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English, August
1994 116’ col English d/co-sc Dev Benegal pc Tropicfilm p Anuradha Parikh st/co-sc Upamanyu Chatterjee, based on his novel c Anoop Jotwani m Vikram Joglekar,D. Wood lp Rahul Bose, Salim Shah, Tanvi Azmi, Meeta Vasisth
Agastya, aka August (Bose), a member of India’s urban English-speaking elite, fan of Bob Dylan and Marcus Aurelius, arrives in the small town of Madna, A.P., as a newly-commissioned Indian Administrative Service bureaucrat. Much of the largely comic film shows life in the Indian heartland through his eyes, including bureaucratic corruption, swaggering officials and people such as the cynical cartoonist Govind Sathe. This is interwoven with his own voyeuristic fantasies and memories of life in the big city. In the end, transferred to a Naxalitedominated area where radicals have killed a similarly Westernised colleague, he takes time off to write his novel. The film begins with his unsuccessful effort to sell the novel to publishers. Mainly an ode to multiculturalism, presented as generational problem. The original novel, of the same title, was one of the better-received items of the post-Rushdie boom in Indo-Anglican fiction.