In This Day That Year installment, Subhash K Jha takes a look back at Govind Nihalani’s Ardh Satya which released in 1983.
Almost every cops film that followed Govinda Nihalani’s hardhitting edgy drama Ardh Satya owes an allegiance to Ardh Satya in one way or another. The stunning film was released during the year when Jeetendra’s Hyderabad-cooked sambhar-dramas Himmatwala, Mawaali and Justice Chowdhary ruled the boxoffice. It was also the year when Rajesh Khanna had his last spate of hits as a leading man in Avtaar, Agar Tum Na Hote and Souten.
And yes, as far as cops dramas in commercial cinema are concerned there was Andha Kanoon in 1983 where Hema Malini played a cop. This was certainly no year for a brutal unrelentingly intense study of crime, punishment, the law, and its subversion by powerful goons and politicians.
The eminent playwright Vijay Tendulkar whose speciality were works on socio-political oppression had earlier penned the screenplay for Nihalani’s directorial debut Aakrosh where Om Puri in one of Indian cinema’s most striking debut performances, ended his unlettered mute tribal character’s selfimposed silence with a bloodcurdling scream of protest.
In Ardh Satya Om’s character of the conflicted compromised cop Anant Welankar protests far more violently. At the end he jumps out of his chair and heads straight for the villain Rama Shetty’s (Sadashiv Amrapurkar) throat, choking him to death and walking out of the goon’s den , riding his motorcycle back to his police station to surrender for the ‘crime’.
And why not? If our socio-political system stifles the straight-thinking upright civil servant why should he not smother the living daylights out of a goon who sits scoffing at Anant’s entire career of honest professionalism?
The relevance of Ardh Satya in this day and age of growing compromises in life remains. The police force remains viciously maligned. And the few conscientious cops who dare to think and act straight find themselves ostracized and even declared insane! Remember the government officer in Uttar Pradesh who was whisked off to a mental asylum after he accused Mayawati of corruption?
The powerlessness of Anant Welankar is the impotency of the Indian bureaucracy . It functions more by tradition rather than integrity. Om’s cop’s character is no larger-than-life hero. Nihalani’s’ hero Anant Welankar took the filmy cop out of the don’t-mess-with-me zone of the invincible. Anant is a wounded hurting middleclass Marathi boy from the village with a troubled childhood.With a bully of a father(Amrish Puri , bleeding brilliancy into the drama with his brief role) who beats up his poor hapless mother, Anant grows up despising all that his father represents.
And yet paradoxically Anant is a bully is his own work space.
In a shocking departure from conventional cinema, Nihalani captured the hero’s life in all its ordinary hues. We see the cop covering his beat in the small lanes and chawls of Mumbai. We see him picking up petty criminals and thrashing them for small crimes to vent his frustration. We see him drinking on the job and calling the girl he loves at her hostel screaming for attention. We see Anant getting progressively embittered by the corruption all around him. We see him spurning his father’s paternal concern reminding the shocked old man, ‘Tu meri maa ko peet-ta hai’. And then in the night we see Anant putting a blanket on his sleeping father.
The character’s biggest virtue is that it doesn’t try to be anything except what it really is… an ordinary government officer trying to be honest to his job. Nihalani cast Om Puri in the lead to capture the texture of ordinariness in Mumbai’s underbelly. The locations reek of a clamped-down corruption. Mumbai in 1983 was a city waiting to split wide open to reveal the wide chasm between the world of the working class and the layer of crime just beneath.
As Anant Velankar transcends into a kind of middleclass despondency that comes to the upright when they’re compromised, we begin to sense his despair and soon embrace it wholeheartedly. The demonization of the duty-conscious cop is palpable in scene like the one where Anant snaps at the elderly constable who gently admonishes him for drinking on duty… Or each time he rings up the mortified Jyotsna and slurs in a drunken haze.
Throughout the film’s jagged journey Jyotsna , as played by the serene Smita Patil, remains the symbol of all things pure and idealistic, sometime naively so. Smita represents that breed of intensely committed women in starched cotton sarees who believe they can change the world through seminars and morchas. While most of Ardh Satya strikes me as being profoundly relevant to our times Smita’s flag-waving idealism to the point that she tells her cop boyfriend to give up his job or his love for her, struck me as somewhat impractical and giddyheaded.
The world that Nihalani’s film embraces has no place for jingoism. It’s a cut-throat Mumbai where every section of people bully the underdog.We see a lot of sadistic violence in Ardh Satya. Unlike other harbingers of social change who came in to make films in the 1970s and 80s Govinda Nihalani was not afraid of violence. He never flinches away from the dark areas of his hero Anant’s psyche.
Nihalani gets absolutely unostentatious actors to play Anant’s colleagues at the police station. Shafi Inaamdar as Hyder his immediate senior is a portrait of benign pragmatism. Hyder knows we live in troubled times. And the sooner we stop trying to change society the better the chances of our survival.
It has widely been believed that the film was conceived with Amitabh Bachchan in mind. Govind Nihalani completely denies this. Naseeruddin Shah agreed to do just 4 scenes in Ardh Satya. Nihalani shot two different endings for the film.The poems that Om Puri recites to Smita Patil were specially written by Dilip Chitre for the film. Satish Shah appeared as a bandit in just one sequence in the film Om Puri’s mother was played by Madhuri Purandre. She is an actress and singer who sang 2 songs, a Ghazal and Lavani in Nihalani’s first film Aakrosh. She was also seen in Jabbar Patel’s play Teen Paische Cha Tamasha, a Marathi adaptation of Brecht’s Three-Penny Opera.
