Welcome to Sajjanpur: Classy Meets the Commercial

By Anirvan Ghosh • Oct 14th, 2008 • Filed under: Bollywood, Film Review, Highlights, Movies

Anirvan Ghosh catches up with Shyam Belegal’s Welcome to Sajjanpur

Welcome to Sajjanpur (2008)

I have not seen such a delightful take on the Indian village life since a long time. Shyam Benegal’s movie packs in a great understanding of the Indian villages, which are hotbeds of caste and political violence and simmering with outmoded superstitions. He has managed to retain a funny bone through the movie even when potraying the horrific consequences of a general lack of law and order, and of the persistence of archaic traditions and customs. This is one of the best satirical movies in the last year.

In this age when even emails are becoming outmoded, and SMS-es are becoming longer, when social interaction has moved from the real to the virtual, Benegal manages to hold the audience with seemingly antique forms of communication - inland letters and postcards.

The film, initially titled Mahadev ka Sajjanpur, revolves around Mahadev (Shreyas Talpade), one of the few educated young men in Sajjanpur, who makes his living by writing letters for the largely illiterate population of the village. His ability to write persuasive letters makes him extremely popular in the village, which is on the cusp of modernity. He falls for his childhood crush (Amrita Rao) who is married but been waiting for her husband for the last four years. Whilst scribbling postcards for the villagers, he plays a spectator to almost every interesting escapade in Sajjanpur. His clientele includes a scheming politician kin (Yashpal Sharma), a dreamy eyed compounder (Ravi Kishan) crazily in love with a widow (Rajeshwari Sachdeva), a superstitious mother (Ila Arun) desperate to get her manglik daughter (Divya Dutta) married, and a eunuch venturing into politics (Ravi Jhankal). And all of them in a simple story told enchantingly, in which the director enables us to connect with the characters. Some of these tales end on a tragic note, even though the film’s denouement is optimistic.

Shreyas Talpade carries off the pivotal role with flamboyance and conviction, but he does not manage to show the grey layers of his mentality as well as he could have. Amrita Rao is gracefully restrained - a far cry from her whimpering ways in mainstream masalas, she gracefully gets under the skin of the naive, unsure Kamla. Her measured dialogue delivery and deliberately held-back body language reflects she has put in a lot of hard work. And to her credit, she gets it right. Ila Arun is perfectly cast and Divya Dutta is brilliant in a small role as the tomboyish and modern girl. Yashpal Sharma as the goon is superb, yet again, after Singh is Kinng, and his first dialogues set the tone perfectly, while Ravi Kishen is passable, having controlled his usual histronics.

This movie does not need any songs, but instead there are quite a few of them. And most are pretty ordinary save the opening number, Sitaram. But the movie works for its writing, by Ashok Mishra, who manages to portray the soci-economic conditions as seen on breaking news channels. And the frothy dialogues are funny, and sound authentically ethnic. He has gone overboard in some scenes in trying to sound rooted, but that is not really noticeable unless you have grown up in the Hindi belt. And the shabby romance angle between Ravi Kisshan and Rajeshwari Sachdeva, which meanders for the most part, comes back to haunt you with its tragic ending.

Benegal also makes some pertinent points on the burning issues of the day - be it criminalisation of politics, the migrant problem in cities, caste based killings or the big industrialisation debate. There is no heavy-handed preaching though, it is all done with a smile on the face, which is what makes it endearing.

So what if India’s foremost filmmaker who pioneered hard-hitting realism in films like Ankur and Nishant, is now somewhat soft and flossy. He is still around, unlike most of his contemporaries, and has finally been able to combine the classy with the commercial.

I enjoyed this movie, and urge you to visit Sajjanpur atleast once. You shall be pleasantly surprised.

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