A tale off Broadway

It was all by chance. I was just walking down Road No I of KPHB Colony, one of the largest residential colonies in the sub-continent when he walked out of a service station and moved towards his car. I almost stumbled upon him. He looked at me and I could see a glitter in his eyes. Six long years have passed since I met him last. He was grown a bit old. I could see wrinkles on his cheek. I too was not as young as I used to be, though. But he smiled, the smile of warmth and love. Bhoopal Reddy looked happy.

I knew the reason. After 20 years of wait, his film ‘Komaram Bheem’ has been released finally. A small chinwag followed and we recalled the good old days when we were part of an off Broadway film Yellamma which has never come out of the box. The filmmaker Mohan Koda left all of us way back in 2004 making us feel that whole world was empty with his departure. “God calls back good people soon,” I consoled myself.

While walking away from Bhupal Reddy, I felt moisture in my eyes, lump in my throat and an inexplicable pang sprouting deep inside. And in the evening, as I was driving along the crammed city roads to my loneliness, a stream of consciousness flurried in my mind. About how we all used to sit and crack jokes at Bhupal Reddy’s ancestral home in Ibrahhimpatnam on the outskirts of the city and in the shady recesses of an abandoned citadel in the jungles of Telangana during the shooting of Yellamma.

 

General public may not know the hero of Komaram Bheem, nor even heard about the movie. It was an effort of an aspiring filmmaker Allani Sridhar who could make no headway in his more than two-decade-old film career.

But bringing Telugu parallel cinema to its pinnacle of glory was B Narsing Rao, a matchless filmmaker from Hyderabad. His internationally acclaimed film Dasi - the bondswoman won five national awards in 1988. Bhupal Reddy played the feudal lord who used her servant maid for his sexual pleasures, as was the custom.

Set in 1920s, Dasi narrates the miserable life of a housemaid who came as a part of dowry to a rich Zamindar’s house. She has to complete the wearisome routine of household chores during the day and entertain the zamindar and his male guests at night.

  

Cameraman AK Bir created magic while Archana who played the bondswoman made a brilliant performance. Bhupal Reddy too did his bit pretty well. There were other films of the same genre, like Goutam Ghose’s Maa Bhoomi and Narsing Rao’s Rangula Kala. But after that, no noticeable work has been made in Telugu.

Narsing Rao, the painter-turned-director, I heard, hero-worshipped legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. With Dasi, Rao brought Telugu film to a new height, proved the world that even Hyderabad can produce a film that is second to none of world’s masterpieces on celluloid. I don’t know where Narsing Rao is nowadays. I haven’t heard anybody telling his name of late. Maybe leading a quiet, retired life.

Intellectuals seem to have turned away from Telugu films for reasons best known to them.

What is considered to be the most powerful media of communication, cinema, especially Telugu, is in the hands of a bunch of mean, gluttonous and grubby lots who manipulates everything and anything.

What a shame!