Disha

aka The Uprooted Ones 1990 135’ col Hindi d/p/s Sai Paranjpye pc Sai Paranjpye Films c Madhu Ambat, G.S. Bhaskar m Anand Modak lp Shabana Azmi, Nana Patekar, Raghuvir Yadav, Om Puri, Nilu Phule, Rajshree Sawant

Paranjpye’s sentimental tale of migrant workers in Bombay, caught between urban displacement and a changing rural reality. Farm labourers Vasant (Patekar) and Soma (Yadav) move to Bombay following drought in their village. Soma becomes a millhand. Vasant, who has come mainly to pay off his marriage debts, returns to find his wife having an affair with her employer, the owner of a bidi (reed) factory. Soma also plans to go home, because his brother (Puri) has finally dug a well which yields water. The film uses extensive tracking shots presenting panoramic views of the Dadar region in central Bombay with its textile mills and apparently Asia’s most populated square mile. Location shots taken in the textile mills provide a quasi-documentary background for the fiction.

Film