Vamsha Vriksha

1971 166’ b&w Kannada co-d B.V. Karanth co-d/dial Girish Karnad p G.V. Iyer st S.L. Bhairappa’s novel c U.M.N. Sharief m Bhaskar Chandavarkar lp Venkata Rao Talegiri, L.V. Sharada Rao, B.V. Karanth, Girish Karnad, Chandrasekhar, Uma Sivakumar, G.V. Iyer

The debut feature of directors Karnad and Karanth, in the wake of Samskara (1970), interrogates the legitimacy of tradition: a proud Brahmin scholar (Talegiri) looks after his widowed daughter-in-law (Sharada) and grandson until she falls in love with her English lecturer (Karnad) and remarries. She loses custody of her son, and her guilt feelings are aggravated by her son (Chandrasekhar) who becomes her student but refuses to acknowledge her as his mother. Eventually the old partiarch discovers that he himself was illegitimate and he foregoes his wealth to prove to the heroine, on her deathbed, that she was right to insist on inventing her own notion of tradition.

Film