nirmala, Y. Vijaya, Potti Prasad, Ravi Kondala Rao, Jayamalini, Jyothilakshmi

Marital infidelity drama regarded as an art-house film. Ravi is more interested in literary debate with his friends than in his wife Seeta. Their friends Deepa and Venu also have marital difficulties. Venu draws near to Seeta and both husbands suspect each other of sleeping with the other’s wife.

  SHATRANJ KE KHILADI

aka The Chess Players

1977 129’(124’) col Urdu

d/sc/m Satyajit Ray p Suresh Jindal pc Devki Chitra st Premchand c Soumendu Roy

lp Sanjeev Kumar, Saeed Jaffrey, Amjad Khan, Richard Attenborough, Shabana Azmi, Farida Jalal, Veena, David Abraham, Victor Bannerjee, Farouque Sheikh, Tom Alter, Lila Mishra, Barry John, Samarth Narain, Bhudo Advani

Ray’s so-called Hindi debut (in fact, it is in Urdu with some English dialogue) is set in 1856 at the court of Wajid Ali Shah in Lucknow, the capital of Oudh. It features two parallel narratives: the first, based on Premchand’s short story, shows the interminable games of chess played by two hookah-smoking zamindars, Mir Roshan Ali (Jaffrey) and Mirza Sajjad Ali (S. Kumar); the other dramatises the conflict between Wajid Ali Shah (A. Khan) and General James Outram (Attenborough) who represents Lord Dalhousie’s treacherously implemented annexation policies. Wajid Ali, shown as a politically weak and effete figure who stimulated the revival of the Kathak classical dance and the musical Raas-leela (cf. Indrasabha, 1932), in the end surrenders to the British without a fight. The colourful period drama about colonialism and indigenous culture begins with an animated cartoon (with Amitabh Bachchan’s voice) about the British annexation policy, and ends with the apolitical duo playing chess in the wilderness - since they can get no peace at home - fighting with each other while the British army marches into their capital. Although he cast major Hindi stars, Ray’s film was refused a normal commercial release by local distributors because of the director’s Calcutta art-house reputation.

  SWAMI

1977 129’col Hindi

d/sc Basu Chatterjee p Jaya Chakraborty pc Jaya Sarathy Combine st Saratchandra Chatterjee’s novel (1918) dial Manu Bhandari lyr Amit Khanna c K.K. Mahajan m Rajesh Roshan

lp Girish Karnad, Shabana Azmi, Vikram, Dhiraj Kumar, Shashikala, Utpal Dutt

Chatterjee extends his usual middle-class romances into a more jaundiced view of marriage based on a novel by the Bengali fountainhead of reformist writing, Saratchandra. Saudamini (Azmi) is a pampered girl until she is forced to marry the widower Ghanshyam (Karnad) and move into his large household. Saudamini cannot cope with her husband’s overbearing and greedy stepmother and pines after the man she really loved and had to abandon, Narendra (Vikram). Although she resents the husband imposed on her by custom, she gradually discovers that Ghanshyam is a tolerant, wise and progressive man. In the end, she prefers to stay with Ghanshyam rather than to leave with her former suitor, and so the wisdom of ‘traditional’ conventions is affirmed.

  THARAM MARINDI

1977 143’ b&w Telugu

d/sc Singeetham Srinivasa Rao
pc Vishwabharati Movies st Madireddy Sulochana dial C.S. Rao lyr Sri Sri, Kopalle Sivaram c Balu Mahendra m G.K. Venkatesh

lp Sridhar, G.S.R. Murthy, Dasarathi, Prasadrao, G. Satyanarayana, M. Panchanadam, Lakshmikant, Pradeep, Pallavi, Shobha, Rajakumari, Seethalatha, Satyavati, Sudha, Lakshmamma

Realist melodrama. An old man has his daughter Chenna (Shobha) married to an aged drunkard because of a promised dowry. The old man’s progressive son opposes this ‘trade’ and further defies his father by marrying Parvati. The son has to set up house in the Harijan section of the village and is forced to become involved in corrupt village politics. Along with T. Madhava Rao’s Chillara Devullu (1975) and B.S. Narayana’s Voorummadi Brathukulu (1976), which also address rural Telangana politics, this film constitutes a current of realist New Telugu cinema.

  AGNI

aka Fire aka Anger which Burns

1978 117’ b&w Malayalam d/s C. Radhakrishnan p P.M.K. Babu, Hassan pc Sheeba Arts lyr Shakuntala c U. Rajagopal m A.T. Oomer

lp Madhu, Vidhubala, Balan K. Nair, Bahadur, Vilasini, Abu Baker, Manavalan Joseph, Shanta Devi, Master Suku

The novelist Radhakrishnan (cf. Ottayadi Paathakal, 1990) used one of his own novels for his directorial debut telling of a headstrong butcher, Moosa (Nair, in one of his most impressive roles), whose daughter Amina (Vidhubala) elopes with Suleman (Madhu), a man accused of parricide. The butcher furiously pursues the lovers but he eventually realises his now-pregnant daughter’s strength of feeling and blesses the couple.

  AKBAR SALEEM ANARKALI

1978 139’col Telugu

d/s N.T. Rama Rao pc Tarakarama Films dial/lyr C. Narayana Reddy m C. Ramchandra

lp N.T. Rama Rao, Gummadi Venkateshwara Rao, Jamuna, Deepa, Madhavi, Sridhar, Chalapathi Rao

In a rare departure from the mythologicals he directed at Tarakarama, NTR’s big-budget Mughal historical retells the often-filmed love story between Prince Salim and the slave girl Anarkali. This version ends with both Salim and Anarkali being saved when the court singer Tansen persuades Akbar (NTR) to forgive the lovers. The film marks the belated entry into Telugu by the Hindi/Marathi composer C. Ramchandra with hit songs like Reyi agiponi and Vela eringa doravunte, echoes his own memorable score for Filmistan’s Anarkali (1953) over two decades previously. The film recalls Muddu Krishna’s stage version of the story which was also NTR’s first theatrical success in the early 40s.

  ARVIND DESAI KI AJEEB DASTAAN

aka The Strange Fate of Arvind Desai

1978 118’ col Hindi

d/co-s Saeed Akhtar Mirza pc Yukt Film Coop co-s/co-dial Cyrus Mistry co-dial Vijay Tendulkar c Virendra Saini m Bhaskar Chandavarkar

lp Dilip Dhawan, Anjali Paingankar, Shriram Lagoo, Om Puri, Sulabha Deshpande, Rohini Hattangadi

Mirza’s first and most experimental feature tries to elaborate its own political film language. The somewhat wimpish young Arvind Desai (Dhawan), the son of a businessman (Lagoo), occasionally dates the company’s secretary (Paingankar) and discusses politics and art with a Marxist colleague (Puri). However, the film constantly juxtaposes Desai’s views with other information: e.g. his views on his sister’s marriage are contrasted with his acquiescence in an arranged marriage; when luxurious carpets are hung in the family’s shop, the film shows the weavers who made the carpets. Critic Bikram Singh suggested influences of Antonioni, Ben Barka’s politics and, for the epilogue (summing up and placing the central character), La hora de los hornos (1967). This was the second and last film by the Yukt Coop, a group started by FTII film-makers and technicians (Ghashiram Kotwal, 1976).

  ASHWATHAMA

aka Wandering Soul

1978 121’ b&w Malayalam d K.R. Mohanan p P.T.K. Mohammed pc Mohan Mohammed Films sc P. Raman Nair st/dial Madampu Kunjukuttan from his own novel c Madhu Ambat m A. Anantha Padmanabhan

lp Madampu Kunjukuttan, Vidhubala, Vatsala, Ravi Menon, Savitri, Kuthulli, M.S. Valliattan

A contemporary fable about a man who is cursed to live on earth for 3000 years like Ashwathama in the Mahabharata. He lives as a teacher, Kunjuni (played by the author of the original novel, Kunjukuttan) and finds himself so frustrated by the prevailing customs and orthodoxies in his milieu that he becomes an alcoholic and begins to lead a dissolute life. Trying to reform and to become like ‘other people’, the respected scholar marries but his virtuous wife (Savitri) turns out to be an epileptic and the man returns to his wayward behaviour, which means mostly drinking himself into a stupor. In addition, the woman he originally loved (Vidhubala) finds herself with a broken marriage and discovers she has cancer. Ambat uses diffused lighting in keeping with the mood of the characters who feel torn in a changing world.

  AVAL APPADITHAN

aka She Is Like That

1978 114’ b&w Tamil

d/st/co-sc C. Rudraiah p Ragamanjari pc Kumar Arts dial Vannanilavan, Somasundareshwar lyr Kannadasan, Gangai Amaran c Nallusamy, Gnanasekharan m Ilaiyaraja

lp Kamalahasan, Rajnikant, Sripriya, Sivachandran, Indrani, S.R. Rajkumari, Nalini

A cautionary tale about an independently minded woman, Manju (Sripriya), who works in advertising for a male chauvinist boss (Rajnikant). Weary of men, she keeps her distance from her sensitive boyfriend Arun (Kamalahasan), who makes vox-pop documentaries. Arun eventually accepts an arranged marriage and Manju declares her love for him when it is too late. The film leaves her a lonely figure on Madras’s Marina beach. The collaboration between modernist writer Vannanilavan and Rudraiah, a graduate from the Madras Film Institute, is an early engagement with the ‘independent woman’ motif in South India. The music and the fluid narrative style mixes flashbacks with vox-pop (students and women workers interviewed about the status of women) and glossy pictorialism. Godard’s Deux ou troix choses que je sais d’elle (1966) could be a distant ancestor of this film.

  CHITHEGU CHINTHE

aka The Restless Corpse

1978 129’ col Kannada

d M.S Sathyu p G.N. Lakshmipathy pc Savan Movies s N. Rama Swamy, Javed Siddiqui c Ashok Gunjal m B.G. Ramanath, Prabhakar Badri, G.K. Venkatesh

lp C.R. Simha, Shivaram, MacMohan, Manjula, Paula Lindsay, Ram Prakash, Padma Shri, Uma Sivakumar

A crazy comedy using the conventions of mainstream Hindi cinema and set on a mythical island, Gajadweepa. The plot features crooked politicians and revolves around a gangster, Thimmaya alias T.K., ensconced in a home for the blind to cover up his criminal activities, and a popular film star Gajasimha (Simha). The star keeps escaping the traps set for him and becomes a successful politician. Good guys Avinash, a karate expert, and Mary (Lindsay), a foreign secret agent, take on the villains. Director Sathyu, better known for his poignant Partition drama Garam Hawa (1973), uses an idiom associated mainly with his stage career at IPTA.

  DOORATWA

aka Distance

1978 96’ b&w Bengali

d//p/sc Buddadhev Dasgupta st Sirsendu Mukherjee c Ranajit Roy m Ain Rasheed Khan, Mahmud Mirza

lp Mamata Shankar, Pradip Mukherjee, Bijon Bhattacharya, Niranjan Ray, Snigdha Bannerjee, Provosh Sarkar

Dasgupta’s feature debut is a story about a young man’s growth into maturity. A Calcutta college teacher and former revolutionary of the late 60s generation, Mondar (P. Mukherjee), marries a young woman, Anjali (Shankar). When the former rebel learns that Anjali is a single mother, he leaves her. He also refuses shelter to a Naxalite on the run. The lonely teacher forms a relationship with a working-class woman and her insane mother, but class differences prevent this from going any further. In the end, he finds that the woman he rejected is mature enough to accept him as a friend and their relationship shows renewed promise as he tries to shed his prejudices. The film continued the Bengali cinema’s fascination with the Naxalite uprising of the late 60s and 70s, often using symbolic imagery as in the opening shot of a newly paved VIP road and the commentary linking the annihilation of ‘troublemakers’ with the ‘beautification’ of the city. The film recalled aspects of Ray’s 70s Calcutta films in its extensive use of silence and its consistently lyrical emphasis on the protagonist’s subjectivity.

  GAMAN

aka Going

1978 119’ col Hindi

d/p/s Muzaffar Ali pc Integrated Film dial Hriday Lani lyr Makhdoom Mohiyuddin, Shahryar c Nadeem Khan m Jaidev

lp Farouque Shaikh, Smita Patil, Geeta Siddharth, Jalal Agha, Devi Mishra, Nana Patekar, Arun Bhuthnath, Amir Bano, Hameed, Sulabha Deshpande, Arvind Deshpande, Nitin Sethi

The uneducated and landless Ghulam Hussain (Shaikh) leaves his wife Khairun (Patil) in his native village in UP to go to Bombay in search of work. He becomes a cab driver and the film intercuts his struggles in the city with those of his wife while she awaits his infrequent letters and remittances. The film’s best moments are in the sequences with the close-knit group of cabbies who operate a kind of subterranean jungle-telegraph. Muzaffar Ali’s FFC-sponsored debut features a typical and characteristically sensitive Smita Patil performance as a rural belle.

(From left) Madhabi Mukherjee, Sandhya Roy, Soumitra Chatterjee and Sumitra Mukherjee in Ganadevata

  GANADEVATA

aka The People

1978 172’ col Bengali d/co-sc/co-lyr Tarun Majumdar pc West Bengal Govt st/co-lyr Tarashankar Bannerjee from his novel (1942) co-sc Rajen Tarafdar co-lyr Pulak Bandyopadhyay, Mukul Dutta, Gangacharan Sarkar c Shakti Bannerjee m Hemanta Mukherjee

lp Soumitra Chatterjee, Sandhya Roy, Madhahi Mukherjee, Samit Bhanja, Ajitesh Bannerjee, Anup Kumar Das, Debraj Roy, Robi Ghosh, Purnima Devi, Sumitra Mukherjee

This adaptation of Bannerjee’s main novel is Majumdar’s most ambitious film. Set in pre-WW2 rural Bengal, it chronicles the revolution incited by two villagers, a blacksmith and a tanner, who refuse to work on the traditionally established rates of barter. A rapacious village landlord, a radicalised schoolteacher (Chatterjee), a revolutionary sought by the British and a group of corrupt policemen lead a large ensemble of characters in a film whose political message is made to order for its sponsors.

  GORANTHA DEEPAM

1978 154’ col Telugu

d Bapu pc Chitrakalpana Films st Nerella Ramalakshmi sc Mullapudi Venkatramana lyr C. Narayana Reddy, Arudra, Dasarathi c Ishan Arya m K.V. Mahadevan

lp Sridhar, Mohan Babu, Ravu Gopala Rao, T.L. Kantha Rao, Allu Ramalingaiah, Vanisree, Suryakantam, G. Varalakshmi

Telugu melodrama about feudal marital life. The young bride Padmavati (Vanisree, in one of her best-known performances) is sent to her new home with injunctions to regard her husband as father, god, teacher and so on and always to ‘earn’ her keep. What she finds is an exploitative mother-in-law, an uncaring husband and a family friend who tries to rape her. However, her exemplary virtuousness eventually transforms everyone.

  GRAHANA

aka The Eclipse

1978 121’ b&w Kannada

d/co-s T.S. Nagabharana p D. Sivaram, D. Venkatesh, D. Rame Gowda pc Harsha Pics co-s T.S. Ranga st Kodalli Shivaram c S. Ramchandra m Vijayabhaskar

lp Anand Paricharan, G.K. Govinda Rao, Venkatramane Gowda, S.N. Rotti, B.S. Achar, Katte Ramchandra, Shobha Jyoti, Malati Rao

Nagabharana’s first feature is a critique of the caste system and of ‘traditional’ mores (cf. Samskara, 1970). The story is based on the Hebbaramma Festival celebrated in some Karnataka districts where Nagabharana shot the film on location (after bribing the local high priest to obtain permission). The plot concerns an annual village ritual in which a small number of Untouchables are selected to be Brahmins, for two weeks only, provided they mortify themselves throughout this period, often in extremely cruel fashion, as a kind of purification ceremony performed by ritual scapegoats. One of the scapegoats dies as a result and his body cannot be buried by members of either caste. The village headman’s son, Puttuswamy, calls in the police who remove the corpse. Puttuswamy then lives with the Harijans for a while. Since this infringes the rules of the ritual and of caste behaviour, the headman commits suicide. In spite of these traumas, the next year’s ritual goes ahead with the full participation of all villagers. However, the rebellious Puttuswamy joins the selected Harijans in the temple and tries to prevent the ritual. The Harijans throw him out to the angry Brahmin crowd and he is beaten to death. Girish Kasaravalli, who assisted on this film while still an FTII student, apparently directed most of it.

  JAGAN MOHINI

1978 163’ col Telugu

d/p/st/sc B. Vittalacharya pc Vittal Prod. dial G. Krishnamurthy, Karpoorapu Anjaneyulu lyr C. Narayana Reddy, Duttaluri Ramarao c H.S. Venu m Vijaya Krishnamurthy

lp Narasimhraju, Prabha, Jayamalini, Vijayalakshmi, Sarathi, Dhoolipala, Savitri, A. Satyanarayana, Bhoosarapu, Jayavani, Attili Lakshmi, Varanasi, K. Mukkamala, Balkrishna, Jayachandran, Anita

In a year marked by spectacular flops (e.g. V.B. Rajendra Prasad’s gangster movie Ramakrishnulu with megastars NTR and A. Nageshwara Rao), the surprise Telugu hit was this mid-budget ghost film. A woman betrayed by a king reappears in his next life as a ghost (the cabaret dancer Jayamalini) intent on possessing him. On the advice of a priest, the king marries a pious woman who matches her devotional prowess against the ghost’s seductions and wins.

  JOI BABA FELUNATH

aka The Elephant God

1978 112’ col Bengali

d/s/m Satyajit Ray p R.D. Bansal pc R.D.B. c Soumendu Roy

lp Soumitra Chatterjee, Santosh Dutta, Siddhartha Chatterjee, Utpal Dutt, Jit Bose, Haradhan Bannerjee, Bimal Chatterjee, Biplab Chatterjee, Satya Bannerjee, Moloy Roy, Santosh Sinha, Manu Mukherjee, Indubhushan Gujral, Kamu Mukherjee

Following on from Sonar Kella (1974), here the trio of detective Feluda (Soumitra Chatterjee), his sidekick Topse (Siddhartha Chatterjee) and thriller writer Jatayu (Dutta) become involved in a grimmer story set in the Bengali quarter of the holy city of Benares. Feluda, on holiday, is hired to track down a stolen gold statuette of Ganesh, the elephant god, harbinger of good fortune and worshipped by the mercantile middle class. Feluda finally gets the villains: the evil Maganlal Meghraj (Dutt), a Marwari businessman and smuggler, and his employer in crime, the yogic godman Machli Baba (Manu Mukherjee). With less action than Sonar Kella and more direct confrontation between the good and evil, the film’s main departure from Ray’s earlier children’s movies is the portrait of the villain who Ray described as ‘polished and ruthless, [clertainly the most ferocious character that I have created’.

  JUNOON

aka The Obsession aka Possessed aka A Flight of Pigeons

1978 141’ col Hindi

d/sc Shyam Benegal p Shashi Kapoor pc Film Valas st Ruskin Bond’s short story A Flight of Pigeons dial Satyadev Dubey, Ismat Chughtai lyr Yogesh Praveen, Jigar Muradabadi, Amir Khusro, Sant Kabir c Govind Nihalani m Vanraj Bhatia, Kaushik

lp Shashi Kapoor, Shabana Azmi, Jennifer Kendall, Naseeruddin Shah, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Jalal Agha, Benjamin Gilani, Tom Alter, Pearl Padamsee, Nafisa Ali, Ismat Chughtai, Geoffrey Kendall, Deepti Naval

Shashi Kapoor’s debut as producer is set at the time of the 1857 ‘Mutiny’ and weaves a passionate love story into the historical fresco. Javed Khan (Shashi Kapoor) is a Pathan whose wife (Azmi) has not yet borne a child. Javed falls madly in love with a half-caste Anglo-Indian girl, Ruth Labadoor (Nafisa Ali), who lives with her mother (Jennifer Kendall). After Javed’s brother-in-law (Shah) and a band of mutineers attack and massacre the English garrison, Javed takes the women under his protection. Marriage with Ruth is impossible because Javed’s family objects to the ‘English’ woman becoming Javed’s second wife. The irony is that the Labadoor family represents the Raj to the Indians even though they are equally suspect in the British milieu. In the end, Javed is killed and Ruth returns to Britain where she dies an old maid. The film touches on the complex relationships between people from three different religions (Muslim, Hindu and Christian) and from different classes as well as ethnic groups. The story opens strongly with an entranced fakir overwhelming his audience with his vision of love and war, but this is quickly overcome with acting styles that are either ‘passionate’ and loud (Shah, Kapoor) or standing still with backlit profiles (Ali, but also the older women). Although the film claimed to offer the first authentic depiction of the ‘Mutiny’ (e.g. every formal, well-drilled attack ends in bloody chaos), it sidesteps any engagement with the issues underpinning what is often described as the first Indian war of independence and opts for a colonial-sexual fantasy instead.

  KAADU KUDURE

aka The Wild Horse

1978 117’ col Kannada

d/st/co-lyr Chandrasekhar Kambhar pc Wheel Prod, sc Shama Zaidi co-lyr M.N. Bangalore c Sundarnath Suvarna m Bhaskar Chandavarkar

lp Manu, Benglori, Mariappa, Krishnappa, Narayana, Ramchandra, Silpa, Swarnamma, Sundarashri, Maithili, Malati Rao, Shashikala

Folklorist Kambhar’s remarkable debut feature, adapting Lorca’s House of Bernarda Alba into a surrealist fable. The film tells, through extensive use of verse, the story of Huligonda (Manu), a handsome youth who falls in love with the youngest daughter of a village chief. To marry her he first has to break in the chief’s wild horse. Having done that, the chief tricks him into marrying, not the girl he loves, but her ugly elder sister. He is virtually trapped in the household, representing different kinds of freedom for each of the three sisters and their formidable mother. When the youngest sister is to be married off to a loutish youth, she decides to elope with Huligonda. They sit astride the wild horse, which refuses to move, and are shot dead by the mother.

  KALLOL

aka Kollol aka The Wave

1978 94’ b&w Assamese

d/s Atul Bordoloi pc Gati Chitra lyr/m Rudra Barua c Nalin Duara

lp Chandra N. Barua, Lachit Phukan, Bishnu Khargharia, Bina Saikia, Muhidhar Gohain, Ranen Saha, Bharat Rajkhowa, Pratima Mahanta, Moihuddin Ahmed

Revolutionary, symbol-laden film about class conflict in a feudal fishing community. When the fishermen fail to capture a giant shark, the local landlord Anangaprasad Choudhury (Barua), who claims most of the fishermen’s catch for himself, is enraged, esp. when a defiant youth, Mani (Phukan), sets out to catch the fish by himself. Eventually the youth leads a rebellion against the landlord. The wordy film was playwright Bordoloi’s first independent movie.

  MANNU

aka The Soil

1978 134’ col Malayalam

d K.G. George pc Susmitha Prod. s/lyr Dr M.K. Pavithran c K. Ramchandra. Babu m A.T. Oomer

lp Soman, Sharada, P.K. Abraham, Adoor Bhasi, Kuthiravattom Pappu, Nellikode Bhaskaran, Nilambur Balan, Sukumaran, Mallika, Shanta Devi

George returned to the idiom of his mentor, Kariat, in this strident feudal melodrama of greed and superstition. The poor Damu (Soman) gets into a legal fight, supported by a CPI activist (Bhaskaran), with the rapacious landlord Krishnan Nair (Abraham) over tenancy rights. The matter takes a religious turn when the landlord announces his decision to build a temple on Damu’s land. Damu kills the landlord and goes into hiding. The film shifts the moral dilemma to the son of the landlord (Sukumaran), a patriotic army officer who has to decide whether to continue the ancestral dispute: the officer makes peace with Damu and his wife (Sharada).

  MARO CHARITHRA

1978 169’ b&w Telugu

d/s K. Balachander pc Andal Prod, p Rama Arangannal dial Ganesh Patro lyr Acharya Athreya c B.S. Lokanathan m M.S. Vishwanathan

lp Kamalahasan, Saritha, Jayavijaya, Shyamala, Madhavi, Saroja, Ramanamurthy, RL. Narayana, Adams, Krishna Chaitanya, Bhaskara Raju, Janardana Rao, Meera Rani, Dhum

Tamil director Balachander’s Telugu film is a love story between a Tamil man Balu (Kamalahasan) and a Telugu woman Swapna (Saritha). Their families interfere and ask them to remain separate for a whole year. Balachander remade the film for L.V. Prasad in Hindi, Ek Duuje Ke Liye (1981), again starring Kamalahasan.

  MULLUM MALARUM

aka A Thorn and a Flower

1978 143’ col Tamil

d/s J. Mahendran pc Ananthi Films st Uma Chandran lyr Kannadasan, Panchu Arunachalam, Gangai Amaran m Ilaiyaraja

lp Rajnikant, Sarath Babu, Fatafat Jayalakshmi, Shobha

Echoing Pasamalar (1961), the successful playwright and director Mahendran’s debut feature provides a low-key version of the orphaned brother and sister theme. The short-tempered Kali (Rajnikant) is a worker at a power station and possessively protects his sister Valli (Shobha). In a clash with the new engineer, Kumaran (Babu), he is fired, gets drunk and loses his hand in an accident. Encouraged by Kali’s wife Manga (Jayalakshmi), Kumaran forms a relationship with Kali’s sister and Kali eventually matures enough to realise he cannot monopolise her for ever.

  MUQADDAR KA SIKANDAR

1978 189’ col Hindi

d/p/co-lyr Prakash Mehra pc Prakash Mehra Prod, st Lakshmikant Sharma sc Vijay Kaul dial Kadar Khan co-lyr Anjaan c N. Satyen m Kalyanji-Anandji

lp Amitabh Bachchan, Raakhee, Vinod Khanna, Rekha, Amjad Khan, Shriram Lagoo, R.P. Sethi, Madhu Malini, Nirupa Roy, Kadar Khan

Bachchan reprises his typical persona of the doomed loner with a mother fixation living and fighting in an urban jungle. A homeless urchin, he receives his name, Sikandar, from his foster-mother (N. Roy). He is raised to be a servant of Kaamna (Raakhee), with whom he falls in love, but her father Ramanath (Lagoo) accuses him of theft and he is cast out. Sikandar befriends a lawyer, Vikas (Khanna), which presents him with a second parental figure and a new responsibility: to ensure Vikas’s happiness. Vikas falls in love with Kaamna, pre-empting Sikandar’s own declaration of love when he goes to find her. Forewarned by the suicide of the only other woman in his life, the prostitute Zohra (Rekha), Sikandar arranges Vikas’s marriage to Kaamna before he dies at the hands of the villain Bilawal (Amjad Khan), a former lover of Zohra. In spite of the film’s aesthetic shortcomings, with rapid and jumpy editing usually to cover up limitations in the shooting, the story’s rootedness in Bombay and Bachchan’s extraordinary performance confirmed him as the icon of Bombay’s industrialised lumpen proletariat.

  ONDANONDU KALADALLI

aka Once Upon A Time

1978 154’ col Kannada

d/co-s Girish Karnad p G.N. Lakshmipathy, K.N. Narayan pc L.N. Combines co-s Krishna Basrur dial G.B. Joshi lyr Chandrasekhar Kambhar c A.K. Bir m Bhaskar Chandavarkar

lp Shankar Nag, Sundarkrishna Urs, Akshata Rao, Sushilendra Joshi, Ajit Saldanha, Rekha Sabnis, Anil Thakkar, Vasantrao Nakkod, V. Ramamurthy, Sundarrajan

A tribute to Kurosawa’s samurai stories, resurrecting a South Indian martial arts technique which survives mainly in the Kerala-based form of the Kalaripayattu. The film is set in 13th C. Karnataka during the Hoysala dynasty (AD 1073–1327), when small princelings fought each other for domination, often hiring martial arts experts. The plot. focuses on the war between two rival brothers, Kapardi (Thakkar) and Maranayaka (Nakkod), who had already disposed of their elder sibling. The terrain is the margin between the Deccan plains and the Malnad jungles. Nag’s Kannada debut appearance sees him in the Mifune-inspired role of the cynical and individualistic mercenary Gandugali whose main antagonist is the equally proficient but more tradition-bound Permadi (Urs), the general of the opposing force. When the rival brothers betray their own soldiers, Ganduguli and Permadi join forces to fight the pretenders to the throne. Gandugali dies in the epic battle but Permadi succeeds in saving the real heir to the throne, Jayakeshi (Joshi), and peace is restored to the kingdom. The exuberant action consists mainly of swordplay, martial arts training and duels. The art directors Jayoo and Nachiket Patwardhan, architects who turned film-makers in their own right, researched the period details for this ballad-like tale. Karnad claims the film sets out to transcend the narrowly anti-brahminical agenda of most Kannada New Cinema’s independents at the time.

  ONDU OORINA KATHE

1978 127’ b&w Kannada

d/s/lyr Baraguru Ramchandrappa c Sundarnath Suvarna m B.V. Karanth

lp Pramila, Vimalakshi, Uma, M.V. Vasudeva Rao, M.S. Umesh, Lohiteshwara, Prasanna, Mailari Rao

Noted Kannada writer Ramchandrappa’s directorial debut is a ruralist drama about caste exploitation, showing that economic exploitation goes beyond orthodox caste divides: when in power, rich Harijans (Untouchables) exploit people as ruthlessly as their erstwhile Brahmin masters did. Sometimes construed as a reply to the relentless anti-brahminism of the Navya writers and film-makers.

  ORU NADIGAI NADAGAM PARKIRAL

aka An Actress Views Her Life

1978 131’ b&w Tamil

d A. Bhimsingh pc Girnar Films s/lyr D. Jayakantan based on his novel c B. Kaman m M.S. Vishwanathan

lp Laxmi, Srikanth, Y.G. Parthasarathy, Nagesh, Mahendran, Thengai Srinivasan, Rajani, Kanthimathi

The director’s last, posthumously released film is a social comedy about women’s independence. The 33-year-old Kalyani (Laxmi) marries the widowed Ranga (Srikanth), a drama critic. She refuses to be a subservient housewife, pursuing her stage career instead. The husband cannot cope but in the comic highlight of the movie, they visit a lawyer whose questioning makes them realise they belong together after all. When Kalyani has a paralytic stroke, they finally unite. Together with Bhimsingh’s Sila Nerangalil Sila Manithargal (1976), this is one of Tamil star Laxmi’s best-known performances.

  ORU VEEDU ORU ULAGAM

1978 130’ b&w Tamil

d/sc Durai pc Movie Int. dial ‘Vietnam Veedu’ Sundaram st Lalitha lyr Vali, Alangudi Somu, Pulamai Pithan m M.S. Vishwanathan

lp Srikanth, Major Sundararajan, Delhi Ganesh, Surulirajan, Shobha, Pandharibai, Manorama

Melodrama about the travails of a daughter, Gowri (Shobha), of a piously Brahmin household. She has to overcome considerable parental resistance to be allowed access to higher education. She falls in love with A.R.K., a lecturer, then she marries the man’s son, Murali. When her husband is accidentally drowned, her parents insist on her leading the austere and repressed life of a widow. Thankfully, A.R.K. intervenes and manages to get his daughter-in-law remarried.

  PARASHURAM

aka The Man With The Axe

1978 100’ col Bengali

d/co-sc Mrinal Sen pc West Bengal Govt. Dept. of Information co-sc Mohit Chattopadhyay st Sudhendu Mukherjee’s sociological report c Ranajit Roy m B.V. Karanth

lp Arun Mukherjee, Sreela Majumdar, Bibhas Chakraborty, Jayanta Bhattacharya, Sajal Roy Choudhury, Nilanta Sengupta, Nimai Ghosh, Arijit Guha, Sumati Guha-Thakurta

Named after the mythical hero Parashuram who avenged his father’s death by raising his axe 21 times, killing the king’s men with every blow, an axe-wielding dispossessed peasant (Mukherjee) arrives in the city and finds shelter in a hovel in an abandoned cemetery together with a beggar (Bhattacharya). Parashuram is haunted by his encounter with a tiger and is prone to fantasies of heroic actions although he lives in fear of authority and petty criminals. Into the world of the destitute a young woman appears, Alhadi (Majumdar), deserted by her husband. She and Parashuram live side by side for a while but then she leaves, presumably because she feels strong enough to look for a better life. The lonely Parashuram sinks into his fantasies and ends up madly wielding his axe against the darkness overwhelming him. The film developed partly from an earlier play, Jagannath, adapting Lu Xun’s Ah Q, staged in Bengal with the film’s lead Mukherjee.

  PRANAM KHAREEDU

1978 137’ b&w Telugu

d K. Vasu pc Shri Annapurna Cine Ents. p Kranthi Kumar s C.S. Rao lyr Jaladi c R. Raghunandha Reddy m Chakravarthy

lp Chandramohan, Jayasudha, Chiranjeevi, Reshmi, Ravu Gopala Rao, Nutan Prasad, Satyanarayana, Ramaprabha

Chiranjeevi’s debut hit about the misdeeds of the village landlord Kankaiah (Rao). The deaf-mute Bhimudu (Chandramohan) and Narsi (Chiranjeevi) are the landlord’s servants. Narsi leaves for the city in search of employment. The landlord misunderstands his young second wife’s (Jayasudha) kindness towards Bhimudu and her illness to mean that she has become pregnant by the servant, and has him whipped. When Narsi returns, having earned some money, he finds that Bhimudu’s sister (Reshmi), whom he had intended to marry, was raped by the landlord’s brother-in-law. The landlord later also kills Bhimudu and his own wife. Narsi kills Kankaiah, while the villagers rise up in revolt. The film is partly contextualised by the political ruralism of the New Indian Cinema.

  PRISONERS OF CONSCIENCE

1978 45’ b&w English/Hindi

d/p/co-c Anand Patwardhan m Shamla and Friends, Calcutta Peoples’ Choir co-c Pramod Mathur, Balan S., Govind Nihalani et al.

Patwardhan’s first documentary to be widely screened in India contains clandestinely filmed footage and features the arrest and detention of political prisoners during the Emergency. It emphasises the widespread practice of arrest and torture both before and after Indira Gandhi’s dictatorial crackdown. The film has interviews with several activists, including Jasbir Singh, member of the youth wing of the Socialist Party; D.P. Tripathi, member of the Students Federation of India; Mary Tyler, an Englishwoman who spent five years in prison and wrote the book My Years in an Indian Prison; Dev Nathan and Vasanthi Raman, intellectuals and supporters of the CPI(ML); and several others, alongside a humane commentary in the director’s voice.

  RATHI NIRVEDHAM

aka Adolescent Desire

1978 124’ col Malayalam

d Bharathan p Prathap Pothan pc Supriya Creations s Padmarajan lyr Kavalam Narayana Panicker c K. Ramchandra Babu m P. Devarajan

lp Soman, Krishnakumar, Adoor Bhasi, Bahadur, Kaviyoor Ponnamma, Manohar, Baby Sumathi, V.J. Jose, Jayabharati, Meena, T.R. Omanna

The painter and sculptor’s 3rd feature tells of Pappu, an adolescent boy, and his sexual awakening, with a scenic tea plantation estate as backdrop, as he falls in love with the slightly older girl next door, Rathi. The consummation of the relationship is treated in high Gothic style with thunder and lightning accompanying the midnight union in a deserted cobra shrine, culminating in the woman being bitten by a snake and dying. Next morning, presumably feeling like a real man at last, he sets out for college and a new life. The most disturbing aspect of the film is not that sexuality is seen as some cataclysmic event but that the death of a woman is presented both as the price paid for sex by women and as a price worth paying by a boy to achieve manhood.

  SARVASAKSHI

aka The Omniscient

1978 135’ b&w Marathi

d/p/st/co-sc Ramdas Phutane pc Giriraj Pics co-sc Meena Chandavarkar lyr Viroba, Aarti Prabhu, Indira Sant, Shanta Shelke c Sharad Navle m Bhaskar Chandavarkar

lp Smita Patil, Jairam Hardikar, Anjali Paingankar, Vijay Joshi, Datta Bhatt, Vilas Rakte, Nilu Phule, Ram Nagarkar, Leela Gandhi, Kamini Bhatia, Shankar Nag, Dilip Kulkarni, Ashok Joshi, Rajan Kalekar, Suresh More

Phutane, a former journalist, art teacher, poet and actor, had produced Patel’s Saamna (1975), inaugurating New Indian Cinema productions in Marathi. This is his debut feature and, like Palekar’s Aakriet (1981), it deals with mystical rituals calling for human sacrifice in the context of the notorious Manwat murders in Maharashtra. The idealistic schoolteacher Ravi (Hardikar) and his wife Rekha (Paingankar) move to a village and come up against local superstition. When Rekha becomes pregnant, she has a premonition of death. A bhagat (witch-doctor) confirms the premonition and suggests a human sacrifice to stave off death. Rekha dies in childbirth. Ravi’s problems are further heightened when he is arrested for the murder of one of the bhagat’s ritual victims. In jail, he has a premonition of another sacrifice and is able to tip off the police who arrest the bhagat.

  SATI ANSUYA

1978 132’ col Oriya d/sc A. Sanjiva Rao pc Madhav Pics dial/co-lyr Saubhagya Chandra Das co-lyr Loknath Patnaik co-lyr/m Prafulla Kar c Babu Rao

lp Chakrapani, Narendra Mishra, Roja Ramani, Mahashweta, Rita

Hit mythological made by a Telugu company and director showing Sati Ansuya narrating her story to Seeta during Rama’s banishment. Her chastity is questioned by the gods, but her devotion to her husband gives her the power to transform the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh into children and to stop the sun from rising for seven days. The film is adapted from two successful Oriya plays, Lakbyahira and Na Pahu Rati Na Maru Pati. Its success persuaded more Telugu and other South Indian producers to explore the Oriya market.

  SATYAM SHIVAM SUNDARAM

aka Love Sublime aka Love Truth Beauty

1978 172’ col Hindi

d/p Raj Kapoor pc R.K. Films s Jainendra Jain lyr Narendra Sharma, Vithalbhai Patel, Anand Bakshi c Radhu Karmakar m Laxmikant-Pyarelal

lp Zeenat Aman, Shashi Kapoor, Kanhaiyalal, A.K. Hangal, David, Hari Shivdasani, Leela Chitnis, Sheetal, Baby Padmini Kolhapure

Kapoor’s most sexploitative movie features Roopa (Aman) as the emphatically sexual woman unfortunately burdened with guilt (her mother died giving birth to her) and with half her face scarred by fire. However, she has an angelic voice which bewitches the engineer Rajiv (Kapoor) who marries her. Refusing to believe that this scarred woman is the figure of his dreams, he rejects the pregnant Roopa who curses her husband. The curse materialises in the form of a dam bursting, causing floods. Eventually, Rajiv accepts the ‘real’ Roopa and his conflict between sacred (ideal) and profane (earthy and imperfect) love is resolved. Aman, a former pin-up girl and advertising model, is presented as a sex object embodying the ‘modernity’ contemporary India has to come to terms with (resulting in censorship problems). In the process, the representation of what has been lost, ‘tradition’, also becomes corrupted, as can be seen from the glitzy temple architecture in the opening bhajan (devotional story) featuring Roopa as a child (Kolhapure) and in which ejaculatory symbols are inflated to gigantic dimensions.

  SHRI RAMA PATTABHJSHEKHAM

1978 196’ col Telugu

d/s N.T. Rama Rao pc Ramakrishna Cine Studios dial Samudrala Raghavacharya lyr Devulapalli Krishna Sastry, C. Narayana Reddy c M.A. Rehman m Pendyala Nageshwara Rao

lp N.T. Rama Rao, Ramakrishna, Satyanarayana, Prabhakara Reddy, Jamuna, Sangeetha, Kanchana, Pushpalata, Saikumari, Suryakantam, Sridhar, Arja Janardana Rao, Thyagaraju, Mamata, Halam

Ramayana mythological featuring the life of Rama (NTR): his childhood, his banishment to the forests for 14 years, his war with the villainous Ravana (NTR again), his return to Ayodhya and Seeta’s trial by fire to prove her chastity.

  THAMPU

aka The Circus Tent

1978 129’ b&w Malayalam d/s G. Aravindan p K. Ravindranathan Nair pc General Pics lyr Kavalam Narayana Panicker c Shaji N. Karun m M.G. Radhakrishnan

lp Gopi, Venu, Sriraman, Jalaja, members of the Great Chitra Circus

Aravindan’s finest b&w film chronicles three days with a circus in a small town in Kerala. A series of high-angle shots, as the circus drives into its new location, introduce us to the village. Several sequences use a remarkable quasi-documentary effect combined with minutely choreographed action e.g. the sunset as the manager (Gopi) directs the raising of the big top. The episodic film tells of a soldier who befriends the circus strong man in a toddy bar and shows how the bizarre characters from the circus including the dwarf merge with the local populace. Much of the imagery is genuinely poetic, accompanied by some remarkable b&w work by Shaji, sustained by a narrative that consistently replaces conventional storytelling with a sense of the cultural geography of the village. The film’s documentary style, including direct address to camera, is in sharp contrast with Aravindan’s previous feature, Kanchana Seeta (1977), also shot by Shaji, although the same reverence for nature animates both works.

  TRISHUL

1978 167’ col Hindi

d Yash Chopra pc Trimurti Films s Salim Javed lyr Sahir Ludhianvi m Khayyam

lp Amitabh Bachchan, Sanjeev Kumar, Raakhee, Shashi Kapoor, Prem Chopra, Hema Malini, Sachin, Poonam, Manmohan Krishna, Waheeda Rehman

In this story, Bachchan plays a character, Vijay, obsessed with his mother whom he believes to have been abandoned by his father Raj, alias R.K. Gupta (S. Kumar). Vijay plans an Oedipal revenge by trying to ruin his father, a prominent businessman. Chopra’s apparent sequel to Deewar (1975), with the same star and scenarists, deploys Bachchan’s familiar persona in a big-budget spectacular culminating in a massive fight sequence set in what looks like a giant aircraft hangar.

  YARO ORAL

aka Someone Unknown

1978 111’ b&w Malayalam

d/s V.K. Pavithran pc Saga Movies c Madhu Ambat m Govindan Aravindan

lp Ravi, Protima, A.C.K. Raja, Varma, Pavithran, Javed Siddiqui, Sathyabhama, Ramani, Baby Preetha

Surreal fable about death. The gynaecologist Malathi (Protima) is childless. To remedy her condition she divorces her husband (Varma) and marries his friend Ravi (Raja). At the end of the film she gives birth to an eight year-old child just before she commits suicide. Her former husband tries to find salvation in religion, while the second husband dies shortly after his wife. The film begins with its main narrator (Siddiqui) shown as a corpse in a mortuary, who is visited by the second husband. The husband eventually replaces the corpse which gets up and leaves. This cynical, often absurd and deliberately anti-realist film has an art-house reputation in Kerala, known for Aravindan’s score and Pavithran’s debut which introduced to Malayalam a genre of personal cinema, exemplified by its several long, static shots.

  AUR KAUN

1979 136’ col Hindi

d Tulsi and Shyam Ramsay p F.U. Ramsay pc Ramsay Pics st Kumar Ramsay dial Kafeel Azar lyr Amit Khanna c Gangu and Keshu Ramsay m Bappi Lahiri

lp Sachin, Rajni Sharma, Padmini Kapila, Roopesh Kumar, Sudhir, Vimal Sahu, Kanchan Mathu, Om Shivpuri, Madan Puri, Nasir Hussain, Dina Pathak, Radha Saluja

A necrophilia film by India’s foremost horror film-makers. Teenager Raj (Sachin) is left alone in his father’s grand, isolated villa. He loves the innocent Kamal but is seduced by Mona, who dies before she was able to reach sexual satisfaction. Her corpse continues to mesmerise Raj, as it appears to demand the sexual fulfilment he was unable to provide. The rest of the film consists of Raj trying to rid himself of the sexually demanding female: first he tries to ‘cool’ her by putting her in the refrigerator, then he buries her and finally he disposes of the body in a lake.

  CHERIYACHENTE KROORA KRITHYANGAL

aka The Wicked Deeds of Cheriyachan, aka The Evil Deeds of Cherian

1979 107’ b&w Malayalam d/s John Abraham pc Janasakthi Films m Johnson c Madhu Ambat

lp Adoor Bhasi, Kaviyoor Ponnamma, Poornima Jayaram, Abraham Joseph, Venu, Payyannoor Aravindan

Released briefly in 1981, Abraham’s 3rd feature is set in the Kuttanad rice-fields of Kerala, the director’s home province. Cheriyachan (Bhasi) is a typical landlord who feels threatened by industrialisation and by left activists. When he witnesses the police massacring poor peasants, he takes upon himself the guilt of his class, as well as the guilt of the voyeur. He is last seen up a coconut tree trying to keep away from the police. It is Abraham’s achievement that this figure, steeped in the local mix of feudal and Christian traditions, becomes understandable as a frightened victim of history whereas most films would cast him as a one-dimensional villain or a grotesquely comic character. The film is Abraham’s most controlled, opening with a series of sweeping shots on the famed backwaters of the region as it establishes both the strongly realist and quasi-mythic flavour necessary to allow for the transference of economic oppression into the condition of Cheriyachan’s guilt. It also leads the film into a far more contentious aspect of Kerala’s political cinema and literature, addressing the common phenomenon of presenting the responsibility of intervention in highly romanticised and even directly sexualised terms, or in other ways implicating individual responsibility towards history in the voyeuristic, infantile guilt of the passive observer.

  DURANIR RONG

1979 177’ b&w Assamese

d/p/s Johns Moholia pc Nabarun Film, Tezpur lyr Bankim Sharma, Rubi Singha, Gholam Samdani c Jaykrishna Patra, Indukalpa Hazarika m Ajit Singha

lp Nipon Goswami, Purnima Pathak, Tasadduf Yusuf, Rupjyoti Das, Chandradhar Goswami, Biju Phukan, Reeta Moholia, Junu Barua, Chetana Das, Nirode Choudhury, Prafulla Barua

Ashim Datta, hired as an assistant manager in a mill, finds himself faced with a corrupt manager and an irresponsible staff. In an attempt to right things, he sacks a female employee, Juri Barua, for having lost an important file which, it turns out, had been destroyed by another staffer, Sunita. Attempting to right things, Ashim discovers that Juri has a personal/sexual relationship with the manager, knowledge which leads to him being charged with the manager’s death. Later when Juri learns of all that has happened, she searches for Ashim in an effort to apologise, but finds him dead in a hospital. Technically sound attempt at a commercial film by a director trained at the Film & Television Institute of India, Pune.

  EK DIN PRATIDIN

aka And Quiet Flows the Dawn aka And Quiet Rolls the Day

1979 96’ col Bengali

d/p/sc Mrinal Sen pc Mrinal Sen Prod. st Amalendu Chakravarty’s Abiroto Chene Mukh c K.K. Mahajan m B.V. Karanth

lp Satya Bannerjee, Geeta Sen, Mamata Shankar, Sreela Majumdar, Umanath Bhattacharya, Arun Mukherjee, Tapan Das, Nalini Bannerjee, Kaushik Sen, Tupur Ghosh, Gautam Chakraborty, Biplab Chatterjee

Sen uses a thriller format for this tale set among Calcutta’s petty bourgeoisie. A young woman, Chinu (Shankar), is the sole breadwinner supporting a family of seven headed by a retired clerk (S. Bannerjee) and his wife (G. Sen). One night, she does not return home from the office and, as the hours pass, the family grows increasingly distraught as each member, including the independent-seeming university student Minu (Majumdar), begins to realise how dependent they are on Chinu’s labour. Filmed by Sen with a mastery of mise en scene in cramped surroundings, the story graphically illustrates how profound insecurities underpin a precarious, egotistical moral code that refuses to acknowledge the real place of women in the social network. When Chinu returns by taxi in the morning, nobody dares question her since this would involve each family member having to betray the selfishness of their concern. With amazing resilience, the facade is restored. There are some echoes of Sen’s previous stylistic devices (e.g. direct address to camera by the characters when they visit a hospital to check on missing persons), but the film leaves an indelible impression of the cavernous courtyard surrounded by claustrophobic apartments and, beyond the gate, a teeming and indifferent metropolis making its presence felt mainly on the soundtrack. Sen claimed that the film started his interest in the ‘inward’ investigation into middle-class life, away from the explicitly political language of his earlier 70s films.

  ESTHEPPAN

aka Stephen

1979 94’ col Malayalam

d/co-st/co-sc/co-m Govindan Aravindan p K. Ravindranathan Nair pc General Pics co-st Kavalam Narayana Panicker co-sc/lyr Isaac Thomas Kotukapally c Shaji N. Karun co-m Janardhan

lp Rajan Kakkanadan, Krishnapuram Leela, Sudharma, Shobha, Catherine, Balakrishnan Nair, Ganesan, Gopalakrishnan, M.R. Krisnan, Francis David

Estheppan (Kakkanadan) is a strange and mysterious figure, allegedly immortal, in a Christian fishing village in Kerala. Although a more earthly version of Kummatty (1979: the subject of his previous film), all manner of virtues and magical powers are ascribed to the Christ-like worker of miracles (including printing his own money and drinking whisky without getting drunk). The director says it was made as a rejoinder to the criticism levelled against him and his scenarist Panicker for the emphasis on folk ritual in their theatre. An extra dimension is given to the central character, adapted from stories about religious mystics of all stripes, by casting Kakkanadan, a Malayalam tantric-modernist painter, in the role. The final sequence of the miracle play alludes to the Chavittu Natakam, a form derived from Portuguese passion-plays on the west coast. However, contrary to the director’s stated intention sympathetically to explore religious mysticism, the film can be seen as celebrating confusion, jumbling together religious iconography, pop music, tourism and garish calendar-art colours and artistic creativity. This cultural levelling out is further heightened by more than one ‘version’ of Estheppan’s activities, each bidding for plausibility but also undercutting whatever conviction the plot might have. The fragmented narrative helps to convey a critique of the conventions of psychological realism prevalent in ‘quality’ cinema by refusing to present an individual as a complex but ultimately coherent and knowable character. However, by also refusing to show the individual as a historically formed figure, an option chosen e.g. by Ghatak, Shahani and Abraham, Aravindan ends up relativising his characters completely, dissolving them either into creatures of gossip, as in the movie, or into the timeless and eternally unknowable flow of nature.

  JHOR

aka The Storm

1979 132’ col Bengali

d/s/co-lyr Utpal Dutt pc West Bengal Govt co-lyr Jyotirindranath Tagore, Henry Derozio c Dinen Gupta m Prasanta Bhattacharya

lp Ujjal Sengupta, Indrani Mukherjee, Sagarika Adhikari, Kaushik Bannerjee, Robi Ghosh, Utpal Dutt

The noted leftist theatre director and film star’s tale about the introduction of Western-style rationalism in Bengal in 1829 and its conflicts with religious and traditional reaction. The focus of the plot is the Hindu College in which the Portuguese Indian Henry Derozio (Sengupta) taught, and his students, members of the Young Bengal movement, who save a woman from the sati ritual. The students lose their battle against obscurantist authorities and Derozio is sacked, but the initial impetus for change has been given. Dutt himself, in conflict with his own political reputation, played the orthodox Hindu leader Radhakanta Deb. The film is edited by Hrishikesh Mukherjee.

  KALA PATTHAR

1979 176’ col Hindi

d/p Yash Chopra pc Yashraj Films s Salim-Javed lyr Sahir Ludhianvi c Kay Gee m Rajesh Roshan, Salil Choudhury

lp Shashi Kapoor, Raakhee Gulzar, Amitabh Bachchan, Shatrughan Sinha, Neetu Singh, Parveen Babi, Prem Chopra, Parikshit Sahni, Romesh Sharma, Poonam Dhillon, Manmohan Krishna, Iftikhar, Madan Puri

A coal-mining tale about three main characters who try to avert a mining disaster in a colliery owned by Seth Dhanraj (Chopra). Vijay (Bachchan) is a court-martialled merchant navy officer who abandoned his ship during a storm and is riddled with guilt. He works as a miner to forget his past. Mangal (S. Sinha) is a dacoit hiding from the police among the miners. Ravi Malhotra (S. Kapoor) is an engineer working for Seth Dhanraj. He discovers his greedy employer’s scheme that will endanger the lives of hundreds of miners in a coal-rich shaft. The men meet women who transform their lives. Vijay falls in love with Sudha (Raakhee), a doctor. Mangal flirts with a bangle seller (Singh) and then rescues her from rapists. Ravi meets his old flame Anita (Parveen Babi) who is now a journalist and has come to do a story about the mines. The wall of the mine shaft collapses and there is a deluge, leading to a long disaster-movie sequence as Mangal atones by sacrificing his life for his fellow miners. Vijay and Ravi survive after rescuing many workers. The film refers to several mining disasters in Dhanbad and Chasnala where organised criminal gangs, often masquerading as trade unions, had become major political issues in the pre-Emergency period. Despite these references, most of the script is largely subordinated to the necessity of providing each of the several stars with equal footage and a hand in the action.

  KASHINO DIKRO

1979 145’ col Gujarati

d Kanti Madia pc Cine India Int. st Vinodini Neelkanth sc/dial Prabodh Joshi lyr Balmukund Dave, Ravji Patel, Madhav Ramanuj, Anil Joshi, Ramesh Patel c Barun Mukherjee m Kshemu Divetia

lp Rajiv, Ragini, Rita Bhaduri, Giresh Desai, P. Kharsani, Tarla Joshi, Leela Jariwala, Vatsala Deshmukh, Mahavir Shah, Arvind Vaidya, Saroj Nayak, Jagdish Shah, Pushpa Shah, Javed Khan, Shrikant Soni, Dilip Patel, Kanti Madia

Debut and sole feature by theatre director and actor Madia, revitalising a Gujarati cinema inaugurated by Rathod’s FFC-supported Kanku (1969). The sentimental melodrama adapted from a noted writer’s story by Gujarat’s two leading stage personalities, Madia and Joshi, tells of Kashi (Ragini) who raises her husband’s (Desai) adolescent younger brother (Rajiv). The young man dies on his wedding night of snakebite. His widowed bride Rama (Bhaduri) is later raped by Kashi’s husband and becomes pregnant. Kashi saves the family’s and Rama’s ‘honour’ by pretending to be pregnant herself and adopting the child as her own. Kashi dies in the end as an icon of saintly motherhood. The rather slow moving narrative promotes a conservative notion of Gujarat’s brahminical joint family culture.

  KUMMATTY

aka The Bogeyman

1979 90’ col Malayalam

d/co-sc/co-m G. Aravindan p K. Ravindranathan Nair pc General Pics st/co-s/lyr/co-m Kavalam Narayana Panicker c Shaji N. Karun co-m M.G. Radhakrishnan

lp Ramunni, Master Ashokan, Vilasini Reema, Kothara Gopalakrishnan, Sivasankaran Divakaran, Vakkil, Mothassi, Shankar

Made shortly after the quasi-documentary Thampu (1978), this film adapts an age-old Central Kerala folk-tale featuring a partly mythic and partly real magician called Kummatty (played by the famous musician and dancer Ramunni in his screen debut) who comes to entertain a group of village children with dancing, singing and magic tricks. In a game, he changes them into animals. One boy, changed into a dog, is chased away and misses the moment when the magician breaks the spell restoring the children to their human form. The dog-boy has to wait a year until Kummatty returns to the village. Aravindan claimed the film to be his favourite and referred to the international legend of the bogeyman which parents use to frighten their children, except that, in Kerala, the bogeyman is often shown as a compassionate person.

  MAABHOOMI

aka Our Land aka The Motherland

1979 152’ b&w Telugu

d/co-sc/co-m Gautam Ghose co-p G. Ravindranath co-p/co-sc/co-dial B. Narasinga Rao pc Chaitanya Chitra st Krishan Chander’s novel Jab Khet Jaage (1948) co-sc Partha Bannerjee, Pran Rao co-dial Pran Rao lyr Suddala Hanumanthu, Yadagiri c Kamal Naik co-m Vinjanuri Seeta, Nagabhushanam

lp Kakarala, Saichand, Rami Reddy, Bhopal Reddy, Yadagini, Pokala, Rajeshwari, Hansa, Prasad Rao, Pradeep Kumar, Lakshmana Rao

Set during one of India’s main peasant risings, the Telangana insurrection between 1945 and 1951 in the pre-Independence state of Hyderabad, the Bengali director’s first feature tells the story of Chander’s best-known novel from the peasant’s point of view. A young peasant, Ramiah, rebels against the corrupt rule of the nizam, and when his girlfriend has to submit to the potentate’s sexual coercion, Ramiah leaves. He befriends a Marxist activist (the rising was CPI-inspired) and participates in the Independence struggle. When the peasants take over the village after Independence, their anger boils over and they perpetrate a massacre. In 1948 the Indian army marched into Hyderabad and suppressed the rising. Many of the ousted landlords returned to power by becoming Congress officials, so that the peasants had to face the same struggle all over again. The film is made in a documentary style inspired by Latin American political cinema but also uses Indian folk idioms such as the Burrakatha style (cf. the political education sequence with the union leader Maqbool). The film’s view of the rising is mostly an uncritical one, esp. in comparison with recent analyses by historians sympathetic to political groups currently working in Telangana.

  NAXALITES, THE

1979 141’ col Hindi

d/s/co-dial K.A. Abbas pc Naya Sansar co-dial Inder Raj Anand lyr Ali Sardar Jafri c Ramchandra m Prem Dhawan

lp Mithun Chakraborty, Smita Patil, Nana Palsikar, Imtiaz Khan, Priyadarshini, Jalal Agha, Tinnu Anand, Dilip Raj, Pinchoo Kapoor

Abbas’s political drama about the Naxalbari peasant uprising (see Naxalite) and student movement borrows from several real-life characters including Ajitha (Patil), an activist from Kerala, Charu Majumdar (Palsikar) et al. The complexities of the historical issues are reduced to an interplay of simplistic attitudes while the sensationalist aspects are intensified (e.g. police torture shown in silhouette). In typical Abbas-style social realism, efforts to convey an insight into the historical events have been replaced by efforts to manipulate the viewers’ emotions, as in the sequence where Majumdar’s speech reverberates through the countryside while the police gather for the final assault, or in the finale, played with great skill by Smita Patil, where she walks to the gallows to the farewells of her fellow inmates. The reasons why young people became part of the Naxalite movements are presented in titillating images of rape, torture and corruption, with the sexual threats to women providing the main motive for male rebelliousness. Partly because of Abbas’s prior political history and the CPI’s rejection of the movement, the film faced some censorship problems. Abbas claimed that unsympathetic political groups waged a vendetta against the film.

Smita Patil (centre) in The Naxalites

  NEEM ANNAPURNA

aka Bitter Morsel

1979 95’ b&w Bengali

d/p/sc Buddhadev Dasgupta st Kamal Kumar Majumdar c Kamal Nayak

lp Monidipa Ray, Sunil Mukherjee, Jayita Sarkar, Manojit Lahiri

A married man loses his job in a small town so he takes his family to the city in search of work. To make ends meet, they rent out part of their hovel to an old beggar. When the father fails to find work and his eldest daughter is tempted by prostitution, the mother steals a sack of rice from the beggar who has a heart attack and dies. She disposes of the body and serves up a delicious meal. Guilt prevents her from eating and she goes out to vomit as the film ends. Dasgupta’s 2nd feature evokes a 1950s Ray style in using slow action, making the plot secondary to extensive and extended mid-shots and realist detailing. The director claimed the influence of Godard in some sequences.

  PASI

aka Hunger

1979 138’ col Tamil

d/s Durai pc Sunitha Cine Arts c V. Ranga m Shankar-Ganesh

lp Shobha, Delhi Ganesh, Vijayan, Thambaram Lalitha, Praveena, Elangovan, Rajendran, Surulirajan, Narayanan, Sathya, S.N. Parvathi, Jayabharati

Durai’s best-known film is a low-life drama set among Madras’s shanty dwellers, people who in most films are cast as comic relief for their ‘Madras Tamil’ dialect or as villains. The teenage ragpicker Kuppamma (Shobha) and her father Muniyandi (Ganesh), a cyclericksha walla with many mouths to feed, are the main characters. She gets pregnant by a lorry driver (Vijayan) who turns out to be married, and dies in childbirth. Other vignettes include the owner of a cycle shop (Narayanan) who plays records to attract the attention of Kuppamma whenever she passes by, a narrative device that compensates for the absence of songs in the film. Spoken in genuine Madras Tamil and shot on location, at times with concealed cameras, the film has an authentic city flavour. Shobha, who committed suicide the following year, received a national award for her intense performance.

  PERUVAZHIYAMPALAM

aka A Dead End aka Wayside Inn

1979 118’ b&w Malayalam

d/s P. Padmarajan p Prem Prakash pc Bhadra Movie Makers lyr Kavalam Narayana Panicker c A. Kannan Narayanan m M.G. Radhakrishnan

lp Ashok, Gopi, Aziz, Jose Prakash, Lalitha, Geeta, Adoor Bhawani

Set in a village, Raman (Ashok) is a rather simple boy living with his sister. The villainous bully, rapist and ex-con Prabhakaran Pillai (Aziz), a married man with children, covets the sister and persecutes Raman who, alone, stands up to the bully and kills him in a knife fight. He has to hide from the police and from the villagers, with the help of a teashop owner (Gopi) and a prostitute, Devayani (Lalitha), who thus express their hatred for the bully they did not dare confront themselves. It emerges that the villain enjoyed a grudging respect for his ‘macho’ qualities: by killing him, Raman has become the one who is both respected and feared. In the end, Raman is struck with remorse when faced by the children of the man he killed. The novelist Padmarajan’s feature has a taut script in which women are expected to pay the price for demonstrations as well as critical examinations of manliness.

  PRATYUSHA

aka Before Dawn aka Dawn

1979 90’ b&w Telugu

d/co-sc Jatla Venkataswamy Naidu [V.N. Jatla] p B. Nagabhushanam, S. Nagaiah, B. Sailu pc Swairi Films st/co-sc/dial K. Siva Reddy c R.S. Agarwal m Bhuvan Hari

lp Kadambini, Gangaram, Godavari, Tulasi

Jatla’s first feature is a critique of the ‘Jogu’ custom practised in some villages where a possessed devadasi (temple prostitute and dancer) selects, in the name of religion, another woman who shall succeed her as a prostitute. The film, performed by non-professionals and shot in documentary style on location in Binola in Nizamabad, focuses on a mother who refuses to hand over her chosen daughter and, because she cannot afford to pay the fine for this infringement against ‘religious’ duty, kills the child.

  PUTHIYA VARPUGAL

aka The New Moulds

1979 143’ col Tamil

d/sc Bharathirajaa pc Manoj Creations st K. Selvaraj dial K. Bhagyaraj lyr Kannadasan, Gangai Amaran, Muthulingam c P.S. Niwas m Ilaiyaraja

lp K. Bhagyaraj, Goundamani, G. Srinivasan, Rati Agnihotri, Usharani, R. Rangarajan, Manorama

A newly arrived village teacher (Bhagyaraj) becomes the rival of the local elder and feudal bully (Srinivasan) for the beautiful Jyothi (Agnihotri), the daughter of a temple musician. The elder frames the teacher for murder and gets his factotum, Amavasai (Goundamani), to marry Jyothi so as to have access to her. She, however, knifes him and is caught in the act by both the teacher and Amavasai, who has an instant change of heart: he disposes of the corpse in a village ritual bonfire, lit by the dead man’s son, and releases Jyothi to escape with her true love. The film is typical of Bharathirajaa’s work, featuring his trade-mark scene of a group dance of white-clad women and following his set narrative structure: a new arrival in a rural location, love at first sight, rivalry with the socially powerful villain and resolution against the background of a village ritual. The locations around Mysore provide a convincing setting.

  SANGHAGANAM

aka Chorus

1979 83’ b&w Malayalam

d P.A. Backer p Salam Karasseri pc Navadhara Movie Makers s M. Sukumaran c Vipin Das m P. Devarajan

lp Srinivasan, Ramu Kariat, P.R. Nambiar, Madhu Master, Rani Tankam

A symbolic story continuing Backer’s effort to provide a geneology of political activists (cf. Kabani Nadi Chuvannappol, 1975; Chuvanna Vithukal, 1976). This story is structured as a quest for a reliable leader called Goutama. The educated but cynical hero meets different men bearing that name but all reject him until he meets a CP union activist being tortured in a police cell. Only after he sees the activist killed in a lathi charge does the hero realise that he must take responsibility for his own actions and rebel against injustice rather than put his faith in a charismatic figure.

  SHANKARABHARANAM

aka The Jewel of Shiva

1979 143’ col Telugu

d/s K. Vishwanath p Edida Nageshwara Rao pc Poornodaya Art Creations dial Jandhyala lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy c Balu Mahendra m K.V. Mahadevan

lp J.V. Somayajulu, Manju Bhargavi, Allu Ramalingaiah, Pushpakumari, Tulasi Ram, Chandramohan, Rangarao, Baby Varalakshmi, Rajyalakshmi, Jhansi

Vishwanath’s musical hit is often presented as the film that transformed the Telugu film industiy in the 80s. It borrows extensively from classical Carnatic music to tell the story of a relationship between a Carnatic guru and a prostitute. The prostitute Ratnaprabha (Bhargavi) runs away from home and is reluctantly accepted as a student, which brings the guru Shankara Sastry (Somayajulu) into social disrepute. When Ratnaprabha is forced to return to her ancestral vocation, she murders her customer but nevertheless finds herself pregnant. She gives birth to a son (Tulasi), who now studies under the guru although they are ostracised. Eventually Ratnaprabha becomes rich and she builds an auditorium in the name of her guru. During the opening performance, he has a heart attack and the son replaces the guru on stage, extending the tradition. It is the first Telugu film to attempt a redefinition of mass culture, using calendar-art aesthetics in several garish dance sequences by Manju Bhargavi - many of them in front of temples - and classical music (the guru out-shouts the rock music created by his detractors). Successful mainly for its anti-Tamil and anti-North view of an indigenist Telugu classicism (cf. G.V. Iyer’s work in Kannada at the same time), spawning a whole genre: cf. Bapu’s Thyagayya (1981), Dasari Narayana Rao’s Megha Sandesam (1982), Singeetham Srinivasa Rao’s Sangeetha Samrat (1984), Vamsy’s Sitara (1984) and Vishwanath’s own sequels Sagara Sangamam (1983) and Swati Muthyam (1985). Somayajulu later played many similar roles, his presence being enough to invoke the Shankarabharanam legacy. Vishwanath remade his Telugu film in Hindi as Sur Sangam (1985) with Girish Karnad and Jayapradha.

  SINHASAN

aka The Throne

1979 170’ b&w Marathi

d/co-p Jabbar Patel co-p D.V. Rao pc Sujata Chitra st Arun Sadhu’s novels Mumbai Dinank and Simhasan sc/dial Vijay Tendulkar lyr Suresh Bhatt c Suryakant Lavande m Hridayanath Mangeshkar

lp Arun Sarnaik, Nilu Phule, Shriram Lagoo, Datta Bhatt, Madhukar Toradmal, Satish Dubhashi, Shrikant Moghe, Madhav Watve, Mohan Agashe, Jairam Hardikar, Nana Patekar

A film that sets out to elaborate a new genre derived from the language of political journalism. Based on two novels by the noted political correspondent Arun Sadhu, and scripted by a former journalist, Tendulkar, the plot addresses Maharashtra’s political corruption linked with Bombay’s entrepreneurial sector. The main protagonist is a newspaper correspondent, Digu Tipnis (Phule), who uncovers a network of telephone tapping and espionage, relations between trade union leaders and politicians, etc. Many of the characters were thinly-veiled references to real-life figures: Chief Minister Jivajirao (Sarnaik) refers to Maharashtra’s former Chief Minister Vasantrao Naik, while the trade union leader Da Costa (Dubhashi) refers to George Fernandes. In the end, the journalist appears to go crazy. The cast includes many of the Marathi theatre and cinema’s most famous names.

  SPARSH

aka The Touch

1979 145’ col Hindi

d/s Sai Paranjpye p Basu Bhattacharya pc Arohi Film Makers lyr Indu Jain c Virendra Saini m Kanu Roy

lp Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana Azmi, Om Puri, Sudha Chopra, Pran Talwar, Arun Joglekar, Mohan Gokhale, Lakshman Tandon, I.V. Sambhani, Arun Sachdev, Tapan Kumar Nandi, Baladutt Sharma, Amjad Ali Khan

Paranjpye’s first full-scale art-house feature tells a love story set among the blind. The blind Anirudh Parmar (Shah) runs a school for blind children and is particularly touchy about the notion that the children might be perceived as less than self-sufficient. Kavita (Azmi), who takes up charitable causes after the death of her husband, becomes involved with the school and falls in love with Anirudh. They are to marry, but Anirudh cannot get rid of the suspicion that she is doing it out of pity. This humanist though sentimental story was commended by reviewers for the performances of the children and the several comic moments that enlivened the script.

  22 JUNE 1897

1979 121’ col Marathi

d/p/co-s Nachiket Patwardhan co-d Jayoo Patwardhan pc Sanket co-s Shankar Nag dial Vijay Tendulkar c Navroze Contractor m Anand Modak

lp Prabhakar Patankar, Ravindra Mankani, Udayan Dixit, Rod Gilbert, John Irving, Sadashiv Amarapurkar

The co-directors, who are also architects and art directors (Ondanondu Kaladalli, 1978) retell the famous Pune legend of the Chaphekar brothers, the militant Hindu chauvinist followers of Bal Gangadhar Tilak whose violent anti-British activities led to their martyrdom. Mr Rand imposed martial law in Pune because of an outbreak of the plague in January 1897, and the eldest brother, Damodar, kills Rand on 22 June. In retaliation, Inspector Brewin starts a massive manhunt using former colleagues of the three brothers as informers. Damodar is hanged, despite Tilak’s personal appeal to the British. When the youngest brother, Vasudev, kills the informers who helped Brewin, he and the remaining brother, Balkrishna, are also sentenced to hang. The directors rely heavily on a version of method acting which was then seeping into the Marathi avant-garde theatre, emphasising minimal movement, deep voices and meaningful looks. The cast includes members of Pune’s Theatre Academy, including its most promising performer, Mankani. Contractor’s sophisticated lighting combined with the directors’ architectural sensibilities provide the film with a sense of place. However, a disturbing question hangs over the film: to celebrate, in 1979, anti-colonial activities is uncontroversial whereas the glorification of fanatical Hindu chauvinists at that time is troubling.

  UDHIRI POOKAL

aka Scattered Flowers

1979 143’ col Tamil

d/sc/dial J. Mahendran p Radha Balakrishnan st Pudumaipithan based on his short story Sittranai c Ashok Kumar lyr Kannadasan, Muthulingam, Vallavan, Gangai Amaran m Ilaiyaraja

lp Vijayan, Ashwini, Sundar, Baby Anju, Samikannu, Charuhasan, Sarath Babu

Melodrama based on the writing of noted author Pudumaipithan, about the feared autocratic Sundaravadivelu (Vijayan) and his gentle wife Lakshmi (Ashwini), beloved by the villagers. The trigger for the drama is the arrival of the schoolteacher (Sundar) who is in love with the headman’s sister-in-law Shenbagam, and health officer Prakash (Sarath Babu), who used to be engaged to Lakshmi. When Lakshmi dies, Sundaravadivelu gets himself a second wife but also lusts after Shenbagam, whom he disrobes, in front of his second wife’s eyes, on her wedding day. The outraged villagers march Sundaravadivelu to the river and invite him to drown himself. He repents, having turned the entire village of peaceable folk into a vengeful mob.

  VETAGADU

1979 161’ col Telugu

d K. Raghavendra Rao pc Roja Movies p M. Arjun Raju, K. Sivaram Raju st/dial Jandhyala lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy c K.S. Prakash m Chakravarthy

lp N.T. Rama Rao, Sridevi, Satyanarayana, Ravu Gopala Rao, K. Jaggaiah, Pushpalatha, Allu Ramalingaiah, Pandharibai, Nagesh, Mamata, Shrilakshmi

With this film, together with Yugandhar (1979), NTR tried to change his image and to assimilate conventions of Hindi cinema. He plays a police officer who hunts down a gang of smugglers in a forest. The combination of NTR and the future Hindi star Sridevi caused a sensation.

  YUGANDHAR

1979 159’ col Telugu

d K.S.R. Doss pc Gajalakshmi Arts st Salim-Javed dial D.V. Narasaraju lyr C. Narayana Reddy, Acharya Athreya, Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy c U.C. Shekhar m Ilaiyaraja

lp N.T. Rama Rao, K. Jaggaiah, Prabhakara Reddy, T.L. Kantha Rao, Thyagaraj, Jayasudha, Jayamalini, Sheela, Satyanarayana

Early example of the impact of the Prakash Mehra and Salim-Javed styles on Telugu cinema, an idiom assimilated by NTR in his later work (cf. Vetagadu, 1979). A kind smuggler unfortunately kills Ramesh, whose sister Jaya vows revenge, but then falls in love with the hero. This genre confirmed several female stars (e.g. Sridevi and Jayapradha) who went on to perform the same roles in Hindi, and provided welcome platforms for 50s stars like Anjali Devi or G. Varalakshmi to play tearful mother roles. The genre also includes cabaret scenes with Jayamalini and Silk Smitha.

  AAKROSH

aka Cry of the Wounded

1980 145’ col Hindi

d/c Govind Nihalani p Devi Dutt, Narayan Kenny pc Krsna Movies s Vijay Tendulkar dial Satyadev Dubey lyr Vasant Dev, Suryabhanu Gupta m Ajit Varman

lp Naseeruddin Shah, Amrish Puri, Om Puri, Arvind Deshpande, Smita Patil, Mohan Agashe, Achyut Potdar, Nana Palsikar, Bhagyashree Kotnis, Mahesh Elkunchwar, Vihang Nayak

Cinematographer Nihalani’s directorial debut with a classic Tendulkar script based on an actual incident in Bhiwandi, a small town outside Bombay. The central character is a young lawyer, Bhaskar Kulkarni (Shah) appointed to defend a tribal, Lahanya Bhiku (Om Puri, who emerged as a star in this film), who is accused of murdering his wife Nagi (Patil) but refuses to speak a word. Kulkarni investigates and finds that the man’s wife had been raped and killed by a group of politicians and businessmen during their revels. He also finds that the police and his own boss (A. Puri) are implicated in the cover-up and the framing of Lahanya. When Lahanya is allowed to attend the funeral of his father, he takes the opportunity to kill his young sister to protect her from the fate that befell his wife. In the end, Lahanya gives vent to his suffering and to his helpless anger with a cry of anguish. The part of a left activist who assists Kulkarni’s investigations is played by the playwright Elkunchwar whose play Party Nihalani adapted to the screen (1984). Nihalani’s film extended Tendulkar’s interest in an expressionist fictional reconstruction of real-life political incidents (cf. Benegal’s Nishant, 1975) and greatly influenced the way cinema in the 80s approached political issues, using tight close-ups, fast-paced editing and dramatic lighting. Nihalani’s 3rd film Ardh Satya (1983) went on to focus on police brutality.

  AJALI NABOU

1980 153’ col Assamese

d Nip Barua lyr Keshab Mahanta c Nalin Duara m Ramen Barua

lp Biju Phukan, Nipon Goswami, Ela Kakoti, Prasanta Hazarika, Purabi Sarma, Purnima Pathak, Vidya Rao, Pranjal Saikia, Biswajit Chakraborty

The first mainstream Assamese Eastmancolor film with a star cast is a melodramatic middle-class musical fantasy. It made Nip Barua the top commercial attraction in Assamese cinema.

  AKALER SANDHANEY

aka In Search of Famine

1980 128’ col Bengali

d/sc Mrinal Sen p Dhiresh Kumar Chakraborty pc D.K. Films st Amalendu Chakravarty c K.K. Mahajan m Salil Choudhury

lp Dhritiman Chatterjee, Smita Patil, Sreela Majumdar, Geeta Sen, Dipankar Dey, Rajen Tarafdar, Radhamohan Bhattacharya, Devika Mukherjee, Sajal Roy Choudhury, Jochan Dastidar, Siddhartha Dutta, Reba Roy Choudhury, Umanath Battacharya, Nirmal Ghosh

In 1980 a film crew from Calcutta headed by a director (Chatterjee) arrives in a small Bengali village to make a ‘social conscience’ film set in the 1943 famine (setting of his earlier Baishey Shravan, 1960). They stay in a dilapidated mansion inhabited by a woman and her incapacitated old husband. The crew, including star Patil (playing herself), begins to make contact with villagers such as the admiring Haren (Tarafdar), the last surviving weaver, and the local teacher (R. Bhattacharya). The villagers observe the preparations with undisguised curiosity but gradually the voyeuristic implications of a big film crew coming to address local history’ in a village become unbearable to all concerned. Conflicts erupt and the film has to be abandoned. The double time levels involved in the 1943–1980 structure of the tale, with ample parallels between the two periods emerging as the film progresses (e.g. a villager accuses the crew of starting a new famine as they buy up food for the film unit’s lavish meals; or the village notables used to be or are descended from famine profiteers), is further complicated by a village woman, Durga (S. Majumdar) whose intimations of the future disorient the city-dwellers even further. Suresh Chandra’s art direction is particularly notable for the way he orchestrates the encroachment of set-like qualities into the village location, giving the cultural and temporal disjunctions in the narrative a palpably physical dimension. Sen commented that the film made ‘a confession of our incapacities. We speak of the crisis in the arts when we hesitate to confront reality or fail to catch its true bearings.’

  ALBERT PINTO KO GUSSA KYON AATA HAI

aka What Makes Albert Pinto Angry

1980 113’ col Hindi

d/p/co-s Saeed Akhtar Mirza pc Saeed Mirza Prod, co-s Kundan Shah dial/co-lyr Madhosh Bilgrami co-lyr Hriday Lani c Virendra Saini m Manas Mukherjee, Bhaskar Chandavarkar

lp Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana Azmi, Smita Patil, Dilip Dhawan, Sulabha Deshpande, Arvind Deshpande

Mirza later acknowledged that the film, which addresses India’s minorities, is set in a catholic Bombay milieu because at the time he lacked the courage to deal with Muslim issues (this he did later in his Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro, 1989). Albert Pinto (Shah) is a garage mechanic from Goa who dreams of owning the expensive cars he drives for clients. His girlfriend Stella (Azmi) upsets him with her casual and pragmatic attitude to his colleagues as well as to their employer’s sexual interest in her. Albert’s father (Deshpande) joins a textile workers’ strike and stimulates his son’s political awareness. Mirza wanted the film to be acceptable to the mainstream Hindi cinema and to that end included some songs e.g. the scene of the garage workers praising an expensive car, Paanch lakh ki gaadi hai (‘The car costs 500,000 rupees’), shot in a single take. Several characteristic Mirza sequences are introduced into the film, such as the hero examining himself in a mirror, or the workers being searched as they leave the factory (shot with a concealed camera).

Dipankar Dey (centre) in Bancharamer Bagan

  BANCHARAMER BAGAN

aka The Garden of Bancharam

1980 133’ col Bengali

d/sc/co-dial/lyr/m Tapan Sinha p Dhiresh Kumar Chakraborty st/co-dial Manoj Mitra, based on his play c Bimal Mukherjee

lp Manoj Mitra, Nirmal Kumar, Dipankar Dey, Robi Ghosh, Bishwa Guha-Thakurta, Debika Mukherjee, Donald F. Sihan, Bhanu Bannerjee, Madhabi Chakraborty

Sinha’s excursion into the fairy-tale genre tells of an old peasant, Bancharam (Mitra), who defeats the tyrannical landlord Chhakari (Dey). Inheriting a dry patch of land, Bancharam converts it into a fabulous garden. The British magistrate supports him when Chhakari attempts to acquire the garden, after which he dies. Chhakari’s son Nakari tries a new strategem: he promises Bancharam Rs 100 every month provided Bancharam bequeaths his garden to the landowner by a specific date. Bancharam agrees but amazingly becomes healthier with every passing day, repeatedly promising to die but failing to do so. Come the appointed day, Nakari arrives with the funeral band and finds Bancharam glowing with health. Nakari collapses on the prepared funeral bed and dies instead. The film used several theatrical techniques, including direct address and rhyming dialogue, and has fine performances by Mitra, the author of the popular play, and Dipankar Dey.

  BARA/SOOKHA

aka The Famine aka Drought aka. Dushkal

1980 135’[K]/119’[H] col Kannada/Hindi

d/p M.S. Sathyu st U.R. Ananthamurthy’s story sc Shama Zaidi, Javed Siddiqui c Ashok Gunjal m Kuldeep Singh

lp Anant Nag, Lavlin Madhu, Nitin Sethi, Veeraj Byakod, Uma Sivakumar

The noted Navya Movement writer Ananthamurthy (cf. Samskara, 1970) provided the story for this tale about political chicanery set in the Bidar district of Karnataka, a famine-ridden area. The film weaves together the farmers’ daily reality with scenes of the political rivalry between two ministers, represented at local level by the clash between Gangadhar, president of the grain merchants’ association, and Bhimoji, a small-time politician. When Satish Chandra (Nag), a deputy commissioner, resorts to a crazy water diviner to relieve the situation, a crisis erupts and a major riot ensues, leading to a ministerial resignation. The rival minister, by being the first to order much-needed grain to be rushed to the famine-stricken area, thereby consolidates his political hold.

  BHAVNI BHAVAI/ANDHER NAGARI

aka A Folk Tale aka The Bhavai of Life

1980 140’[G]/125’[H] col Gujarati/Hindi

d/s Ketan Mehta pc Sanchar Film st Folk-tale Achhut No Bhavai Vesh c Pammy m Gaurang Vyas

lp Naseeruddin Shah, Smita Patil, Mohan Gokhale, Om Puri, Dina Pathak, Suhasini Mulay, Benjamin Gilani, Nimesh Desai, Gopi Desai

Mehta’s debut is a remarkably successful transposition of the folk performance idiom to the screen. It is dedicated to Brecht, Goscinny and to the inventor of the Bhavai, Asait Thakore, who was a Gujarati Brahmin cast out from his community. He proceeded to live among the lower castes and his descendents, the targalas, are the traditional Gujarati performers of the plays he wrote and dedicated to Amba, a mother goddess. The Bhavai evolved into one of India’s most energetic folk music and dance dramas. It has an episodic structure consisting of Veshas (playlets set in medieval Gujarat stressing masquerades and offering much scope for improvisation) and mobilises a wealth of religious, political and mythological references, usually held together by a male Rangla and female Rangli chorus. The film deploys a ‘chinese box’ structure. In the framing narrative, a group of persecuted Harijans (Untouchables) are migrating to the city and pause for the night. To the accompaniment of Malo’s (Puri) music, a story is told of the time when Harijans had to have broomsticks tied to their backs in order to erase their footsteps while walking. The tale is of a king (Shah) with two wives. When the elder queen delivers a male heir, the younger one (Mulay) conspires to have the child killed. But the child survives and, raised by Malo, grows up into the handsome Jivo (Gokhale). The climax of the film combines Jivo’s sexual awakening in response to the wild tribal woman Ujaan (Patil) with the digging of a well by the Untouchables to propitiate the gods, so that the king may have another heir. However, in a traditional happy ending, the well yields water, Jivo is saved and the people freed. This ending of Malo’s story is disputed by his audience, who suggest an alternative: Jivo is beheaded and Malo jumps into the dry well cursing the king with his dying breath; his sacrifice results in a flood that washes away the evil rulers (this ending is intercut with documentary footage of India’s freedom struggle). The film’s own end shifts back into realism showing the Harijans approaching the city. The film succeeds mainly through the extraordinary performances of e.g. Shah, Gilani (the commander) and Mulay, enhanced by comic-strip-style camera angles and exotic locations. Its several contemporary references include violent caste riots in Ahmedabad and the severe drought in Northern Gujarat.

  CHAKRA

aka Vicious Circle

1980 140’ col Hindi

d Rabindra Dharmaraj p Manmohan Shetty, Pradeep Uppoor pc Neo Films st Jaywant Dalvi’s Marathi novel (1963) sc/dial Shama Zaidi, Javed Siddiqui lyr Madhosh Bilgrami c Barun Mukherjee m Hridayanath Mangeshkar

lp Smita Patil, Naseeruddin Shah, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Ranjit Choudhury, Anjali Paingankar, Savita Bajaj, Uttam Sirur, Rohini Hattangadi

Predating Salaam Bombay (1988) by several years, Dharmaraj’s only feature (he died in 1981) provides a less idealised look at Bombay’s slum-dwellers. Amma (Patil) and her son Benwa (Choudhury) move to Bombay’s slums when her husband killed a moneylender who tried to rape her. The husband was then shot trying to steal some tin to build a hut. In Bombay, she lives with the vain pimp and petty crook Lukka (Shah), Benwa’s idol. Lukka is banned from Bombay by the police and Benwa marries the young Chenna (Paingankar). Amma acquires another lover, a truck driver (Kharbanda), and becomes pregnant. Lukka reappears, ravaged by syphilis and drugs; he kills a chemist to feed his habit and hides in Amma’s hut. The cops find him and arrest both him and Benwa, beating them up in the process. Amma has a miscarriage in the scuffle. In the end, bulldozers arrive to flatten the entire slum area. Patil gives her best ‘realistic’ performance and some shots of her moving unrecognised among Bombay’s slum-dwellers were taken with a hidden camera (Do Bigha Zameen, 1953, had made the same claims).

  CHANN PARDESI

1980 147’ col Punjabi

d Chitrarath Singh co-p Swarn Seedha, J.S. Cheema co-p/st/dial Baldev Gill sc/co-lyr Ravindra Peepat co-lyr Pawan Kumar, Waryam Mast c Manmohan Singh m Surinder Kohli

lp Raj Babbar, Rama Vij, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Om Puri, Amrish Puri

One of the few Punjabi hits is an epic melodrama spanning two generations of feudal warfare. The peasant Nekh (Kharbanda) loves Kammo (Vij), but she is seduced by the landlord Joginder Singh (A. Puri). Kammo gives birth to Singh’s baby after she is married to Nekh, leading to Nekh’s lifelong vendetta against Singh. Nekh becomes a bandit and on several occasions tries to attack Singh’s house, which leads to his arrest and life imprisonment. Years later, Kammo’s son (Babbar) falls in love with Singh’s daughter, Channi, unaware that she is his half-sister. Eventually, after Nekh’s release and complications involving Singh’s blackmailing secretary (O. Puri) and Channi’s wedding, the outlaw is reconciled with his wife. All leading players were imported from the Hindi cinema, inaugurating a new trend of commercially successful Bombay-based Punjabi movies as an offshoot of the Hindi industry.

  DADAR KIRTI

1980 154’ col Bengali

d/sc Tarun Majumdar pc Ram Cine Arts p Ram Gupta st Saradindu Bandyopadhyay lyr Rahindranath Tagore, Pulak Bandyopadhyay, Hridesh Pandey c Shakti Bannerjee m Hemanta Mukherjee

lp Tapas Paul, Mahua Roy Choudhury, Ayan Bannerjee, Debashree Roy, Kali Bannerjee, Satya Bannerjee, Anup Kumar, Ruma Guha-Thakurta, Shefali Bannerjee, Sulata Choudhury

Hit melodrama about a simple-minded youth’s growth into adulthood. Kedar (Paul) is sent to study with his smarter cousin Santu in the hope of improving his university results. Kedar falls in love with next-door neighbour Saraswati, but also comes under the nefarious influence of the local bully Bhombhal, who also estranges Kedar from Saraswati. The problems are resolved only at the end. Paul, whose debut this was, went on to become a major Bengali star in the 80s playing the naive, sacrificing hero almost to the point of masochism (cf. Guru Dakshina, 1987). His ‘loveable’ image is often pointedly in contrast to the 80s Hindi cinema’s emphasis on machismo.

  DOORATHU IDHI MUZHAKKAM

aka Faraway Thunder

1980 125’ col Tamil

d/p K. Vijayan pc Jai Sudha Films s Somasoodan c N. Balakrishnan m Salil Choudhury

lp Poornima, Vijayakant, Peelisivam, A.K. Veeraswamy, Jagadeesan

A village melodrama about a fisherman, Ponnan (Vijayakant), believed lost at sea whose girlfriend Chelli (Poornima) marries a relative, Mari (Peelisivam), and has a child. Assuming she had been unfaithful, Mari and a nasty magician plan to sacrifice the child ritually to obtain wealth. Ponnan resurfaces and saves the child but both the men in Chelli’s life die, leaving her to sail off into the sunset with her baby. The film introduced future star Vijayakant.

  GEHRAYEE

1980 135’ col Hindi

d/st/co-sc Aruna-Vikas pc N.B. Kamat, Avikam co-sc Vijay Tendulkar dial Hafeez lyr Gulzar c Barun Mukherjee m Laxmikant-Pyarelal

lp Shriram Lagoo, Anant Nag, Padmini Kolhapure, Indrani Mukherjee, Amrish Puri, Rita Bhaduri, Sudhir Dalvi, Suhas Bhalekar, Shobha Joshi, Satyendra, Satya Kumar Patil, Shetty

Uma (Kolhapure), the daughter of a businessman (Lagoo), spews abuse and reveals uncomfortable secrets from her father’s past. The father arranges psychiatric treatment for her, including electric shocks, to the disapproval of the mother (Mukherjee) and son Nandu (Nag) who prefer the more traditional interpretation that Uma is possessed by a rogue demon. To perform the exorcism, they employ a potentially dangerous Tantric (Puri) who practises black magic on virgins. The daughter’s exorcism is then followed by the son’s effort to track down the demon whom he finds living in the body of a woman. He strangles her as the film ends, literally, with a question mark. Although The Exorcist (1973) was an unofficially acknowledged influence, the film is more a mystificatory engagement with religious ritual than with the conventions of the horror film.

  GREESHAMAM

aka Summer

1980 122’ col Malayalam

d/s V.R. Gopinath p Sumathy Ayyapan pc Mayflower Movie Makers c Madhu Ambat m M.B. Srinivasan

lp Rajendran, Gopi, Ravi Menon, Jalaja, Rekha Rao, Protima, Ramu

Drama about Hari (Rajendran), a psychology student with remarkably little psychological sensitivity who is obsessed by a 16-year-old girl, Rathi (Jalaja). When he discovers that she is not the daughter but the mistress of his university professor, the student is so traumatised and preoccupied with himself that he is unable to develop any real relationship with other women like the prostitute Anitha (Protima) or his former colleague Malini (Rekha Rao). The story, told in flashbacks, ends with a dreamlike reconciliation between Hari and Rathi, suggesting that Hari remains stuck in his adolescent fantasies.

  HIRAK RAJAR DESHE

aka The Kingdom of Diamonds

1980 118’ col Bengali

d/s/m Satyajit Ray pc West Bengal Govt c Soumendu Roy

lp Soumitra Chatterjee, Utpal Dutt, Tapan Chatterjee, Robi Ghosh, Santosh Dutta, Promod Ganguly, Alpana Gupta, Robin Majumdar, Sunil Sarkar, Noni Ganguly, Ajoy Bannerjee, Kartick Chattopadhyay, Haridhan Mukherjee

Continuing the adventures of Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1968), Ray’s musical is at times a hard-hitting satire. The lead duo Goopy (T. Chatterjee) and Bagha (R. Ghosh) face up to the despotic king of Hirak (Dutt) who tries to brainwash his subjects with the help of a scientist (Dutta) and shuts down the only school in the kingdom, forcing the idealist schoolteacher Udayan (S. Chatterjee) to become a terrorist in hiding. Goopy and Bagha eventually plunder the diamond treasury, bribe the soldiers, rescue Udayan and defeat the king. The Emergency (1975–7) and Sanjay Gandhi’s fascist programmes are directly referenced in e.g. the scene where poor people are to be evicted so that tourists may not see them, while the king’s attempt to brainwash all his subjects by means of rhymed couplets inculcating good behaviour evokes the many official slogans launched at the time enjoining people to mind their own business, to ‘be Indian buy Indian’ and to follow the then prime minister’s Twenty-point Programme.

  HUM PAANCH

1980 163’ col Hindi

d Bapu pc S.K. Film Ents st S.R. Puttanna Kanagal sc M.V. Raman dial Rahi Masoom Raza lyr Anand Bakshi c Sharad Kadwe m Laxmikant-Pyarelal, S.P. Balasubramanyam

lp Sanjeev Kumar, Shabana Azmi, Mithun Chakraborty, Naseeruddin Shah, Deepti Naval, Raj Babbar, Gulshan Grover, Amrish Puri, Kanhaiyalal

Bapu’s first Hindi film remade Puttanna Kanagal’s Paduvarahalli Pandavaru (1978), derived from a popular Mahabharata legend set in feudal UP. The villainous zamindar Veer Pratap Singh (Puri) is Duiyodhan, his sidekick Lala (Kanhaiyalal) is Shakuni and their opponents are the drunken holy man Krishna (Kumar), Bhima (Chakraborty), Arjun (Babbar), etc. The good and the bad perform with straightfaced conviction (which prevents the film from becoming a comedy) a story reduced to a series of action thrills. In many respects this feudal drama ironically echoed Benegal’s Nishant (1975), a resemblance reinforced by the presence of Puri, Azmi and Shah.

  INSAAF KA TARAZU

aka The Scales of Justice

1980 146’(135’, 112’) col Hindi

d/p B.R. Chopra pc B.R. Films s Shabd Kumar lyr Sahir Ludhianvi c Dharam Chopra m Ravindra Jain

lp Zeenat Aman, Padmini Kolhapure, Raj Babbar, Deepak Parashar, Shriram Lagoo, Iftikhar, Simi Garewal, Jagdish Raj, Om Shivpuri

This notorious rape movie followed in the wake of growing feminist activism in India in the 70s after the Mathura and Maya Tyagi rape cases, the amendment to the Rape Law and the impact of e.g. the Forum Against Rape which offered legal assistance to rape victims. The film has been analysed by Susie Tharu in her essay ‘On Subverting a Rhetoric: Media Versions of Rape’ (in Olympus, 9 August 1981). The pre-credit sequence shows a rape in shadow play. The story then shows the advertising model Bharati (Aman) being raped by the millionaire Ramesh (Babbar). When he is arrested, Bharati is unable to get a conviction in court. Bharati and her sister Nita (Kolhapure) move to another city where Nita, answering a job advertisement, is also raped by Ramesh. Bharati shoots Ramesh dead and once again faces the legal process, presided over by the same judge and prosecuted by the lawyer who had earlier defended Ramesh. The argument gets bogged down in legal technicalities until it is emotionally resolved with a passionate outburst from Nita. The three rape sequences shown in the film, staged with voyeuristic relish, no doubt contributed to its commercial success. Bapu remade the film in Telugu as Edi Nyayam Edi Dharmam (1982).

  KALYUG

aka The Machine Age

1980 152’ col Hindi

d/co-s Shyam Benegal p Shashi Kapoor pc Film Valas co-s Girish Karnad c Govind Nihalani m Vanraj Bhatia

lp Shashi Kapoor, Rekha, Anant Nag, Raj Babbar, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Victor Bannerjee, Vinod Doshi, Vijaya Mehta, Supriya Pathak, Sushma Seth

Following on from the work of Ghatak and Shahani, Benegal essayed an ‘epic’ movie by transferring famous episodes from the Mahabharata to contemporary industrial society in order to explore, in his words, ‘human values as they exist today in the modern world’. The result is a crime movie about a feud between two industrial families, the Puranchands and the Khubchands, which escalates into violence and murder by contract. Karan Singh (Kapoor) is killed while changing a car tyre, referring to Karna, the tragic son of Kunti and the Sun god in the original epic, who was killed when his chariot wheel got stuck; other mythological characters become income tax inspectors raiding the Rekha’s character’s house, rummaging in her cupboard and fingering her underwear.

  KARZ

1980 160’ col Hindi

d Subhash Ghai pc Mukta Films st Mukta Films Story Dept. sc Sachin Bhowmick dial Rahi Masoom Raza lyr Anand Bakshi c Kamalakar Rao m Laxmikant-Pyarelal

lp Rishi Kapoor, Tina Munim, Simi Garewal, Raj Kiran, Premnath, Pran, Durga Khote, Pinchoo Kapoor, Abha Dhulia, Iftikhar, Aruna Irani

Rebirth story with echoes of Bimal Roy’s Madhumati (1958). The day after his wedding, Ravi Varma (Kiran) is killed by his calculating wife Kamini (Garewal) on instructions from Sir Judas. Years later a rock singer, Monty (Rishi Kapoor), who is in love with Tina (Munim), is haunted by images of a woman killing a man. Eventually realising himself to be Varma’s reincarnation, he takes belated revenge on Kamini, now the queen of Ooty. The film had the electronic rock-music-inspired hit Om Shanti Om, performed on a stage resembling a giant gramophone record.

  KOLANGAL

aka Caricatures

1980 133’ col Malayalam

d/s K.G. George pc Falcon Movies p K.T. Varghese, D. Philip pc Falcon Movies st P.J. Anthony c K. Ramchandra Babu m M.B. Srinivasan

lp Menaka, Rajam K. Nair, Gladys, D. Philip, Venu Nagavalli, Nedumudi Venu, Thilakan

A story set in a Kerala village where rumour and gossip spread like wildfire. Kunjamma (Menaka), the only daughter of an overbearing mother (Nair) with a biscuit stall in the market, sells milk to the villagers. When she befriends a fashionable urban youth (who works as a production assistant for a film company) (Nagavalli), gossip ruins her reputation and her mother threatens suicide if Kunjamma does not agree to marry the only man still willing to accept her as a wife: an old but well-off lecherous drunk (Thilakan). Set in the Kerala matriarchy, the film presents its several village characters as not always good but essentially benign, contrasting this edenic world with the corruption introduced by the urban youth (shown wearing garish clothes and dark glasses). The contrast is, however, undone by the mode of filming itself, with continuously saturated colour and emphatic performance modes.

  LORRY

1980 136’(114’) col/scope Malayalam

d B.G. Bharathan p Rajamma Hari pc Supriya Films s Padmarajan lyr Poovachal Khader c Ashok Kumar m M.S. Vishwanathan

lp Balan K. Nair, Nitya, Achan Kunju, Prathap Pothan

Continuing the collaboration between director Bharathan and writer Padmarajan, the film features the villainous Velan who kidnaps and forcibly blinds village children to turn them into fellow circus performers. He falls in love with one of his victims, the beautiful Rani, as does his hard drinking lorry-driver friend Ouseph. Eventually Ouseph and Velan kill each other allowing Rani to escape with the man she really loves, a lorry cleaner.

  MINCHINA OTA

1980 135’ col Kannada

d Shankar Nag pc Sanket Prod, s Girish Karnad c B.C. Gowri Shankar m Prabhakar Badri

lp Anant Nag, Shankar Nag, Ramesh Bhatt, Priya Tendulkar, Loknath, Somu, Mandip Roy

Story of three petty thieves, Katte (S. Nag), Tony (A. Nag) and Tatha (Loknath), attempt a daring jailbreak because Tony wants to be with his pregnant wife (Tendulkar) when she has her baby. Shankar Nag’s directing debut, apparently based on a real-life incident.

  MURATTU KALAI

1980 144’ col Tamil

d S.P. Muthuraman pc AVM s/lyr Panchu Arunachalam c Babu m Ilaiyaraja

lp Rajnikant, Jaishankar, Ashokan, Surulirajan, Mahendran, Thengai Srinivasan, Rati Agnihotri, Sumalatha

After a long absence, the prestigious AVM company returned with this megahit featuring Rajnikant as Kaaliyan, a simple but rich and virile young man in a village, who tames a bull and attracts the meretricious attentions of the headman’s sister Soundaryan (Sumalatha). When the hero falls for the damsel in distress Kannamma (Agnihotri), the headman has his sister and henchman killed, blaming Kaalaiyan, who has to flee into exile before being able to prove his innocence. The film confirmed Rajnikant as a superstar while the film’s hit song, ‘Podhuvaga en manasu thangam - oru pottiynu vandhu vita singam’ (‘I am sensitive, but when challenged, I roar like a lion’) became a classic, featuring prominently even in the election campaign of 1996.

Master Arvind (left) and Menaka in Oppol

  OPPOL

aka Elder Sister

1980 143’ col Malayalam

d K.S. Sethumadhavan pc Rosamma George s M.T. Vasudevan Nair lyr P. Bhaskaran c Madhu Ambat m M.B. Srinivasan

lp Menaka, Master Arvind, Balan K. Nair, Shankaradi, Master Sivaprasad

Sethumadhavan’s best-known Malayalam film. The 6-year-old Appu (Arvind) is the illegitimate son of Malu (Menaka) and knows her as his elder sister. He becomes intensely jealous when Malu marries the hard-drinking ex-military man Govindan (Nair). Appu attacks him during the honeymoon. When Malu scolds him, the boy applies emotional blackmail by running away. Much of the film deals with the bizarre love triangle, which ends only when the little Oedipus triumphs by driving away the husband so that he can keep the mother all to himself. The film, and Vasudevan Nair’s script, which apparently legitimises a woman’s love for her illegitimate son, broke new ground with the characterisation (and performance) of the little boy who dominates the film.

  PIKOO

aka Pikoo’s Day

1980 26’ col Bengali

d/s/m Satyajit Ray pc Henri Fraise c Soumendu Roy

lp Arjun Guha-Thakurta, Aparna Sen, Soven Lahiri, Promod Ganguly, Victor Bannerjee

Short film made as a companion piece for Sadgati (1981). It is a sad fairy-tale about an upper-class Bengali family seen through the eyes of the little boy Pikoo (Guha-Thakurta). One afternoon, Pikoo’s father discovers that his wife (A. Sen) is having an affair. The mother makes love to her boyfriend (V. Bannerjee) while the grandfather (Ganguly) dies of a heart attack in another room and Pikoo sketches flowers in the garden with his new crayons.

  QURBANI

1980 157’ col/scope Hindi

d/p/ed Feroz Khan pc F.K. International st/sc K.K. Shukla dial Kadar Khan lyr Indivar, Farooq Kaisar c Kamal Bose m Kalyanji-Anandji

lp Feroz Khan, Vinod Khanna, Zeenat Aman, Aruna Irani, Amjad Khan, Shakti Kapoor, Amrish Puri, Baby Natasha Chopra

Hugely successful action movie mobilising the traditional ‘yaari’ or male bonding story. The crook Rajesh Kumar (F. Khan) loves the night club singer Sheila (Aman). While he is in jail, she falls for the reformed gangster Amar (Khanna), but repudiates him when Rajesh is released. Rajesh saves Amar’s life on two occasions from the underworld leader Vikram (Kapoor) and Vikram’s sister Jwala (Irani), while the villains also frame Rajesh for the murder of another criminal, Raaka (Puri). The film is mainly concerned with notions of ‘qurbani’ or male sacrifice and the climax comes when in a British countryside, Amar sacrifices his life for Rajesh. The film was known also for the song Aap jaisa koi, performed by the Pakistani-British singer Nazia Hassan, one of the first songs in the style later made popular by composer Biddu for MTV. By way of a lengthy opening tribute the film was dedicated to Sanjay Gandhi, showing the cremation of his body and announcing that the film’s profits would be donated to charity in his memory. The controversial award of tax exemption to the film by the then-Maharashtra Chief Minister A.R. Antulay, who also extended the same facilities to Feroz Khan’s younger brother Sanjay Khan’s Abdullah (also 1980), was widely discussed in the media.

  SATAH SE UTHATA ADMI

aka Arising from the Surface

1980 114’ col Hindi

d/p/sc Mani Kaul pc Infrakino Film, Madhya Pradesh Kala Parishad st texts by Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh c Virendra Saini m Fariduddin Dagar

lp Gopi, M.K. Raina, Vibhutijha, Kulbhushan Billori, Satyen Kumar

Kaul’s film addresses the writings of Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (1917–69), one of the main representatives of the Nai Kavita (New Poetry) movement in Hindi (Tar Saptak, 1943; Chanda Ka Mooh Tedha Hai, 1954). Muktibodh also wrote several short stories, one of which (1971) provides the film with its title, and critical essays. The film integrates episodes from Muktibodh’s writings with material from other sources, including a reinvented neo-realism derived from Muktibodh’s literary settings. The narrative is constructed around three characters. Ramesh (Gopi) is the one who speaks and enacts Muktibodh’s writings, functioning as the first-person voice of the text; his two friends, Madhav (Jha) and Keshav (Raina), are Ramesh’s antagonists and interlocutors esp. in the debates about modernity. Kaul gradually minimises the fictional settings until, in the remarkably shot sequences of the factory, the audience is directly confronted with the written text itself. Kaul had begun his studies of Dhrupad music, the classical North Indian music known mainly for its extreme austerity, and derived a number of cinematic styles from this musical idiom which have influenced all his films since: e.g. the continuously mobile camera, the use of changing light patterns and the importance of improvisation.

  YAGAM

1980 111’ b&w Malayalam

d/c Sivan p B. Chandramani Bai pc Saritha Films st N. Mohan sc K.S. Namboodiri m M.G. Radhakrishnan, lp Babu Nanthancode, Premji, Jalaja, Kalpana, Sreelatha

The sentimental melodrama, allegedly critiquing the extreme-left CPI(ML), has the middle-class namboodiri hero Unni join a political group committed to violent struggle. He abandons his studies, slavishly obeys the group’s leaders and kills a fellow activist as well as a religiously inclined local landlord. Moving to Madurai, he falls in love with Kannamma, the daughter of a factory worker. In the end, following Party instructions, he blows up a train but discovers too late that one of the victims is Kannamma’s father.

FILMS 1981 – 1990

Amol Palekar in Aakriet

  AAKRIET

aka The Misbegotten

1981 135’ col Marathi

d Amol Palekar pc Dnya Films s Vijay Tendulkar c S.D. Deodhar m Bhaskar Chandavarkar, Ashok Patki

lp Amol Palekar, Chitra Palekar, Rekha Sabnis, Dilip Kulkarni

Film star and stage director Palekar’s directorial debut is based on a series of brutal ritual murders among tribals in Manwat, Maharashtra. The central characters are the corrupt Mukutrao Shinde (A. Palekar), an influential trader, fence and smuggler, and his mistress Ruhi (C. Palekar). The middle-aged Ruhi, desperate to consolidate her hold on her husband, wants to become pregnant and initiates the ritual murders of five young virgins to facilitate the desired event. The greedy Mukutrao’s hope to become rich on completion of the ritual stifles his fear of being caught. The fast-moving, confidently edited story quickly abandons its initial realism in favour of the suspense.

  ADHARSHILA

aka The Foundation Stone

1981 154’ col Hindi

d/p/s Ashok Ahuja pc Ashok Films c Sharad Navla lyr Ranjit Kapoor m Uttam Singh

lp Naseeruddin Shah, Anita Kanwar, Devki Nandan Pandey, Anil Kapoor, Madhu Malati

An example of a genre rarely practised in Indian feature films: autobiography. Ahuja features the existential dilemmas of an FTII graduate who wants to express himself through art movies. Ajay (Shah) takes his new bride Asha (Kanwar) on a tour of the Film Institute, narrating its history (it was the former Prabhat Studio). The two set up home and do reasonably well except that Ajay is haunted by disturbing desires to make films.

  ANTHA

1981 143’ col Kannada

d/co-sc S.V. Rajendra Singh pc Parimala Arts p H.N. Maruthi, Venugopal st H.K. Anantharao co-sc/dial H.V. Subbarao lyr Udayashankar, Geethapriya, R.N. Jayagopal c P.S. Prakash m G.K. Venkatesh

lp Ambarish, Laxmi, Latha, Prabhakar, Jayamala, Vajramuni, Shakti Prasad, Musari Krishnamurthy, Pandharibai, Vatsala, Sundarkrishna Urs, Baby Sindhu

Derived from a serial in the popular magazine Sudha, the comic strip-style movie opens with a sequence showing, under the credits, the very pages of the magazine whence it took its story. It then evolves into a violent cop-on-the-rampage film (cf. Zanjeer, 1973; Ardh Satya, 1983), dubbed into Telugu, Malayalam and Tamil and remade in Hindi as Meri Awaaz Suno (1981). The film became a notorious censorship case. A police officer (Ambarish) tracks down a gang of smugglers, leading to some gruesome encounters (the cop’s pregnant wife is tortured, his nails are torn out, etc). He discovers that his own superiors, incl the police chief (Shakti Prasad), are involved in the gang, massacres the villains and drives their corpses into the courtroom. In a remarkable and trendsetting title sequence, the camera appears to literally enter the pages of the popular journal Sudha, identifying the serialised source of Anantharao’s original story. Such ‘alienation’ devices became the norm in several Kannada films later in the decade (cf. the action film Ajit, 1982, the comedy Ganeshana Madhuve, 1990). The promotion for the original Kannada version enjoined viewers to ‘see it before it is banned’ and created a series of controversies which finally led to a parliamentary debate on the Hindi version (starring Jeetendra and Hema Malini). There were claims of it being a political movie for exposing the connections between criminals, the police and politicians, but the censor cuts apparently had nothing to do with the movie’s alleged politics, bearing mainly on nude scenes, a fire and a gory abortion.

  APARNA

1981 97’ b&w Malayalam

d/co-p/s Padmakumar co-p Vijayan pc Sahya Film Makers c Bipin Mohan m Anantha Padmanabhan

lp Prathap Pothan, Sudeshna, Kanakalatha, Master Tony, Balakrishna Pillai

The tale of a young woman, Aparna (Sudeshna), who invests all her hopes and dreams in the illusion of loving Ramesh (Pothan) while her real life becomes progressively more unbearable. She clings to memories and attaches herself to a little boy, Ramu (Tony), who bears the nickname she gave to her lost love. When she sets out to find Ramesh again, she reaches a banyan tree where Ramesh was said to have taken refuge one day and she realises that everything, happiness and misery, even death itself, have been manifestations of ‘maya’, illusion. The ambiguous ending suggests that Aparna too may have disintegrated into an illusion. The film evokes the myth of Aparna’s love for Shiva, which was transformed into an intense and concentrated tapasya (a form of ritual penance).

  CHAALCHITRA

aka The Kaleidoscope

1981 92’ col Bengali

d/s Mrinal Sen p Dhiresh Kumar Chakraborty pc D.K. Films Enterprise c K.K. Mahajan m Aloke Dey

lp Anjan Dutt, Geeta Sen, Utpal Dutt, Debapratim Dasgupta

The lower-middle-class Calcutta milieu critically examined in Ek Din Pratidin (1979) here becomes the setting for an affectionate comedy with a sting in the tail. A talented young writer, Dipu (A. Dutt), is asked by a newspaper editor (U. Dutt) to write in two days a short story about everyday life. Dipu starts enthusiastically but each situation he addresses appears to have ramifications too wide to deal with in a short impressionistic sketch. He wants to write about families living in overcrowded apartment blocks using coal stoves for cooking because they cannot afford gas. This means the small rooms are constantly filled with smoke. At one point, Dipu’s little brother innocently asks: ‘How many coal stoves are there in the city?’ Dipu, despairing of his ability to deal with the subject in the format commissioned by the newspaper, has an angry wish fulfilment dream which he writes up and presents to the editor who prints the story suitably toned down. Sen returns to the same problem in his next film, Kharij (1982).

  CHASHME BUDDOOR

aka Touch Wood aka Shield against the Evil Eye

1981 142’ col Hindi

d/s Sai Paranjpye p Gul Anand pc PLA Prod, lyr Indu Jain c Virendra Saini m Raj Kamal

lp Farouque Shaikh, Deepti Naval, Saeed Jaffrey, Rakesh Bedi, Leela Mishra, Ravi Baswani

A light romantic comedy about three students who share a flat in Delhi. Jomo (Bedi) and Omi (Baswani) are forever chasing women in the city but it is the shy Siddharth (Shaikh) who finds a woman he can love. The film also pokes fun at the way mainstream Hindi cinema portrays love relationships. Amitabh Bachchan puts in a guest appearance here, as he seems to do in all Gul Anand productions (Jalwa, 1986; Hero Hiralal, 1988).

  CHATTANIKI KALLULEVU

1981 141’ col Telugu

d/sc S.A. Chandrasekhar pc Srikar Prod. p Venkineni Satyanarayana st Sobha dial/lyr Mylavarapu Gopi c D.D. Prasad m Krishna-Chakra

lp Chiranjeevi, Laxmi, Madhavi, Kannada Prabhakar, Ceylon Manohar, Hema Sundar, Narayana Rao

Revenge drama with the siblings Vijay (Chiranjeevi) and Durga (Laxmi) pursuing their sister’s and father’s murderers John (Hema Sundar), Javed (Kannada Prabhakar) and Janardan (Ceylon Manohar). Durga, now a police officer, wants the murderers to be punished legally while Vijay tracks them down and kills two of them, on each occasion frustrating his sister’s invesitgations. In the end, when Durga is kidnapped by Javed, the hero rescues her and kills the last villain in her presence. The very popular film belongs to the Chiranjeevi genre of vigilante revenge dramas deployed as critiques of a corrupted legal system, here adding the motif that a female cop is no match for a macho man.

  DAKHAL

aka The Occupation

1981 72’ col Bengali

d/co-sc/m/c Gautam Ghose pc West Bengal Govt st Sunil Jana co-sc Partha Bannerjee

lp Mamata Shankar, Robin Sengupta, Sunil Mukherjee, Sajal Roy Choudhury, Bimal Deb

Ghosh’s first Bengali featurette tells of Andi (Shankar), a member of a nomadic tribe of scavengers, and her struggle against a local landlord. Andi is married to the peasant Joga from a different tribe. When Joga dies, the landlord, who wants Andi’s land, incites Andi’s nomadic tribe to declare her marriage illegal so that the landlord may appropriate her land. Eventually, the tribe sees through the manipulation and apologises to Andi, offering her the tribe’s protection. However, she refuses to rejoin the nomads and decides to fight for her land. Set among Bengal’s most marginalised people, the film presents a poeticised (cf. the soft-focus twilight shots in the beginning) image, with allegorical rather than miserabilist overtones, of a struggle for bare survival (cf. Paar, 1984) in an elemental, raw nature shorn of cultural associations.

  ELIPPATHAYAM

aka The Rat Trap

1981 127’ col Malayalam

d/s Adoor Gopalakrishnan p K. Ravindranathan Nair pc General Pics c Ravi Varma m M.B. Srinivasan

lp Karamana Janardanan Nair, Sharada, Jalaja, Rajam K. Nair, Prakash, Soman, John Samuel, Balan K. Nair, Jaycee, Thampi

Unni (Karamana) is a middle-aged relic, the head of a parasitic family of the Nair community of ex-rent collectors in a decaying feudal society. His eldest sister Janamma (R.K. Nair) fights for her own family’s share of the feudal spoils; the obedient younger sister Rajamma (Sharada) is condemned to be both the slave and the surrogate mother of the indolent Unni until she collapses under the strain. The youngest sister Sridevi (Jalaja) is a student, defiantly pragmatic in her rejection of the old system. Confronted with any difficult situation, Unni withdraws like a rat into a dark hole and eventually sinks into paranoia. The film uses an obsessive, numbing rhythm and an intricate tapestry of close-ups, long shots and isolated sounds to convey the last gasp of a dying order as Unni runs through his house like a rat in a trap. As with Mukha Mukham (1984), his next film, the performance is pitched between naturalism and metaphor e.g. when Unni tries to make an inquisitive cow go away or shows a pathological fear of getting mud on his clothes. The director acknowledged autobiographical elements in the film, likening Unni’s house to his own ancestral home, but he added that the film is in fact about Kerala’s emergence into modernity.

  ILAKKANGAL

aka The Emotional Upsurge

1981 114’ col Malayalam d/co-dial Mohan p David Kachapally, Innocent pc Sathru Films st M. Raghavan sc/dial Mohan, John Paul lyr Kavalam Narayana Panicker c U. Rajagopal m M.B. Srinivasan

lp Nedumudi Venu, Shankaradi, Innocent, Kaviyoor Ponnamma, Adoor Bhasi, Sudha

Unni, a young man working in the city, returns to his village for a holiday and has to cope with the adolescent yearnings of a 15-year-old girl, Amminikutty, who had built many of her fantasies around him and his presumed big city lifestyle. Unaware of the depth of her feelings, he returns to the city casually giving her a tip for having washed his clothes. One of art director Mohan’s better-known films.

  IMAGI NINGTHEM

aka My Son, My Precious

1981 106’ b&w Manipuri

d Aribham Syam Sharma pc X-Cine Prod. s M.K. Binodini Debi c K. Ibohal Sharma m Khundrakpam Joykumar

lp Leikhendro, Rashid, Ingdam Mangi, Thoithoi

The breakthrough film of Manipur’s best-known director, made in collaboration with the writer and art patron maharajkumari M.K. Binodini Debi (they collaborated again on Ishanou, 1990). The sensitive schoolteacher Dhani helps Thoithoi, the illegitimate son of Dinachandra, to be adopted by Dinachandra’s legitimate wife Ekashini. The legal aspects of the child’s adoption are intercut with the child’s growth, presented with mythological overtones (e.g. Thoi Thoi plays the infant Krishna in the folk Raas-Leeld).

  NASEEB

aka Destiny

1981 197’ col Hindi

d/p Manmohan Desai pc MKD Films, Aasia Films st Prayag Raj sc K.K. Shukla dial Kadar Khan lyr Anand Bakshi c Jal Mistry m Laxmikant-Pyarelal

lp Amitabh Bachchan, Hema Malini, Shatrughan Sinha, Rishi Kapoor, Reena Roy, Kim, Pran, Amrish Puri, Kadar Khan, Amjad Khan, Shakti Kapoor, Prem Chopra, Lalita Pawar, Jagdish Raj, Raj Kapoor, Shammi Kapoor, Dharmendra, Rajesh Khanna, Mala Sinha, Waheeda Rehman, Sharmila Tagore, Shubha Khote, Om Shivpuri

Desai’s most extravagantly plotted film to date. Namdev (Pran), a waiter, a band musician (Jagdish Raj), Damodar (A. Khan) the photographer and Raghubir (K. Khan) the hack driver jointly win a lottery ticket. After being framed for the murder of the musician, Namdev is presumably killed by Damodar and Raghubir who use the money to set up a criminal empire. The story then switches to the second generation: John Jani Janardan (Bachchan) and Sunny (Rishi Kapoor), are the sons of Namdev; John’s buddy is Damodar’s son Vikram (S. Sinha); the dead band musician had two daughters: the singer Asha (Malini) and schoolgirl Kim (Kim). Namdev was not killed after all and later resurfaces as the henchman of the ultimate crime boss, Don (Puri). Unlike Desai’s other Bachchan films (cf. Amar Akbar Anthony, 1977), the convoluted plot and the multitude of characters overwhelms the superstar along with everyone else in the film. The film’s shots gradually become shorter and by the second half of the story, two seconds seems an average shot-length. The dialogue accompanying the surfeit of physical action merely conveys information as quickly as possible. Desai’s virtual abandonment of narrative structure is complemented by innumerable references to his own as well as to other films and TV commercials. Bachchan sings at a celebration of Desai’s earlier Dharam Veer (1977); Charles Bronson’s Hard Times aka The Streetfighter (1975) is replicated in Bachchan’s second profession as a boxer; The Towering Inferno (1974) is evoked as a revolving restaurant goes up in flames; in the last song the heroes are dressed as a matador (Bachchan), a cossack (Sinha) and as Chaplin (Rishi Kapoor).

  ORIDATHORU PHAYALWAN

aka There Lived a Wrestler

1981 128’ col Malayalam

d/s P. Padmarajan pc Thundathil Films c Vipin Das m Johnson

lp Rashid, Jayanthi, K.G. Devakiamma, Nedumudi Venu

Lightweight folk parable, apparently derived from the director’s childhood memories, about success and failure in the life of a wrestler (Rashid). Partronised by the village tailor, he becomes a local hero when he overcomes all opponents and claims the prettiest woman (Jayanthi) as his wife. One of the cinematic highlights is the hero’s primitive courtship dance in the traditional wrestling style, flexing his muscles as he throws his new bride in the air. However, his muscular prowess is offset by sexual inadequacy, and he has to leave the village. A novelist and frequent collaborator of B.G. Bharathan, Padmarajan presents the wrestler as a catalyst for change: the sleepy tailor transforms into a shrewd businessman and an old woman learns to guard her hens which kept disappearing whenever the wrestler grew hungry.

  PALAIVANA SOLAI

1981 131’ col Tamil

d/sc/c Robert Rajasekar p R. Vadivelu dial Prasannakumar lyr Vairamuthu m Shankar-Ganesh lp Chandrasekar, Rajiv, Kailash, Thyagu, Janakaraj, Suhasini, S.N. Parvathi, Kalawani

A love story of five boys for each other, using the death of a girl to confirm their mutual affections. The successful film was made by a group of Film Institute students seeking to inaugurate a new formula of ensemble playing using the conventional story of male youths using a pretty woman as a lightning conductor for the sexual undertones of their devotion to each other. Young Geeta (Suhasini), suffering from a heart disease, moves into a house on a street where five bosom buddies hang out: Shekhar (Chandrasekar), Senthil, Vasu, Siva and Kumar. Attracted to the laddish boys, she falls for Shekhar, but he marries Vasu’s sister. Nevertheless, they all remain very devoted friends, though the two lead characters are rendered somewhat melancholic by their unconsummated friendship. When Geeta dies, the five friends bond together even more tightly.

  PEHLA ADHYAY

aka Pahala Adhyay

1981 130’ col Hindi

d/co-sc Vishnu Mathur pc Dhwanyalok Films st/co-sc C.S. Lakshmi aka Ambai, from her Tamil short story, Milechan c Navroze Contractor

lp Dinesh Shakul, Jyoti Ranadive, Madan Jain, Rashmi Sethi, Madan Bawaria, Debu Parekh, P.C. Sethi, Kamala Sethi, Anant Bhave, Madhav Sathe

Mathur’s debut is an avant-garde feature about Ravi (Dinesh Shakul), a young man from a small village who goes to Bombay University and finds himself unable to relate to life in the city. Unable to connect with the city, Ravi tries to establish contact with a fellow student but his sense of being ‘out of place’ remains until his pent-up anxieties and fears explode into a violent physical outburst and breakdown. The film ends on a cautious note of optimism as Ravi seems to recover. Mathur tries to make the lived and obscurely threatening sensations of displacement into the very substance of the film. He avoids the way questions of belonging are usually formulated in communitarian terms (religion, class, national or regional identity, etc.). The film was not released. Mathur’s next major film, made years later, was The Flying Bird (1989).

  POKKUVEYIL

aka Twilight

1981 106’ col Malayalam

d/co-s Govindan Aravindan p K. Ravindranathan Nair pc General Pics co-s Dr Ramesh c Shaji N. Karun m Hariprasad Chaurasia, Rajeev Taranath, Latif Ahmed

lp Balachandran Chullikad, Satish, Ansar, Kalpana, Vijayalakshmi, V.P. Nair

A poignant story of urban life showing a young artist living with his father, a radical friend and a music-loving young woman. The father dies, the radical has to flee and the woman is taken by her family to another city. The boy’s world collapses: he becomes prey to hallucinations and ends up in an asylum where he is visited by his mother. The film, mostly told in flashback, betrays the nature-mystic Aravindan’s distrust of urban living.

  RAJA PARVAI

1981 144’ col Tamil

d Singeetham Srinivasa Rao pc Haazan Bros. s Hazan K, Santhanabharati lyr Kannadasan, Vairamuthu, Gangai Amaran c Barun Mukherjee m Ilaiyaraja

lp L.V. Prasad, Kamalahasan, Madhavi, Nirmala, KPAC Lalitha, Y.G. Mahendran, Delhi Ganesh

A major Kamalahasan melodrama in which he plays a blind musician oppressed since infancy by his evil stepmother. Nancy (Madhavi) falls in love with him, but her father David forces her to marry someone else. The happy ending sees the lovers elope on a scooter with the aid of Nancy’s grandfather (Prasad). Kamalahasan apparently persuaded the producer, director and ex-actor Prasad to come out of retirement for this role. Both the direction and Kamalahasan’s performance are unabashedly melodramatic, milking the hero’s disability for all its worth, and Srinivasa Rao’s notorious zooms and cutaways underlined by rapid and awkward editing are fully in evidence. Unusually, the credits list everyone in a single rolling title sequence without assigning individual credits.

  RANGANAYAKI

1981 196’ col/scope Kannada

d/sc S.R. Puttanna Kanagal pc Ashok Arts st Ashwath dial Yoganna lyr Vijayanarasimha, Kanagal Prabhakar Sastry c Maruthi Rao m M. Ranga Rao

lp Arathi, Ashok, Ambarish, Rajanand, Ramakrishna, Musari Krishnamurthy

Kanagal’s epic features Arathi’s most famous performance: she plays a stage actress in the folk theatre who marries a rich man (Ramakrishna) and ostensibly adapts to the required upper-class lifestyle. Her intense desire to perform on the stage is rekindled when her old theatre group arrives in her city. She agrees to replace one of the actresses in an emergency. The sexual release she experiences in acting emerges forcefully during a street procession when she appears to be ‘possessed’, to the intense embarrassment of her husband. Her obsession with acting leads to a divorce and her husband gets custody of their son. Having become a film star, she has an affair (coyly presented in the film) with a sexy young man (Ashok) who turns out to be her son. In a drawn out climax, the son tries to reconcile his parents but arrives too late to prevent his mother’s suicide. Kanagal extensively used hand-held camerawork and a distorting wide-angle lens which, in a CinemaScope frame, creates a disturbingly unsettling space, aggravated by the primary colour schemes. The film’s publicity claimed it showed the backstage world of the old Company Natak.

  SADGATI

aka Deliverance

1981 52’ col Hindi

d/sc/co-dial/m Satyajit Ray pc Doordarshan st Munshi Premchand co-dial Amrit Rai c Soumendu Roy

lp Om Puri, Mohan Agashe, Smita Patil, Richa Mishra, Geeta Siddharth, Bhaiyalal Hedao

Short film, derived from a Premchand short story, made as a companion piece to Pikoo (1980) for Doordarshan. The indolent Brahmin Ghashiram (Agashe) gets the low-caste bonded labourer Dukhi (Puri) to perform several onerous tasks while denying him food. While chopping a giant log with a blunt axe, as instructed, Dukhi dies of exhaustion, leaving a grieving widow (Patil) and child in the village. Ghashiram, in a muddy and rain-soaked landscape, is last seen dragging the corpse away. In casting actors associated with the Bombay-based New Indian Cinema (Puri, Agashe, Patil) for this rural drama, Ray made a belated contribution to the 70s rural-exploitation melodrama, a genre eventually adopted by Doordarshan.

  SATTE PE SATTA

1981 160’ col/scope Hindi

d Raj N. Sippy p Romu N. Sippy st/co-sc Jyoti Swaroop co-sc Satish Bhatnagar dial Kadar Khan lyr Gulshan Bawra c Anwar Siraj m R.D. Burman

lp Amitabh Bachchan, Hema Malini, Sachin, Shakti Kapoor, Amjad Khan, Ranjeeta, Sudhir, Aradhana, Prema Narayan, Paintal, Madhu Malhotra, Kanwaljeet, Asha Sachdev, Rajni Sharma

Successful Hindi adaptation of Stanley Donen’s Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954). Ravi (Bachchan) is the eldest of a wild clan of seven brothers, each named after a day of the week, who collectively run a farm. Ravi falls for the nurse Indu (Malini), whose arrival following their marriage leads to a disciplining of the entire family. The remaining brothers in turn fall for each of the six companions of the heiress Seema (Ranjeeta), thus initiating the film’s final drama. In order to appropriate her wealth, Seema’s guardian, Ranjit Singh (Khan), has hired the notorious Babu (Bachchan in a double role) to kill her. The villains kidnap Ravi, allowing Babu to impersonate him in order to assassinate Seema. However, Babu is reformed by the large family and in the end falls in love with the heiress.

  SEETHAKOKA CHILAKA

1981 141’col Telugu

d/sc Bharathirajaa pc Poornodaya Movie Creations st Mani Kannan dial Jandhyala lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy c Kannan m Ilaiyaraja

lp Murali, Karthik, Aruna, K. Jaggaiah, Sarath Babu, Janaki Jr, Smita, ‘Sakshi’ Rangarao

Musical fantasy addressing communal harmony. Raghu (Karthik), the son of a Brahmin widow, falls in love with the Christian woman Karuna (Aruna). Karuna’s brother (Sarat Babu), who does not like Raghu, warns him to keep away from his sister and to leave the village. Later the priest of the local church intervenes and both Raghu and Karuna abandon their respective religions to be able to live together.

  SILSILA

1981 182’ col Hindi

d/co-sc Yash Chopra pc Yash Raj Films st Preeti Bedi co-sc Sagar Sarhadi lyr Javed Akhtar, Rajinder Krishan, Hasan Kamal, Nida Fazli, Harivanshrai Bachchan c Kay Gee m Shiv-Hari

lp Amitabh Bachchan, Shashi Kapoor, Jaya Bhaduri, Rekha, Sanjeev Kumar

Shobha (Bhaduri) is in love with the air force officer Shekhar (Kapoor). Shekhar’s younger brother Amit (Bachchan) writes poetry and plays and woos Chandni (Rekha). Shekhar dies in the war, leaving Shobha pregnant. Amit sacrifices his love for Chandni to marry Shobha and save her reputation. Chandni marries a doctor (Kumar) in the town where Amit and Shobha live. The ex-lovers meet in an accident in which Shobha loses her baby. Amit and Chandni have an affair while their marital partners suffer in silence. The lovers elope after a highly stylised confrontation between the two women (the two rivals standing back to back). The film features Bachchan’s alleged offscreen lover Rekha and his wife Bhaduri (who came out of retirement to play the part). Several scenes appear designed to fuel or to exploit the gossip journalism which underpins and surrounds film careers. In the end, the sanctity of marriage triumphs and the original married couples are restored. Bachchan sang his own songs and declaimed numerous poetic couplets addressed to Chandni, fully exploiting a key aspect of his star persona: his deep baritone voice. Songs picturised in Dutch tulip fields help promote Rekha’s image as a glamorous but unattainable object of desire.

  SUPATTAR BINANI

1981 153’ col Rajasthani

d/sc Satyen pc Amrit Kalash Prod. st/dial/lyr/m Mahendra Pujari c Balbir

lp Shirish Kumar, Neelu, Kshitij, Vijaya, Atmaram, Manjula, Padma Khanna

After a long commercially fallow period, Satyen’s hit re-established the Rajasthani cinema. The modern Ramakant (Kumar) is forced by his rich orthodox father to marry the illiterate Munga (Neelu). Ramakant’s greedy uncle and aunt urge him to abandon his wife and to marry the modern Kavita who stands to inherit a fortune. Ramakant almost kills his exemplary, long-suffering wife before orthodoxy triumphs. Neelu went on to become Rajasthan’s top star with neo-traditionalist melodramas like Chokho Lage Sasariyo (1983), Nanand Bhojai (1985), Bhikaoo Tordo (1987) and Liehhmi Ayi Angane (1992).

Saritha in Thanneer Thanneer

  THANNEER THANNEER

aka Water Water
1981 143’ col Tamil

d/sc K. Balachander pc Kalakendra Movies st Komal Swaminathan’s play lyr Vairamuthu, Kannadasan c B.S. Lokanathan m M.S. Vishwanathan

lp Saritha, V.K. Veeraswami, Shanmugham, M.R. Radha Ravi

Shot on location and set in Athipattu, a drought-stricken hamlet in Southern TN, Balachander’s political film tells of the villagers’ desperate attempts to obtain water in the face of corrupt politicians and their servants, including the police. The villagers protect a communist fugitive from justice and later give him money to buy a bullock with which to bring water from a spring 20 miles away. The man persuades them to dig a canal, an initiative obstructed by government officials. The villagers then decide to boycott elections (a tactic tried in Thanjavur a year after the film’s release), but in the end the police act against them for defying orders and corruption triumphs. The film’s effort at a stark realism, esp. in the use of Southern Tamil dialect, goes alongside an agit-prop stage style borrowed from Swaminathan’s original play e.g. when villagers hand a petition to a minister, he gives it to his assistant, who hands it to a district collector, who passes it to his orderly, who puts it in his pocket. The Tamil Nadu Information Minister, R.M. Veerappan, calling for a ban on the film, said that ‘the law enforcement ministry had never used arms against people who made efforts to get their water supply’.

  36 CHOWRINGHEE LANE

1981 122’(113’) col English

d/s Aparna Sen p Shashi Kapoor pc Film Valas c Ashok Mehta m Vanraj Bhatia

lp Jennifer Kendall, Dhritiman Chatterjee, Debashree Roy, Geoffrey Kendall, Soni Razdan, Dina Ardeshir, Fae Soares, Reny Roy, Sylvia Philips

Aparna Sen’s directorial debut, made in English, relies heavily on Bansi Chandragupta’s art direction for her film on loneliness and old age. An Anglo-Indian schoolteacher, Violet Stoneham (Kendall) lives a solitary life teaching Shakespeare, her major obsession, to schoolgirls. She invites Samaresh (Chatterjee) to write his novel in her house but instead he uses the place to make love to his girlfriend Nandita (D. Roy). The couple constitute Violet’s principal interaction with the outside world. The lovers get married and no longer need the flat. The teacher reconciles herself to further loneliness on Christmas Day while the soundtrack plays Silent night, holy night. Presented as a European-style character study (reminiscent of Rene Allio’s La Vieille dame indigne, 1965, and of the Merchant-Ivory films with which producer Kapoor was also associated), the film has often elicited charges of colonial nostalgia. The Indian version includes scenes removed from the British release version e.g. a sequence with Violet’s cat atop the lavatory cistern.

  THYAGAYYA

1981 143’ col Telugu

d Bapu pc Navata Cine Arts sc/dial Mullapudi Venkatramana lyr Thyagaraja, Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy c Baba Azmi m K.V. Mahadevan

lp J.V. Somayajulu, Ravu Gopala Rao, Rallapalli, M.B.K.V. Prasada Rao, K.R. Vijaya, Rohini

Bapu’s remake of Chittor V. Nagaiah’s classic Saint film (1946) adapted his mythological style to the notion of classicism proposed by Vishwanath’s Shankarabharanam (1979) The latter film’s star, Somayajulu, here plays the Telugu saint Thyagaraja (1767–1847) who defies Serfoji, the king of Tanjore. When the hero’s sister-in-law Ganga steals his precious deity and throws it in the Kaveri river, the saint goes on a pilgrimage in search of his god. Several divine interventions later (filmed in Bapu’s typical frontal-address mythological style) and following the death of his wife Kamala, the saint eventually transforms into a sanyasi, a renouncer. Unlike the pre-Independence versions of the genre, this film exemplifies the essential requirement of a neo-traditional ‘authenticity’ in terms of contemporary caste for the cinema Vishwanath and others pioneered. Here S.P. Balasubramanyam, who sang the kritis of Thyagaraja, was criticised by Carnatic vocalists for not being classical enough: this attack, unlike those pointing to the performance or soundtrack as the far more obvious instances of pandering to popular taste in the name of ‘high’ art, appeared to be seen as far more damaging to the film.

  UMBARTHA/SUBAH

aka Threshold aka Dawn
1981 151’[M]/135’[H] col Marathi/Hindi

d/co-p Jabbar Patel co-p D.V. Rao pc Sujatha Chitra st Shanta Nisal’s novel Beghar sc/dial Vijay Tendulkar lyr Vasant Bapat, Suresh Bhatt c Rajan Kinagi m Hridayanath Mangeshkar

lp Smita Patil, Girish Karnad, Shrikant Moghe, Ashalata, Daya Dongre, Kusum Kulkarni, Manorama Wagle, Jayamala Kale, Ravi Patwardhan, Shriram Ranade, Satish Alekar, Purnima Ganu

Smita Patil’s best-known screen role features her as Sulabha, the wife of the progressive lawyer Subhash (Karnad). Upset by her husband’s willingness to blacken the name of a rape victim in order to benefit his client, accused of committing the rape, Sulabha decides to take charge of a Mahilashram (women’s home). There she has to contend with the gross corruption and greed which further exploits and victimises the women in her care. The governors of the institution eventually make life so difficult for Sulabha that she has to resign. When she returns home, her husband informs her that he has taken a mistress and intends to keep her. Sulabha leaves her home determined to make a life for herself. Based on an autobiographical work by Shanta Nisal, the film was given a feminist value by Smita Patil’s performance and by her use of the film in campaigns for women’s rights. The feminist historian Susie Tharu expressed reservations about the film’s presentation of the lead character: The filmic focus, emphasised by several close-ups of Sulabha sitting, toying with her glasses, looking up, walking, sitting again [e]stablishes her as the central character as well as the problem (the disruption, the enigma) the film will explore and resolve. In Umbartha it is clear that to search herself is, for a woman, a tragic enterprise. An enterprise in which she is doomed to fail, but can fail bravely and heroically. Such a perspective [i]nevitably poses the problem in such a way that the solutions come from the individual, more specifically from the individual’s personality or character. We sense a vague structural similarity [b]etween Sulabha’s own predicament and that of the destitute or abandoned women in the Home. But the parallel is never clear because while one motif is explored psychologically the other is given a rather crude sociological interpretation’ (1986).

  UMRAO JAAN

1981 145’ col Urdu

d/co-sc Muzaffar Ali pc Integrated Films st Meer Hadi Hassan Ruswa’s novel Umrao Jaan Ada (1899) co-sc/dial Shama Zaidi, Javed Siddiqui lyr Shahryar c Pravin Bhatt m Khayyam

lp Rekha, Farouque Shaikh, Naseeruddin Shah, Raj Babbar, Prema Narayan, Shaukat Kaifi, Dina Pathak, Leela Mishra, Gajanan Jagirdar

Based on the first major Urdu novel and possibly (there is controversy about this) the autobiography of a legendary mid-19th C. tawaif (a courtesan who was also an accomplished and respected musician and dancer) from Lucknow. Abducted as a child and sold in Lucknow, Umrao Jaan (Rekha) is trained in music and dance. She grows up to become immensely popular with the elite of the city, falls in love with an aristocrat nawab (Shaikh), then finds companionship with her childhood friend Gauhar Mirza (Shah), finally escaping her claustrophobic life with the bandit Faiz Ali (Babbar). Aijaz Ahmad (1992) notes about the novel that: ‘The scandal of Ruswa’s text is its proposition that since such a woman depends upon no one man, and because many depend on her, she is the only relatively free woman in our society. Ruswa was a very traditional man, and he was simply tired of certain kinds of moral posturing’. Ahmad sees the continuation of this motif of the free woman in the work of the PWA in the 30s. Muzaffar Ali recreated the image of the Urdu costume spectacular around the star Rekha while Bansi Chandragupta’s sets and Khayyam’s music endow the film with a sense of opulence enhancing the star’s performance (as well as overshadowing her limitations as a dancer). Includes many popular ghazals sung by Asha Bhosle e.g. Dil cheez kya hai and In ankhon ki masti.

  VALARTHU MRUGANGAL

aka Performing Beasts
1981 148’(125’) col Malayalam

d T. Hariharan pc Priyadarshini Movies s/lyr M.T. Vasudevan Nair c Mehli Irani m M.B. Srinivasan

lp Balan K. Nair, Sukumaran, Madhavi, Nagesh

A bleak melodrama involving murder among circus performers. The members of a financially ailing circus troupe join a bigger circus, and find the employees exploited. Trapeze performer Janu falls for a stuntman who is also the employees’ representative in their fight for better work conditions. The stuntman is killed in a simulated accident, and his girlfriend tries to commit suicide. The plot was originally written as a short story by scenarist Vasudevan Nair. Director Hariharan was one of the most prolific in the 70s Malayalam cinema, with over 60 features since his debut, Ladies’Hostel (1973).

  AAROHAN

aka The Ascending Scale aka The Ascent
1982 147’ col Hindi

d Shyam Benegal pc West Bengal Govt sc Shama Zaidi dial/lyr Niaz Haider c Govind Nihalani m Purnadas Baul

lp Om Puri, Sreela Majumdar, Victor Bannerjee, Rajen Tarafdar, Geeta Sen, Pankaj Kapoor, Khoka Mukherjee

The small farmer Hari Mondal (Puri) supports an extended family working on his little plot of land. When he tries to obtain a loan from his absentee landlord living in Calcutta, Mondal finds himself ensnared in a lengthy legal battle, lasting from 1967 to 1977, to preserve his political rights as a sharecropper. In the process, his family is destroyed. One of the better known of several films produced by the communist government of West Bengal to portray through fiction their political programmes: in this case, Operation Barga, a successful campaign of land for landless tillers. Benegal starts the film with Om Puri introducing himself, the cameraman, scenarist and other crew members who are to enact the performance to follow. The rest of the film, however, once it starts, attempts no further alienation devices except perhaps a spectacular and stagey scene of lightning and floods.

  AJIT

1982 148’ col Kannada

d V. Somasekhar pc Parimala Arts st Vijaya Sasanoor sc/dial H.V. Subba Rao lyr Udayashankar, R.N. Jayagopal, Doddarange Gowda, Dr Kalyan c P.S. Prakash m Satyam

lp Ambarish, Jayamala, Prabhakar, Sundarakrishna Urs, Jaijagadish, Pandharibai, Subhashini, Shakti Prasad, Musari Krishnamurthy, Lakshman, C.R. Simha, Sathyananda, Pravin Kumar

Ambarish’s follow-up of the successful Antha (1981). The quirky plot with segments of dystopian realism is characteristic of several crime films of the time. Ajit (Ambarish) displays his yogic skills and solves several cases before he is sent on a mission to a fictional foreign country to bring back a notorious criminal. Trapped in the criminal’s fortress, he uses his yogic powers and manages to send the criminal back to India. However, in a self-consciously unconventional ending, he is himself left behind, on the brink of death, after a battle with armed gangsters.

  APAROOPA/APEKSHA

1982 127’ col Assamese/Hindi

d/p/st/co-sc Jahnu Barua co-sc J.S. Rao dial Jogen Chetia c Binod Pradhan lyr/m Bhupen Hazarika

lp Suhasini Mulay, Biju Phukan, Girish Karnad

Barua’s technically accomplished debut feature is a stylish low-key melodrama set in the colonial upper-class society of Assam’s tea gardens. Aparoopa (Mulay) foregoes her education to marry the rich Mr Barua to whom her father owes money. Her boredom and anxiety become unbearable on the arrival of an old college friend and military officer who offers her an escape route.

  ARTH

1982 143’ col Hindi

d/st/dial/co-sc Mahesh Bhatt pc Anu Arts co-sc Sujit Sen lyr Kaifi Azmi c Pravin Bhatt m Chitra Singh, Jagjit Singh

lp Shabana Azmi, Smita Patil, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Raj Kiran, Rohini Hattangadi, Siddharth Kak, Geeta Siddharth

Inder Malhotra (Kharbanda), a fashionable film-maker, is married to Pooja (Azmi) when he starts an affair with film star Kavita (Patil). Pooja leaves him and experiences the social insecurities of a single working woman. Her dilemmas are highlighted by the parallel story of her cleaning lady (Hattangadi) who, abandoned by her husband, kills him and is arrested. Kavita, who suffers from guilt and eventually succumbs to schizophrenia, leaves Inder. Bhatt’s breakthrough film benefited both from gossip suggesting, with Bhatt’s assistance, that it was autobiographical, and of a much-publicised rivalry between actresses Patil and Azmi. Bhatt continued producing sensationalised versions of wicked upper-class Bombay life, peppered with inane talk about art cinema (as in this film’s party sequence), paralleling e.g. gossip columnist Shobha De’s novels set in the film and advertising industries.

  CHOKH

aka The Eyes
1982 108’ col Bengali

d/s/m Utpalendu Chakraborty pc West Bengal Govt dial Akhya Upadhyay c Shakti Bannerjee

lp Om Puri, Shyamanand Jalan, Anil Chatterjee, Sreela Majumdar, Asit Mukherjee, Dipak Sarkar, Madhabi Chakraborty

When in 1975, during the Emergency, a union leader, Jadunath (Puri), is falsely accused of murder and hanged, he bequeaths his eyes to a blind worker. The surgeon Dr Mukherjee (Chatterjee), who has to perform the operation, is put under severe pressure by the factory owner who instigated the judicial killing of Jadunath and who now wants an eye donor for his own son. When the factory owner (Jalan) learns who the eyes belonged to, he orders them to be destroyed in the hope that the revolutionary fire that burned in them may be extinguished forever. The surgeon resists the order but eventually has to comply while outside the hospital, Jadunath’s widow (Majumdar) and demonstrating workers advance on the police cordon surrounding the surgery. The demagogic film by-passes the cinematic potential of the motif of ‘vision’ in favour of low-angle shots with wide-angle lenses together with a high-volume expressionist soundtrack.

  DHRUPAD

1982 72’ col Hindi

d/p Mani Kaul pc Infrakino Film c Virendra Saini

lp Zia Mohiyuddin Dagar, Zia Fariduddin Dagar

Kaul’s documentary on Dhrupad, the famous North Indian form of classical music. Its foremost living practitioners are members of the Dagar family. The film features the director’s own music teachers, Zia Mohiuddin Dagar on the rudra veena and his younger brother Fariduddin Dagar as vocalist. The music itself, unlike its successor form, the khayal, is austere and rigidly defined with e.g. precise rules for its elaboration from the formalist alaap (which includes no words and no external rhythmic accompaniment) to the faster and more celebratory drut. Its central tenet is that of freedom achieved within a rigid rule-bound structure through a continuous musical scale and the use of notes mainly as approximations rather than as absolutes (as in Western traditions). The film attempts to explore the musical form through the cinematic orchestration of space and light. It includes sequences suggesting Dhrupad’s tribal musical origins and some remarkable scenes in Jaipur’s Jantar Mantar observatory. The bravura ending has a long shot descending from the sky into the urban metropolis, weaving through concrete rooftops as the camera pulls slowly out of focus. The critic Shanta Gokhale commented: ‘Classical Indian music is to Mani Kaul the purest artistic search. The alaap or slow unfolding of a raga (melody) to get its innermost swaroop (form), is its finest expression. Just as a good musician has mastered the musical method of construction which saves his delineation of a raga from becoming formless, so a good film-maker has a firm control over cinematic methods of construction and can therefore allow himself to improvise.’

  EENADU

1982 181’ col/scope Malayalam

d I.V. Sasi pc Geo Movie Prod, p N.G. John s T. Damodaran lyr Yusuf Ali Kacheri c S.S. Chandramohan, C.E. Babu m Shyam

lp Mammootty, Balan K. Nair, T.G. Ravi, Ratheesh, Anjali, Surekha, Vanitha, Krishnachandran

Sasi’s opus about Kerala politics. Karunakaran (Ravi), the corrupt Congress politician, and Venu (Ratheesh), a member of the Legislative Assembly, run a major nexus of crime with the assistance of the police and state bureaucracy. Karunakaran’s son, a student gangster, tries to rape the girlfriend of his colleague Shashi in the college, leading to her suicide. In order to defeat their Left opponents, the corrupt politicians engineer the mass distribution of adulterated liquor, causing large-scale deaths. Eventually Salim (Mammootty), a Dubai-returned youth impoverished by prevalent conditions, leads a revolution, along with Krishna Pillai (Balan K. Nair), the good trade unionist/politician and a reference to the Kerala CPI leader P. Krishna Pillai. The people are successful, however, only because Karunakaran’s wife Sridevi offers evidence of her husband’s murderous activities. From the titles, which are intercut with a CPI(M) march, to the final confrontation as Venu is forced by the people to withdraw his bid for the chief minister’s post, the film unabashedly locates the villains as representing the corrupt Congress governments that have ruled the state. The good, on the other hand, become politicised in support of the Left for a variety of reasons that include religious, caste and economic oppression. Much of the plot makes direct reference to contemporary events, including the notorious ‘blade’ finance companies and the liquor deaths, that have been (with the corruption) key issues in Kerala politics. The film packs in a massive number of characters in a variety of situations including politicial meetings, backdoor bargaining, press conferences and the inevitable drinking sessions, which it usually wraps up with a few fast-paced talking heads shots, with the demagoguery underlined by a relentless music track.

  EZHAVATHU MANITHAN

aka The Seventh Man
1982 125’ col Tamil

d/sc K. Hariharan p/st Palai N. Shanmugham pc Lata Creations dial Somasundareswar, Arunmozhi lyr Subramanya Bharati c Dharma m L. Vaidyanathan

lp Raghuvaran, Ratna, Satyajit, Deepak, Anita Mathews, Satyendra, Ranga

First feature of Hariharan, a former member of the YUKT Film Coop (Ghashiram Kotwal, 1976), who went on to become an eminent Tamil film critic. The film tells of labour/management conflicts in a Tirunelveli district village, the home of the legendary late 19th C. Tamil poet Bharati (cf. DMK Film) whose poems are featured in the movie, contrasting his Utopian vision with contemporary conditions. The central figure is an engineer, Anand (Raghuvaran), who becomes the main activist for social justice in a cement factory with connections to a callous moneylender and his cronies. In line with traditional Tamil plot structures, the villain Seth and the hero are after the same woman, Gouri. The villains even plan to set the factory on fire hoping to blame the workers and to claim the insurance, but the plan misfires. The film was apparently inspired by Martin Ritt’s Norma Rae (1979).

  GRIHAJUDDHA

aka Crossroads, aka The Crossroad
1982 98’ col Bengali

d/sc/m Buddhadev Dasgupta pc West Bengal Govt st Dibyendu Palit c Sambit Bose

lp Anjan Dutt, Mamata Shankar, Gautam Ghose, Prabir Guha, Manoj Mitra, Monidipa Roy, Sunil Mukherjee

Costa-Gavras-type political thriller continuing Dasgupta’s efforts to address the nexus between private lives and politics, evolving a kind of morality fable about sexual and comradely relationships (e.g. Dooratwa, 1978). The corrupt owner of a steel factory has his labour officer killed and then hires thugs to murder Prabir, a left-wing trade union worker. Prabir’s impoverished sister Nirupama (Shankar) loves her brother’s friend and comrade Bijon (Dutt). The journalist Sandipan’s (filmmaker Gautam Ghose) investigation is blocked by the paper’s editor (Mitra) and eventually he too is killed. Bijon, now a successful salesman in distant Nasik, finds the gulf between himself and the politically committed Nirupama too wide to allow their marriage.

  KATHA

aka The Tale aka The Fable
1982 141’col Hindi

d/s Sai Paranjpye pc Devki Chitra lyr Indu Jain c Virendra Saini m Rajkamal

lp Naseeruddin Shah, Farouque Shaikh, Deepti Naval, Mallika Sarabhai, Leela Mishra, Nitin Sethi, Arun Joglekar, Winnie Paranjpye-Joglekar

Satire adapted from the director’s own play Sakkhe Shejari, and inspired by the tale of the hare and the tortoise. Set in a lower-middle-class tenement in Bombay, it features the slow-but-sure upwardly mobile clerk Rajaram (Shah), who loves his neighbour Sandhya (Deepti Naval). The energetic Basu (Shaikh) arrives and dazzles everyone with his go-getting charm. He rapidly acquires three girlfriends: Sandhya, Anuradha (Sarabhai), Rajaram’s boss’s 2nd wife, and Jojo, the boss’s daughter. When things get too hot, Basu departs for new pastures and life settles down again in the tenement. The fairly successful musical included signs on the screen officially censoring some of the lewd jokes presumably being told.

  KHARIJ

aka The Case is Closed
1982 95’ col Bengali

d/sc Mrinal Sen pc Neelkanth Films st Ramapada Choudhury c K.K. Mahajan m B.V. Karanth

lp Anjan Dutt, Mamata Shankar, Indranil Moitra, Debrapatim Dasgupta, Sreela Majumdar, Nitalpal Dey, Bimal Chatterjee, Chakruprakash Ghosh

Whereas Chaalchitra (1981) addresses the middle-class living conditions in Calcutta as a comedy, here Sen returns to the same theme in a darker mood. A young servant boy is hired by a middle class couple (Dutt, Shankar) and locked in the kitchen in an apartment block where he dies. The social networks prevailing in the neighbourhood are thrown into relief during the police investigation. Selfishness and guilt create a nightmarish atmosphere heightened by the arrival of the boy’s father from a small village. In the end, the postmortem reveals the boy died of carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a coal stove in the cramped room. In an ending reminiscent of Ek Din Pratidin (1979), as soon as the protagonists feel let off the hook, all the problems are promptly swept back under the carpet. In this second Calcutta trilogy, Sen deploys a critical yet compassionate look at his own social milieu and described the films as a form of autocritique. The flamboyant narrative style of the earlier Calcutta trilogy (starting with Interview, 1970) has been replaced by a more reflective but equally intense approach relying on framing and camera movement to emphasise the interactions between people’s mentality and their living conditions. The relations between people and the spaces they inhabit (a series of Chinese boxes) becomes the driving force of a narrative proceeding with a sense of coiled energy constantly threatening to tear the fabric of daily life.

  MARMARAM

aka Rumbling
1982 113’ col Malayalam

d Bharathan pc P.N. Films sc John Paul st/dial Vijayan Karot lyr Kavalam Narayana Paniker c K. Ramchandra Baba m M.S. Vishwanathan

lp Nedumudi Venu, Gopi, Jalaja, Jose

A sensitive and progressive headmaster, Narayana Iyer (Venu), falls in love with the school’s music teacher, the lower-caste Nirmala (Jalaja), whose husband is a political activist (Gopi) on the run and whose child is looked after by her parents in her home village. Narayana overcomes his own prejudices and endures his orthodox mother’s disapproval. When Nirmala’s husband is shot by the police, Narayana consoles Nirmala and their love for each other triumphs over all social and emotional obstacles. The young but prolific director described the film as, ‘The melodious murmur of two people who love each other with all their hearts’.

  MASOOM

aka Innocent
1982 143’ col Hindi

d Shekhar Kapur pc Krsna Movies Ents s/lyr Gulzar c Pravin Bhatt m R.D. Burman

lp Shahana Azmi, Naseeruddin Shah, Saeed Jaffrey, Tanuja, Supriya Pathak, Jugal Hansraj, Urmila Matondkar, Aradhana, P. Jairaj, Rajan, Satish Kaushik, Pran Talwar, Anila Singh

Marital melodrama featuring Shah as D.K. Malhotra, living happily with his wife Indu (Azmi) and their two daughters, Rinky and Minnie, when a boarding school asks him to come and fetch his son. Replying that he has no son, he later realises that the boy Rahul (Hansraj) is the fruit of a brief affair he had with the terminally ill Bhavna (Pathak). Unbeknown to D.K., Bhavna had raised the child. Now she is dead and D.K. and his wife are forced to adopt the boy, shattering the couple’s peaceful life. Indu finally accepts the boy and D.K. at last has a male child in his family. Kapur’s glossy directing debut benefits by the children’s uninhibited performances which endeared the film to a predominantly urban middle-class audience. Although the film addresses the question of illegitimacy in a humane manner, it also sidesteps the knottier aspects of the problem by making the illegitimate child a boy and by requiring the wife to accept the fruit of her husband’s infidelity rather than the other way around.

  MEGHA SANDESAM

aka The Cloud Messenger
1982 151’ col/scope Telugu

d/p/s Dasari Narayana Rao pc Taraka Prabhu Films lyr Jayadeva, Devulapalli Krishna Sastry, Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy, Palagummi Padmaraju c P.S. Selvaraj m Ramesh Naidu

lp A. Nageshwara Rao, Jayapradha, Jayasudha, K. Jaggaiah, Subhashini, Balamurali Krishna

Dasari’s art-house melodrama shows the influence of Shankarabharanam (1979) on Telugu film. It invents a legend recalling Sternberg’s Der blaue engel (1930): an upright and much-loved poet, Ravindrababu (Nageshwara Rao) falls in love with the courtesan Padma (Jayapradha). He composes several poems praising her, proving to his wife (Jayasudha) that he needs Padma to survive as an artist. Sacrificing herself to his talent, the wife urges her husband to move in with his lover. However, when the poet’s daughter marries, Padma persuades him to go back to his wife. Overcome with remorse, Ravindrababu dies. Padma dies at the same time to confirm their profound unity. It remains Dasari’s best-known film outside AP. Apparently a homage to the Telugu lyricist Devulapalli Krishna Sastri who died shortly before the film was made and whose songs (e.g. Akulo akunai, Sigalo avi virulo, Mundu telisend) were reset to music by Ramesh Naidu and became very popular.

  MOONDRAM PIRAI

1982 143’ col Tamil

d/s/c Balu Mahendra pc Satyajyothi Films p G. Thyagarajan lyr Vairamuthu, Kannadasan, Gangai Amaran m Ilaiyaraja

lp Kamalahasan, Sridevi, Silk Smitha, Y.G. Mahendran, Poornam Vishwanathan, Nataraj

Mahendra’s best-known film is a morality tale about a schoolteacher (Kamalahasan) who rescues a mentally deranged woman (Sridevi) from a brothel and looks after her in his hillside home. While the crazed woman, regressing into a childlike state, becomes devoted to him, he struggles to keep his sexual desire in check. The libidinal tensions culminate in an orgiastic dream sequence attributed to the headmaster’s (Vishwanathan) sexually frustrated wife (Silk Smitha) who desires the hero: she erupts into a sinuous, hip-swinging dance around a tree (and the teacher) on a bare hill. Mahendra remade the film with its original cast in Hindi as Sadma (1983).

  ORMAKKAYI

aka In Your Memory
1982 113’ col Malayalam

d/co-s Bharathan p David Kachapally, Innocent pc Pankaj Movie Makers co-s John Paul lyr Madhu Alleppey c Vasant Kumar m Johnson

lp Adoor Bhasi, Madhavi, Gopi, Nedumudi Venu, Krishnachandran, Ramu, Innocent, Lalitha

The story, told in flashback during a scooter ride through the city on a bleak and rainy day, of Susanna’s (Madhavi) tragic life. Recently released from prison, she looks for her little daughter in the city’s orphanage. Her story involves the death of her pleasure-loving Anglo-Indian father, her marriage to the kindly deaf-and-dumb painter Nandagopal and the unwelcome advances of the pop singer Peter Lal. In a scuffle, both Peter and Nandagopal are killed, causing Susanna to be put in jail and her daughter in an orphanage.

Gopi (standing, left) and Madhavi (centre) in Ormakkayi

  PHANIYAMMA

1982 118’col Kannada

d/p/sc Prema Karanth pc Babukodi Movies st M.K. Indira lyr Chandrasekhar Kambhar c Madhu Ambat m B.V. Karanth

lp L. V. Sharada Rao, Baby Pratima, Pratibha Kasaravalli, Archana Rao, Dasharathi Dixit, H.N. Chandru, Vishwanath Rao, Kesargodu Chinna, Shri Pramila, Anant Nag

Stage personality Prema Karanth’s directorial debut, adapting a major novel by Kannada author M.K. Indira (1976). The novel’s protagonist, a mid-19th C. widow, resurrects a stereotype from reformist fiction, drawing ‘its emotional capital from powerful and deeply embedded cultural formations and is emblematic of the way Swadeshi formulations of gender, nation and indeed feminism have reappeared and are renotated in the literature of the late 70s and 80s’ (Susie Tharu/K. Lalitha, 1993). Based on the actual life story of Phaniyamma who from 1870 to her death in 1952 lived in the village of Hebbalige in Malnad, Karnataka. The woman’s story was told to M.K. Indira’s mother when Phaniyamma came to help her give birth to a child. Born into an upper-caste and respected family, Phani (Sharada Rao) is married aged 9 to a young relative who dies shortly afterwards. Having suffered the cruel conventions imposed upon widows throughout her childhood, Phani eventually grows into a strong, quiet and wise woman to whom many people come for help and advice. Flouting caste rules, she helps an Untouchable woman give birth to a child and stands by a young woman who, when widowed at the age of 16, rebels against the harsh norms imposed by an orthodox society. Mostly told in flashback, the film conveys the spirit of the original work through Sharada Rao’s dignified performance, suggesting not a radical critique of orthodox society but a purification of tradition adapted to modern conditions (evoked in the film through tight close-ups e.g. in the opening childbirth sequence, and fast-paced editing).

  SAHASA SIMHA

1982 174’ col Kannada

d/sc Joe Simon pc Lakshmi Cine Prod p Pandurangam, M. Ramalingam st Manu dial Ku. Nagabhushan lyr Chi. Udayashankar, R.N. Jayagopal c H.G. Raju m Satyam

lp Vishnuvardhan, Rajalakshmi, Vajramuni, Dhirendra Gopal, Thoogudeepa Srinivas, Shakti Prasad, Prabhakar, Sudhir

One of the several dystopian crime thrillers from the early 80s, starring Vishnuvardhan. The convoluted plot begins with family-centered villainy, but then shifts to Bombay to expand into a story of child kidnappers. Police officer Pratap (Vishnuvardhan) busts the gang and reveals his own identity as one of the kidnapped children who had had acid thrown in his face. The scene in which the star Pratap takes off his mask to reveal a hideously disfigured face carries a traumatic charge that belies the promise of triumphant heroism contained in the title’s reference to a lion. Like the several other films in this genre, the plotting is often inept, but it adheres to its key code of leaving the hero a castrated, destitute figure in the end (cf. Ajit, 1982).

  SEETA RAATI

aka Winter Night
1982 108’ b&w Oriya

d/co-s Manmohan Mahapatra pc Varatee Pics co-s Bibhuti Patnaik c Ranajit Roy m Shantanu Mahapatra

lp Arun Nanda, Mahashweta Roy, Hemanta Das, Sadhu Meher, Subrat Mahapatra, Samuel Sahu, Pinku

Melancholy film-novelette set in rural Orissa. The rich Pranab (Nanda) loves the poor Aruna (Roy) but class differences keep them apart. Their story is woven into the cultural divide between the city and the village and into rural politics. Eventually the woman realises that the class gap cannot be overcome and she resigns herself to her fate. Mahapatra’s feature debut inaugurated the New Indian Cinema type of ruralist realism in Oriya.

  SHAKTI

1982 177’ col/scope Hindi

d Ramesh Sippy pc M-R Prod. p Mushir-Riaz s Salim-Javed lyr Anand Bakshi c S.M. Anwar m R.D. Burman

lp Amitabh Bachchan, Dilip Kumar, Smita Patil, Raakhee, Amrish Puri, Kulbhushan Kharbanda

Ramesh Sippy’s extraordinary follow-up to his own Sholay and Chopra’s Bachchan classic Deewar (both 1975), both scripted by Salim-Javed. Bachchan plays Vijay, the criminal son of the obsessively zealous police officer Ashwini Kumar (D. Kumar). Kidnapped by the gangster J.K. Verma (Puri) as a child, he discovers that his father puts duty before paternal affection and the two become estranged. Vijay is arrested twice for crimes he did not commit and on both occasions his father insists on scrupulously following legal procedure, refusing to help his son. Eventually, echoing Raj Kapoor’s Awara (1951), Vijay finds a new father figure in K.T. Narang (Kharbanda), a hotelier and smuggler who once saved him as a child. Trapped in this dual patriarchy is Vijay’s mother Sumitra (Raakhee) who is eventually killed by Verma. The stylishly shot night-time climax on an airport runway has the father shoot his son dead. Smita Patil plays Vijay’s lover Roma. Often regarded as superior to Sholay and possibly Ramesh Sippy’s best film, it failed at the box-office.

  SHELTER

1982 42’ b&w English

d/s/c Uma Segal pc FTII

The only film, made while still a student, by the promising cinematographer and director Uma Segal, who died in 1991. The film deals with slum demolition in Bombay, a major political issue in the early 80s (and also the subject of Patwardhan’s Hamara Shaher, 1985). It intercuts interviews with various concerned individuals, and ends with documentary shots of an actual demolition.

  VEENA POOVU

aka Fallen Flower
1982 133’ col Malayalam d/sc Ambili p Surya Prakash pc Mithra Film Makers st Ravi Krishnan lyr Srikumaran Thampi, Mullaneshari c Bipin Mohan m Vaidyanathan, Anantha Padmanabhan

lp Nedumudi Venu, Shankar Mohan, Uma, Babu Namboodiri, Seeta, Sukumari

Ambili was a leading art director when he turned director with this film about a young musician who falls in love with Sumangala, the daughter of an impoverished Brahmin in a village of the Namboodiri community. Obeying her father, the young woman marries a mentally retarded member of her own community. The drama is further heightened by first equating Sumangala with the mystificatory folk rituals the musician sets out to discover, and then by the book of poems in which he expresses her condition. The lovers remain separated, with dire consequences, especially for the woman.

  YAVANIKA

aka The Curtain Falls
1982 147’ col Malayalam d/st/co-sc K.G. George p Henry pc Carolina Films co-sc S.L. Puram Sadanandan co-lyr O.N.V. Kurup c K. Ramchandra Babu co-lyr/m M.B. Srinivasan

lp Gopi, Jalaja, Mammootty, Venu Nagavalli, Nedumudi Venu, Thilakan, Jagathi Srikumar, Ashok

A story, told like a thriller, about touring players and the sense of claustrophobia that encompasses their violent lives. The plot is structured around the search for the unpopular tabla player (Gopi) of the Bhavana Touring Theatre in Kerala. He turns up as a murder victim. The subsequent police investigation reveals the complicated sexual rivalries and internal dissensions within the group, yielding several possible suspects. George said that in using the thriller form, situated in a theatrical context, he wanted to contextualise and thereby overcome the conventionally ‘stagey’ format of Malayalam film.

  ABHILASHA

1983 159’ col Oriya

d/p/co-st/sc Sadhu Meher pc Shanti Films cost Ramesh Mohanty dial Purna Mohanty lyr/m Saroj Patnaik c Suresh Patel

lp Uttam Mohanty, Aparajita, Sujata, Jaya, Byomkesh Tripathi, Niranjan, Satapathy, Sadhu Meher

Medical students Chinmay (Mohanty) and Anuradha (Aparajita) get married but disagree on their professional priorities: Chinmay starts a clinic in the village while his wife stays in the city. The hero faces opposition from the local medicine man (Meher) and from Gajanan, the villainous son of the zamindar, who eventually has Chinmay killed. Anuradha continues the hero’s good work. The debut feature of Meher, better known as the Hindi actor who played Shabana Azmi’s handicapped husband in Ankur (1973) and in several Benegal films. Meher continued his mentor’s style of dialogue, of a naturalist performance idiom and his use of rural locations.

  ABHILASHA

1983 145’ col Telugu

d/co-sc A. Kodandarami Reddy pc Creative Commercials p K.S. Rama Rao st/co-dial Yandamuri Veerendranath co-sc G. Satyamurthy co-dial Satyanand lyr Acharya Athreya, Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy c H. Loksingh m Ilaiyaraja

lp Chiranjeevi, Radhika, Ravu Gopala Rao, Rallapalli, Gollapudi Maruti Rao, Rajyalakshmi

One of a series of Chiranjeevi films based on the novels of popular Telugu writer Veerendranath. The suspense drama tells of a complicated plot initiated by a young lawyer, Chiranjeevi (Chiranjeevi). His innocent father had been hanged and his sole ambition is to have capital punishment abolished in India. He teams up with the rich lawyer Sarvottama Rao (Rao) and also falls for Rao’s niece Archana (Radhika). Rao has his illegitimate daughter Susheela (Rajalakshmi) murdered, and the plan is to let Chiranjeevi be accused of the killing and sentenced to death, so that in vindicating himself at the end of a sensational case, the duo would illustrate the evils of capital punishment. However Rao decides to let Chiranjeevi be hanged. He is eventually saved by Archana, who also helps him to solve the case so that the much-rehearsed plea for the abolition of the death sentence may be delivered in court.

  ADAMINTE VARIYELLU

aka Adam’s Rib
1983 142’ col Malayalam

d/st/co-sc K.G. George pc St Vincent Movies p Vincent Chittilappally co-sc Kallikkadu Ramachandran lyr O.N.V. Kurup c K. Ramchandra Babu m M.B. Srinivasan

lp Suhasini, Srividya, Soorya, Rajam K. Nair, Gopi, Venu Nagavalli, Mammootty, Thilakan

An emphatic film graphically depicting the relentless oppression of women in urban milieus which are presumed to be more liberal than the Draconian conditions prevailing in rural India. The plot tells of three women. Vasanthi (Suhasini) has to mother three generations of her family in addition to her daytime job; she eventually escapes into madness and experiences the asylum as a kind of liberation. Alice (Srividya) is married to a ruthless businessman (Gopi) and seeks solace in affairs. When she is refused a divorce, she prefers suicide. Both the middle-class women push their rebellion to self-destruction. The third, however, overcomes her condition: Ammini (Soorya) is a brutally exploited maid in Alice’s home. She ends up in a home for women where, in a powerfully Utopian ending, she helps her fellow women break out of the suffocating institution and rush right past the camera crew waiting in front of the gates, to freedom.

  ADI SHANKARACHARYA

aka The Philosopher
1983 156’ col Sanskrit

d/s G.V. Iyer pc NFDC dial Benanjaya Govindacharya lyr Balamurali Krishna c Madhu Ambat m B.V. Karanth

lp Sarvadaman D. Bannerjee, M.V. Narayana Rao, Manjunath Bhatt, Leelamma Narayana Rao, L.V. Sharada Rao, Bharat Bhushan, T.S. Nagabharana, Srinivasa Prabhu, Gopal, V.R.K. Prasad, Gopalakrishna, Gayathri Balu, Balasubramanyam, Balu Bhargava

The first film made in Sanskrit. Set in 8th C. Kerala, it tells of Shankara aka Adi Shankaracharya, the best-known Advaita Vedanta (Monism) philosopher to whom over 300 Sanskrit texts are attributed and the subject of numerous biographies. He established a series of religious sites at Badrinath (in the Himalayas), Puri (in Orissa), Dwarka (on the west coast) and Sringeri in South India. The film begins with Shankara as a boy in a village inducted into brahminical rituals. When his father dies, the boy turns to philosophy to try to understand the great mysteries of life and death. He lives as a mendicant and studies Vedic texts. Later, he shies away from marriage and promises his mother that he will remain a devoted son while living as a wandering scholar. The teacher Govinda entrusts Shankara (Bannerjee) with the composition of new Vedic commentaries. Having glimpsed the inner truth of the texts, Shankara becomes an ascetic and travels to the peaks of the Himalayas. Everywhere he goes he is received as a man of infinite wisdom. He eventually founds his own monastery having transcended all earthly illusions, including the rituals of the Brahmin community, and, at the age of 32, he rises from his sickbed and wanders away towards the mountains so that his soul may become one with the Brahma. Continuing his effort after Hamsa Geethe (1975) towards a brahminical revivalism, Iyer claimed to have made the film in Sanskrit to do justice to the abstractions of Shankara’s philosophical thought. The film does away with the miracle scenes typical of the genre and deploys several symbolic figures (e.g. death and wisdom are both personified). The extensive musical track consists of Vedic chants. Iyer went on to make two more Saint films featuring two of Shankara’s main disciples, Madhavacharya (Kannada, 1986) and Shri Ramanujacharya (Tamil, 1989). The film did not get a commercial release in India but apparently did very well in foreign markets.

  AKKARE

aka The Other Shore
1983 118’ col Malayalam

d/p/s K.N. Sasidharan pc Sooryarekha Film c N. Diwakar Menon m M.B. Srinivasan

lp Gopi, Madhavi, Mammootty, Nedumudi Venu, Rani Padmini, Baby Vandana, Mohanlal, Master Prasad Babu

FTII graduate Sasidharan’s debut satirising the phenomenon of Malayalis emigrating to the Gulf States and the rise of a culturally degenerate neo-rich class. Honest clerk Gopinath (Gopi) tries to learn typing and tailoring in an effort to emulate the success of men like Johnny (Venu) and Ismail (Mammootty). His ambitious wife (Madhavi) lusts for the consumer objects with which her neighbourhood is awash, but this gets the clerk into a series of difficulties. He has an encounter with a prostitute that leads to a scandal, is cheated by a labour agent and ends up as a porter carrying the luggage of Keralites returning from the Gulf. The film was important to future megastar Mammootty, establishing a generic context for many of his thrillers (cf. Eenadu, 1982, where he plays a Dubai-returned Muslim youth).

  AMERICA AMERICA

1983 148’ col/scope Malayalam

d I.V. Sasi pc Vijayatara Movies st Radhika Vijayan sc T. Damodaran lyr Bichu Thirumala c C.E. Babu m Shyam

lp Mammootty, Lakshmi, Seema, Ratheesh, Prathap, Balan K. Nair, K.P. Ummar

Complicated melodrama, adventure movie and whodunit set mainly in Florida. This definitive Malayalam hit established the combination of star Mammootty and director Sasi. He plays Ramesh, an undercover investigator checking the murder of Albert, the captain of a ship and husband of heroine Radha. He also investigates the loss of the ship Kaikeyi. The film’s main highlight includes strippers in Miami, and shootouts on American streets, before the final confrontation with an international gang and the triumphant return of the good guys. The film’s three songs included the Never on Sunday tune from Jules Dassin’s Pote Tin Kyriaki (1960).

  ARDH SATYA

aka The Half-truth
1983 130’ col Hindi

d/c Govind Nihalani p Manmohan Shetty, Pradeep Uppoor pc Neo Films Associates st S.D. Panwalkar’s short story sc/dial Vijay Tendulkar, Vasant Dev m Ajit Varman

lp Om Puri, Smita Patil, Amrish Puri, Naseeruddin Shah, Sadashiv Amrapurkar, Achyut Potdar, Shafi Inamdar

Nihalani followed his Aakrosh (1980) with this variation on Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971). The son of a brutally violent cop (A. Puri), Anant Welankar (O. Puri) is a sub-inspector in the Bombay police. Wanting to arrest the big gangster and powerful politician Rama Shetty (Amrapurkar), Welankar is constantly frustrated and vents his anger on less prominent targets, to the distress of his humane girlfriend Jyotsna (Patil). Although the example of the ex-cop Lobo (Shah), now an alcoholic wretch, is pointed out to him, Welankar cannot control his temper and he eventually kills a petty thief. Forced to ask Shetty for protection, he kills him instead and surrenders to the police. The fast-paced film, with almost continuous action interspersed with tightly framed close-ups of the lead character, was very successful and spawned numerous cop-on-rampage movies sharing none of this one’s serious intent. Its best-known remake is K. Vijayan’s Kaval (Tamil, 1985).

  BANKER MARGAYYA

aka Margayya, the Banker
1983 145’ col Kannada

d/co-p/sc T.S. Nagabharana co-p B.S. Somasundar pc Komal Prod. st R.K. Narayan’s novel The Financial Expert (1952) lyr Vijayanarasimha c S. Ramchandra m Vijayabhaskar

lp Lokesh, Jayanthi, Master Manjunath, Sundarraj, Sundarkrishna Urs, Vijayaranjini, Surekha, Ponni, Musari Krishnamurthy

An ironic morality tale about an entrepreneur whose endeavours are constantly ruined by his son. Margayya (Lokesh) starts out as a moneylender sitting under a banyan tree opposite a co-operative bank, filling in forms, and offering advice to the villagers of Narayan’s fictional village of Malgudi, usually on how to circumvent the bank’s bureaucratic process of offering loans. His career as a banker is ruined when his son Balu (Sundarraj) throws away all the account books. Then Margayya publishes a sex manual with its author, a Dr Pal (Urs). The venture is very profitable and Margayya becomes wealthier than all the banks in the area. But Balu is the victim of the salacious book and starts visiting prostitutes. Dr Pal manoeuvres to keep all the profits for himself and Margayya has to start all over again under his banyan tree, with the threatening but beloved presence of his son by his side. Narayan, who had earlier disowned the Navketan production of his story Guide (1965), claimed this film to be the only ‘authentic’ screen version of his fiction.

Jayanthi (centre) and Lokesh (right) in Banker Margayya

  BETAAB

1983 162’ col/scope Hindi

d Rahul Rawail pc Vijayta Pics, p Bikram Singh Dehal s Javed Akhtar lyr Anand Bakshi c Manmohan Singh m R.D. Burman

lp Sunny Deol, Amrita Singh, Shammi Kapoor, Nirupa Roy, Prem Chopra

Sunny (Deol) and Roma, alias Dingy (Singh), are childhood sweethearts. When Sunny is forced to become a farmer, Roma’s father Sardar Dinesh Singh (Kapoor) disapproves of their relationship. The arrogant Roma is ‘tamed’ by Sunny, who forces her to rebuild his house which she, provoked by his attentions, had destroyed. The father wants Roma to marry the son of his evil business partner Balwant (Chopra), but changes his mind when he overhears the villains plotting to appropriate his property. Designed to launch the career of Deol, Dharmendra’s elder son, the romance set in mountain scenery approvingly quotes ‘taming of the shrew’ motifs of masculinity. The film had one hit song, Jab hum jawan honge.

  CHAKRAVYUHA

1983 155’ col Kannada

d V. Somasekhar pc Eswari Pics. p N. Veeraswamy s M.D. Sundar dial/lyr Chi. Udayashankar c Chittibabu m Shankar-Ganesh

lp Ambarish, Vajramuni, Ambika, Prabhakar, Thoogudeepa Srinivas, Shakti Prasad, H.N. Chandrasekhar, Shanthamma, Prashanti Nayak, Master Arjun, Ravichandran

Typical early 80s Kannada crime story with ‘rebel star’ Ambarish. The unemployed Amarnath (Ambarish), helped by a politician, trains to be a cop and serves the state honestly until he discovers a criminal network that includes his politician-benefactor as well as his own father-in-law. Blackmailed into collaborating with them, Amarnath soon becomes integrated into the network. The narrative, however, ascribes to him a secret purpose in order to justify the collaboration. The film ends with Amarnath, now a politician heading a new government, decimating his entire cabinet of criminals with a machine gun.