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Swayamkrushi

1987 164’ col Telugu d/s K. Vishwanath pc Poornodaya Movie Creations p Edida Nageshwara Rao lyr C. Narayana Reddy, Seethatama Sastry c H. Loksingh m Ramesh Naidu lp Chiranjeevi, Vijayashanti, Sumalatha, Bannerjee, Charan Raj, P.L. Narayana, Master Arjun, Master Suresh

Elaborate melodrama with Chiranjeevi as the illiterate cobbler who raises his dead sister’s son Chinna (Arjun/Suresh?) while also financing the education of the orphaned Sharada (Sumalatha). When Sharada marries, Sambaiah’s lover Ganga (Vijayashanti) is sterilised so that nothing will interfere with Chinna’s growth. Ganga assists Sambaiah in becoming enormously wealthy, but this causes several problems: Chinna’s biological father Govind (Raj) teams up with Sharada’s no-good husband Bhaskar (Bannerjee) to make a series of demands on Sambaiah and to claim Chinna’s guardianship. Eventually, Chinna rebels against his father and both he and Sambaiah return to the latter’s modest original profession of cobbler. The film was a critical success, notably for recasting action star Chiranjeevi in an unusual role, which also constituted his influential effort to transform his screen image by entering what is known in Telugu cinema as the ‘class film’. Less than two years after the formation of the Dalit Mahasabha in A.P. (1985), the film posits a conservative resolution to an important political movement in its evacuation of all caste conflict in favour of a fictional conflict between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Dalits.

Film