This movie called : Sparsh

Sparsh. A film, just, could not have been more apt with its christening.

Before one would want to delve into the dissection of the movie, understanding the significance of the ‘80s is of utmost importance. Downfall was the buzz word. Russia had begun its Afghanistan invasion - which would eventually lead to the disintegration of USSR. The Gulf Wars were in its nascent stage.Mall culture had slowly started gripping the Western milieu. Pop music was born and MTV had started its brainwash agenda. India had already seen itself subject to an Emergency rule and that corruption had started seeping into the system was seen more in public news. Narrowing down, mainstream cinema in our country had,supposedly, entered its ugliest phase ever – where every producer aimed at making the most out of his ‘formula’ films, regardless of the presence of substance in them.

Luckily, for India, all this turmoil got channelized into a new breed of films and filmmaking – arthouse cinema. The urban minds were now experiencing a kind of celluloid culture which spoke of the everyman, had substance in their content, made contextual usage of songs, instead of using it as a tool to increase the viewer attendance in theatres. The common man (and also, woman) was now the protagonist, without any pretense. The fresh batch of youngsters who had graduated from the top two national institutes of the nation dedicated towards cinema studies – National School of Drama (NSD, Delhi) and Film and Television Institute of India (FTII, Pune) – took the country by storm with their nihilism and minimalistic portrayals of characters in cinema.  Their presence restored calm and patience in the minds of the many that saw their Dream of an Independent and Prosperous India fade to black.

Sparsh (1980) was one such movie which injected realism and minimalism into Indian cinema by moving away from convention. Directed by Sai Paranjpye and produced by Basu Bhattacharya, this film has Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana Azmi, Om Puri, Mohan Gokhale,etc. putting in a stellar performance. With a runtime of over 2 hours, this motion picture takes its own sweet time showing us a tranquil part of Delhi.

The story is about Anirudh, a visually-challenged principal of an institute for the blind (Naseer) who develops a mutual relationship with Kavita (Shabana Azmi), a ‘sighted’ teacher who has not shed the baggage of her husband’s untimely death. This relationship is composed of love, respect, pity, self-pity, care and egoism. Set in a backdrop of an institute for the visually challenged – where kids would learn to read in Braille, play instruments, prepare handicraft products and have a basic knowledge of bartering change money – the screenplay aims at breaking shackles, moving off the convention that the blind need to stay dependent on the sighted. A beautiful scene in the film tries to show the exact opposite where Kavita feels wronged because of her sense of sight.

A careful attempt has been made to project the presence of self-dependence and male ego in Naseer’s character. This was method acting at its finest – that the role could have been more perfected is a matter subject to sheer chance and ‘what if’s. Not to be left far behind is Om Puri, in a minor supporting role as a blind teacher who loses his wife of many years and feels this sense of dependence and helplessness creep within him. His rolling, oblivious eyes, as he laments on his wife’s ‘release from this jail term’, hit the spot. Also, worth mentioning is the earnest yet innocent performance put in by the visually challenged children who performed an eponymous role, as well as the supporting cast featuring Mohan Gokhale, Sudha Chopra and other acclaimed theatre actors.

The dialogues are woven in simple, text-book Hindi language, laced with English common-usage words and phrases – to make it seem natural. A theatre actor loves to underplay his character and that was what was required. The music score includes three songs and an Ustad Amjad Ali Khan song excerpt, apart from a somber and classically-tinged background score.

Finally, onto my last part. This film has a poignantly charming role portrayed by Shabana Azmi – the perfect foil to Naseeruddin Shah’s character. How could a woman ever look so beautiful yet be so unassuming! Her aura symbolized the journey that a self-aware Indian woman has to embark upon to find the sole purpose of her life.  She undoes her character of the ‘abla, besahara nari’ dogma – a character so beautifully essayed in Mahesh Bhatt’s, ‘Arth’.

It’s really unfortunate that today’s generation has to tolerate such a substandard and crass fare of movies. Nonetheless, a selected few could do with this ‘sparsh’ of nostalgia for decades to come.