Directors Girish Karnad (1938-2019) and the late B.V. Karnath (1929-2002) would both co-create and turn out their own respective films during the early 1970s. This was at a time when Karnad was actively pursuing a highly productive acting career, and Karanth was moonlighting with his first love - the theater. Karanths' best achieved film almost certainly was Choma's Drum (1975) which included a standout performance from its gracious lead - Vasudeva Rao - who starts as a harijan (untouchable) who during his oppression, dreams of owning his own land but whose hopes soon disintegrate as caste and class systems present insurmountable barriers. Karnad's breakthrough release was Kaadu (The Forest,1973) in which two warring villages are witnessed through the eyes of a child during his impressionable years.
Karnad also directed and co-wrote Ondanondu Kaladalli (Once Upon A Time,1978), an action-fueled adventure set in medieval times, rife with strong characterizations that reminded many a critic of Akira Kurosawa's signature blend of samurai films, to whom the film is actually dedicated.
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| The Strange Fate of Arwind Desai and the not so strange cold shoulder and night on the couch routine. |
Saeed Mirza, whose polemical Albert Pinto ko Gusso Kyon Aata Hai (1981) provided a decisive change of gear from his seemingly elliptical first feature, The Strange Fate of Arvind Desai,(1978). Buddhadeb Dasgupta produced Dooratwa (Distance,1979) which concerned the emotional stability of contemporaneous India's middle-class and followed suit with Neem Annapurna (1980) illustrating the fatal lure of the big city for the fervid petit-bourgeois. And Govind Nihalani - whose inspired arthouse film Aakrosh (Cry of the Wounded,1981) shared the main award at the 1981 Delhi Festival - showed how much he had developed as a filmmaker after years working in Hindi cinema as Shyam Benegal's cameraman. It is directors such as these who set to alter the face of the Indian cinema.
