Welcome to Sajjanpur

CAST: Shreyas Talpade, Amrita Rao, Divya Dutta, Yashpal Sharma, Ravi Kissan, Rajeshwari Sachdev, Ila Arun

DIRECTOR: Shyam Benegal

Welcome to the return of Shyam Benegal. The director, who’s been meandering for some time with stodgy biopics and moral science lessons, is back doing what he is best at: creating life-like characters to tell life-like stories.

Sajjanpur is a modern-day, hovering-on-the-edge-of-prosperity Indian ‘gaon’, where ‘bijli’ and ‘pani’ have made inroads, as well as ‘kutcha’ roads and rattling buses. But illiteracy is still rampant. Which is why Mahadev (Shreyas), the village’s only ‘padha likha’ young fellow, hangs up a shingle under a ‘bargad’ tree, and makes a living writing letters. And reading them out, also for a charge.

All kinds of people wash up under that tree: a loony aunt (Ila Arun) worrying about her ‘manglik’ niece (Divya), a lovelorn wife (Amrita) waiting to hear from her husband, away for four years in Bambai, a local ‘neta’ (Yashpal) who can easily pass off as a goon, a compounder (Ravi) in love with a pretty widow (Rajeshwari).

Welcome to Sajjanpur stays quirky and engaging even when the pace flags, and the rural accents turns faux, because of the felt screenplay and superbly robust, earthy dialogues by Ashok Mishra (this is a U/A film). The fact that the village is really a set is evident too, but you overlook it all when you see how skilfully Benegal brings up the ills that beset us still, after all these years. If a girl is unlucky, marry her off to a dog. If a eunuch stands for election, get rid of her.

... contd.