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Himmatwala

1983 179’(157’) col Hindi d/sc K. Raghavendra Rao pc Padmalaya p Krishna dial Kadar Khan lyr Indivar c K.S. Prakash m Bappi Lahiri lp Jeetendra, Sridevi, Amjad Khan, Waheeda Rehman, Satyen Kappoo, Shakti Kapoor, Shoma Anand, Asrani

Ravi (Jeetendra), a government engineer, arrives in his ancestral village to right all the wrongs perpetrated on his family by the villainous Zamindar Sher Singh Bandookwala (Khan) and also - on behalf of the State - to introduce welfare measures represented by the dam he is to build on Sher Singh’s property. Sher Singh, who runs his own ‘parliament’ and system of dispensing justice, had earlier forced Ravi’s upright father (Kappoo), a school teacher, into bonded labour and raped Ravi’s mother (Rehman). The villains now force Ravi to donate his sister Padma in marriage to the evil Shakti (Kapoor), but in the end he reforms the villains. The hero bullies Sher Singh’s initially arrogant daughter Rekha (Sridevi) into supporting him and opposing her father. This modernisation melodrama, of the same generation as e.g. Bangarada Manushya (1972) and some of Bhartirajaa’s films, was also a vehicle for the successful entry of South Indian production capital into Hindi cinema and the best-known of the several Jeetendra- Sridevi films usually referred to as ‘South’ pictures in the Bombay media. This shift sometimes created unusual rhetorical structures as it sought to transpose local idioms onto a ‘national’ terrain: e.g the opening sequence in which Ravi’s mother tells him of the family’s unhappy history is narrated in quickfire, quasidocumentary imagery with freeze frames and cutaways providing ‘information’ accompanying the mother’s strident voice-over.

Film