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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