Diksha – knowledge is power
Divyam jnanam yato dadyat kuryat papasya sanksayam
tasmad dikseti sa prokta desikais tattva-kovidaih
The process that bestows transcendental and spiritual knowledge which destroys sin, and the seed of sin and ignorance, is called diksha by the spiritual persons who have seen the Truth (desikais tattva-kovidaih)
Friday 13thFeb, a wonderful movie was going on in DD, late-night. I wonder why they show such nice movies at such odd hours, maybe because they wanted me to catch that movie because had they shown it any other hour I may have missed it.
The movie had Nana Patekar, Manohar Singh and KK Raina; this was enough to convince me that it would turn out to be good. While they took a small news-break I logged onto the net and went through Nana Patekar’s filmography to realise that the movie was ‘Diksha‘, directed by Arun Kaul and the writer was UR Ananthamurthy. The movie was made in 1991, much after the success of Prahaar, Parinda, Salaam Bombay etc.
The movie is set in pre-independence era in a district of Karnataka, and Nana mumbles a lot of Kannada while playing his role of Koga, a shudra. Its a movie on caste barrier of our society and a stark portrayal of that. Manohar Singh plays Udup Pandit, a head priest, and his son KK Raina plays Shrikar Upadhyay. They are running a gurukal which currenly has 3 students. Upadhyay teaches them and his younger sister Yamuna, played brilliantly by Rajshree Sawant, cooks and feeds them.
The director establishes in the very beginning that Udup Pandit is a forward thinking brahmin; he does not allow his widowed daughter Yamuna to shave her head or live in alienation and in another case he performs the death ceremony of Dodamma, a shudra, by giving her tulsi and ganga-jal that would transcend her soul to heaven. Dodamma is Koga’s guardian/nanny and Nana’s pain and anguish at her death and the way he urges Udup Pandit to perform the ritual so that her soul can rest in peace is amazing; what an actor!
Koga very well knows that he is a shudra, an untouchable, and he maintains his distance from the brahmins and the 3 students of the gurukal. When Udup Pandit goes off on a teerth-yatra, a journey to holy places, things start going awry. Yamuna gets close to one of the teachers of the government school[setup by Brits] and their physical proximity leads to her getting pregnant. The coward teacher cannot stand-up and claim responsibility and she has to bear the brunt of the society, all alone.
Another priest Manjunath, played by Vijay Kashyap, gets to know of Yamuna’s pregnancy and he seeks this ideal opportunity to malign Udup Pandit and become the head-priest. The issue gets politicised and he instigates the parents of the 3 students to withdraw their kids from Udup Pandit’s gurukul. In the meantime Udup Pandit is back in the village and he learns of this. Now, what will he do? Will he take a step ahead, shun religion and ritual, or will he order the death/out-caste of his daughter? Will he be selfish about losing his respect in society or will he sacrifice it to save his daughter?
There is a father-son conflict; because the Udup Pandit’s justice is not acceptable to Upadhyay. He rebels against the system and boycots everyone because he has been taught to be forward-thinking and he cannot comprehend his father’s verdict. Meanwhile his sister Yamuna is being witch-hunted by the other brahmins who want to stone her and harm her. Koga tries his best to rescue her and is even able to do his little bit, but finally the word of Udup Pandit is final and binding. So, he approaches the Udup Pandit and tells him ‘naag se bachaya, shudron se bachaya … brahmano se nahi bacha saka‘. This is such a telling statement of the brahmanical society.
Koga reminds Udup Pandit that he is a human being first and a brahmin later, and its his duty to safeguard his daughter; if he wont then who will ? When Udup Pandit begins to recite hymns about how everyone of us have to meet our fates, Koga intervenes and tells him that there is no religion higher than humanity and thats the first lesson of every religious text.
The movie kept me engrossed till 2.30am and its still been with me. I have not been able to get-over the fantastic theme and Nana’s perfromance. Without being judgemental, I can honestly say that the movie points at the ills of our society. And though the movie is set in pre-1947, the caste-barrier still exists in our society and we have not progressed.
Much after the movie, I kept wondering why a forward thinking Udup Pandit gave a verdict which was contrary to his own thought process. And the only reasoning I came-up with is that, since he was liberal he did not want to play into the hands of the backward thinking fellow-brahmins, so he sacrificed his daughter for the larger cause. Had he stuck to his open-mindedness, he may have been overthrown by the hard-liners[consequently Manjunath would have become the head-priest and and enforced some more medievial rituals] and more such ills would have followed. In any case, its saddening. We have stepped into 21st century carrying the burden of 2000 yrs of casteism.
Tags: diksha, KK Raina, manohar singh, nana patekar
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
rals – welcome aboard!
Any torrent link available for watching this movie?You have created curiosity inside me.Recently ,I watched Om Dar Badar and it goes above my head.I hope this piece of cinematic work is for novice people also.
The movie is Adults Only, hence shown @midnight.
I am guessing this as DD used to broadcast late night movies once a week @15 yrs back or more..
I used to sit up late and watch these… (was not a adult yet :-)), the other films that i distinctly remember along with this are Mandi, Bazaar, Giddh, Gehrayee, Chakra, Ardh Satya, Party, Jalwaa…
Welcome to PFC, Rals, with a good review as usual from you. I think generally the best movies i havs seen were in the late night slot. TV channels allocated slots for such movies, as commercially they don’t get too many sponsors. But i like watching such late night movies more, as you dont have to deal with the deluge of ads.
good review of a gr8 movie. i remember having watched it on DD some years back. there was another movie on the same theme of brahminical society tht i hadwatched on DD – Trishagni. it had pallavi joshi and nitish bhardwaj as main protagonists, and (probably,cant remember exactly) Nana Patekar also.
@Satyendra – yes, there was Nana in that too..
@Rals – welcome to the gang!
@Satya[cmnt#3]:the movie was not ‘adults only’ coz i have seen lots of good movies in tat time slot. i think ratnakar is right, its abt commercial viability. no ads at all, just a news break. but yet, the time is really odd.
Have to catch this movie also, hope it is available on dvd.
Welcome aboard Rals.Havent seen the movie yet, its on my to be watched list.Yes but it reminds me of Trishagni as Jha says.D.D used to regularly have the late night movie slot on fridays in the earlier days- those days it was mainly movies slightly more suited for the adult audience that was played.But I also remember that they played movies like Escape to Victory in that slot
:::Awards won by Diksha::::
The film was awarded the 1992 National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi and 1992 Filmfare Critics Award for Best Movie .
The film participated in International Film Festival of India, 1993, and won seveval international awards including, Annonay International Film Festival Award, France, 1992; Prix Du Public (Audience Awards) and Best Feature Film in Hindi by Madhya Pradesh Development Corporation, 1992 .
Ref:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diksha_(film)
Hey guys..
while searching more about Diksha in net, I came across a nice blog which I thought can be of your interest:
http://parallelcinema.blogspot.com/
It has not been updated since sept 2007 , but it contains reviews of many very good parallel(as said earlier) movies in many indian languages.
Check out!!
@Bharat : thanx for all the info
thanx to all fellow-members for the warm welcome and making me feel at home