I vividly recall going to see this film with family, a sister visiting, and being treated in style because we knew someone; on the way a poem of the director whose poems were amongst my collection and some very favourite including that one kept going on in my head, what with it being now a song on radio, and to my surprise it was a song in this film, albeit a lesser version compared to the original poem. That was sort of augury to further changes to the story of the film as we saw it.
We had seen the original version of the film before India had emergency declared and the film was forced to be re shot and cleaned up version substituted for the original one, because although the original story (by Kamaleshwar who is a well known and respected veteran author in Hindi literature) was inspired by another politician (who happened to be from Orissa) arriving in a helicopter for her pre election meetings and raising a dust storm (Aandhi), with no reference to anyone's real life in the rest of the story, this was less known to general public that read less and so the authorities during emergency instantly saw the film as dangerous in that it might be identified with the then prime minister of India. The cleaned up version obviously was far less genuine, but then the bits that were changed were probably from the director and not the original author anyway, so merely deleting them could have been better rather than substituting lesser ones.
A man gets away with much neglect and even destruction of his family in seeking his goals of career and more, but a woman forever is judged by whether she has sacrificed herself for her family - and if she has given up any notion of a personal life in quest of higher ideals she is then judged for not having given up those ideals in being a slave to all other humans, blood relatives and whoever else might demand her blood.
If she is successful in her career and if her career happens to be public service and she has had to give up a personal life for this, she is nevertheless judged and forever under suspicion for being possibly not quite as virginal as men would like all women to be except when serving their own pleasures, and even then.
Aandhi is about trials and travails of one such woman, who gave up her marriage and family to follow her chosen path.
In the original she is divided between her father who is a top politician and her husband who is a small hotel manager who resents her attentions and following her father because all he would wish for is a small happy family life, but the cleaned up version had her father changed to a businessman who proclaims her being useful to his business if she pursues politics, hinting at his selfishness and the unclean nature of the politics with unethical nature of business and the nexus of the two. Wonder how that bit was passed by the censor in preference to the daughter following a father.
Subsequently the now successful politician campaigning once again for election is mysteriously faced with everything at a small town hotel being of her tastes not known to people generally, until she realises her husband - they never did divorce or at any rate remarry, so in effect the two are still bound and bonded after all the years of separation - is the manager of the hotel. They meet when she has time, but then there is a cloud of suspicion about her character until she publicly clarifies that she has been meeting her own husband whom she left so she could serve people.
She is in a quandary because now she is exhausted and would rather return to a nest to rest, but husband would rather she returned because of preference and not because of failure, and of course if she wins she is not going to give it up - so it ends in her leaving and raising another dust storm as her helicopter leaves.
The original had her own daughter among a bunch of schoolgirls asking for her autograph in the last scene, and the poignancy of a mother who left her infant not recognising the now grown up daughter who nevertheless pines for recognition and any little bit the she can have of the mother she knows only from afar and not even by sight; but this too was cut by the censor during emergency and another bland end substituted.
Wonder what stops the director from restoring the original film - or was that too destroyed by the censors as they did to some other famous ones?
Tuesday, April 1, 2014.
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