by ZIYA US SALAM
Om Puri’s moment finally came in 1983 with Ardh Satya. He played a cop and Sadashiv Amrapurkar played the villain.
The early 1980s was the best period to be a serious actor in Hindi cinema. It was the time when the parallel cinema movement was not only appreciated but had begun to be accepted beyond the niche crowd that frequented art house cinema shows. Names such as Mrinal Sen, Shyam Benegal and Govind Nihalani had become identifiable among those whose understanding of cinema did not go beyond popular films such as Amar Akbar Anthony.
The likes of Saeed Akhtar Mirza and Ketan Mehta were just a shout away. It was nothing short of a miracle when three films in succession—Aakrosh, Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyun Aata Hai and Bhavni Bhavai—got the discerning as well as the more easily pleased sections of the audience rooting and cheering. While the first two were straight from the art house stable, soaked in the angst and pathos of the deprived and the dispossessed, Bhavni Bhavai, a Gujarati film directed by Ketan Mehta, proved that folklore could be the subject of serious cinema, too. All the three ground-breaking films starred Om Puri, who was in the middle of completing a quartet of actors, with Naseeruddin Shah, who studied theatre acting at the National School of Drama with him, Shabana Azmi and Smita Patil. Together, they dominated serious cinema. And when any director of note got a script ready, the names of Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana Azmi, Smita Patil and Om Puri, in that order, were the ones that were first pencilled in. Later, when Deepti Naval sought to join them, the door opened, but only partially.
Albert Pinto, Aakrosh and Bhavni Bhavai were remarkable for the way they arrived at the cinema houses. Back then, the release of commercial potboilers would be preceded by advance publicity, with billboards erected at vantage points across cities and movie trailers/teasers, drip-feeding information about the forthcoming film either before the screening of a film at theatres or during “intermission” of a film screening. Nothing of the sort heralded the arrival, of say, Shyam Benegal’s Ankur or Mrinal Sen’s Mrigayaa. However, Albert Pinto, Aakrosh and Bhavni Bhavai brought about a big change in what the viewers wanted to see.
When Govind Nihalani’s Aakrosh was made, it created a buzz among university students, who were already in a mood for films that did not portray the typical Bollywood melodrama. So much so that Aakrosh was actually released at cinema houses located near university campuses. In Delhi, Batra, then a new theatre, screened Aakrosh for seven weeks at a stretch. Such was the craze for this intense story of corruption in the judicial system to the detriment of the underprivileged, penned by the Marathi playwright Vijay Tendulkar, that special shows were arranged on Sunday afternoons.
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