Ankahee

aka The Unspoken 1984 135’ col Hindi d/p Amol Palekar pc Suchimisha sc Jayant Dharmadhikari, Vasu Bhagat, S.G. Akolkar st C.T. Khanolkar’s play Kalaya Tasmeya Namaha dial Kamalesh Pandey c Debu Deodhar m Jaidev lp Amol Palekar, Deepti Naval, Shriram Lagoo, Anil Chatterjee, Dina Pathak, Devika Mukherjee, Vinod Chopra, Seema, Vinod Mehra

Palekar follows his Marathi film Aakriet (1981) with this Hindi melodrama about fatalism, adapted from a noted experimental play. Nandu’s (Palekar) father (Lagoo) is an astrologer who stoically lives with the knowledge that his predictions mostly come true. Nandu resents his father’s fatalistic attitude and rebels when his father predicts that Nandu’s first wife will die in childbirth, which puts a damper on Nandu’s marriage plans with Sushma, a rational woman prepared to take the risk. Instead, Nandu marries the retarded but curable Indu (Naval), hoping to circumvent his father’s prediction. Indu is taken to hospital to give birth and she survives, but Sushma commits suicide to assert her right to determine her own destiny.

Film