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'''Mohan Joshi Haazir Ho!'''


aka A Summons for Mohan Joshi
1984 123’(130’) col Hindi
d/p/co-st/co-sc/co-dial Saeed Akhtar Mirza
pc Saeed Akhtar Mirza Prod. co-st/co-sc Yusuf
Mehta co-dial Ranjit Kapoor co-st/co-sc Sudhir
Mishra lyr Madhosh Bilgrami c Virendra Saini
m Vanraj Bhatia
lp Naseeruddin Shah, Deepti Naval, Bhisham
Sahni, Dina Pathak, Rohini Hattangadi, Amjad
Khan, Mohan Gokhale, Satish Shah, Pankaj
Kapoor, Arvind Deshpande


Mirza’s parody on housing legislation tells of
Mohan Joshi (Sahni, the well-known novelist
and brother of Balraj Sahni in his screen
debut), a retired clerk who lives with his wife
(Pathak) in an old Bombay tenement. Joshi
sues his landlord, the evil property developer
Kundan Kapadia (Khan), which starts a
complicated and expensive legal procedure
conducted by the slick lawyer Malkani
(N. Shah). Eventually Joshi realises that one
cannot win against entrenched economic
powers. In the end, when the judge comes to
see the condition of the building for himself,
Kapadia’s men quickly cover its rickety walls
with a coat of paint and Joshi, unable to control
his anger, goes berserk and demolishes the
place, making it collapse on to his own head.
Mirza’s allegorical approach, using a crudely
Brechtian idea of surface realism, allows him to
cast the noted screen villain Amjad Khan (cf.
Sholay, 1975) as the property developer with
lather dripping from his chin or eating a leg of
mutton.

[[Film]]