Revisiting Mahesh Manjrekar’s Pitaah As It Turns 23

On 04 Jan 2025 12:24:37

Pitaah is a gripping drama about social injustice and oppression in rural India. Sanjay Dutt plays Rudra, a father seeking justice

Pitaah is a gripping drama about social injustice and oppression in rural India. Sanjay Dutt plays Rudra, a father seeking justice after his daughter is brutally assaulted by a powerful Zamindar's sons. The film, though powerful in its portrayal of grief and struggle, occasionally falls into clichés but remains emotionally intense and impactful. Read on!

Pitaah was the third film in Mahesh’s paternal trilogy and infinitely superior in subject treatment and theme to his recent turnips on the same theme, Tera Mera Saath Rahe and Ehsaas.

Pitaah possesses grip and gumption and an attitude of compelling conscientiousness towards the downtrodden sections of our rural society. This gives the film the lushly aggressive look of a seminal war between the haves and have-nots in Ganga Jumna, Mother India, Mujhe Jeene Do, and Dacait, in which the protagonist (played by Sanjay Dutt’s father in two of these films) takes to the gun after being a victim of vicious social discrimination.

Borrowing the main core of his subject from John Grisham’s courtroom novel A Time to Kill, Manjrekar moves towards discrimination and persecution in a village, presumably in North India. Though no place names or caste specifications are mentioned, the characters wear clothes and speak a patois language that suggests they’re from Uttar Pradesh.

The locational details, including the Zamindar’s haveli and the characters’ costumes, could have been a little more in-depth. A perfunctory mood often overtakes the chilling story. However, the director remains in firm control over the narrative. He makes us care, sometimes deeply, for the agonised characters and their pathetic plight.

Mahesh Manjrekar’s hero Rudra (Sanjay Dutt) could have conveniently lapsed into rhetorical machismo to win instant applause from the power-hankering audience. To the director’s credit Rudra’s meek submissive character of the Zamindar’s farm hand never undergoes dramatic changes. The protagonist remains steadfastly baffled by the injustices that are heaped on his family after his minor 9-year-old daughter (Tanvi Hegde) is brutally raped by the local Zamindar’s two loutish sons.

Forget justice, Rudra has to run for his family’s life and even contemplate mass suicide to get away from the Zamindar’s wrath. The protagonist’s helplessness as he scampers from pillar to post in a corrupt debauched and lawless no-man’s-land is vividly portrayed in the sequence where Rudra sneaks into the courtroom on the night before the accused are to be brought for justice to find himself hiding place for shooting down the rapists before the mockery of justice begins.

Sanjay Dutt portrays the father’s anguish helplessness and uncontrollable grief with devastating authenticity. His face is a map of untold misery. Unfortunately, Nandita Das as his supportive and inspirational wife just doesn’t match up to Dutt's militant-dimensional performance. Everything from her hair(obviously a wig) to her sharp rebuttals when justice is denied to her ravaged little daughter, seems a little too tame and watered down. It’s ironic that an actress specialising in playing grassroots characters should be so out of breadth in an environment of heightened emotions.

As usual, Manjrekar focuses only on the main plot. His films are blessedly bereft of brutal intrusions. Except for the shrieking Mujras and Nautch items to exhibit feudal hedonism the film unplugs the music system to focus on the primary tragedy which unfolds with searing immediacy.

The characters are drawn in a unidimensional arc encompassing the age-old battle between Good and Evil. Some incidental characters such as the seemingly upright doctor(Anjan Srivastava) treating the traumatized rape victim, turning traitor for the right amount of money, shock us with their contemporary swine-of-the-times insensitivity.

But most characters, including the venomous Zamindar(played with amused intolerance by Om Puri) and his firebrand wife(Mita Vashist), suffer from an acute shallowness. Apart from Sanjay Dutt who gives a moving performance, it’s Jackie Shroff the corrupt cop who comes around finally to help the tortured protagonist, who gives a scene-stealing performance. Shroff’s drawling debauchery and his glint-eyed greed are underscored by a cynicism that sets him apart from the other characters who either breathe fire or breed persecution.

Vijay Arora’s camerawork paints a rather forceful landscape with choleric colours. The flaming reds and browns contrast well with the arid lives of the peasants. But the narrative’s quest for a climactic nirvana leaves the film looking hopelessly wheezy at the end. Some portions of the long-drawn finale resemble the Spaghetti Westerns of Clint Eastwood while the shootout around a train(with Manjrekar’s favourite actor Shivaji Satam popping up as a station master) seems to over-cook the inherently raw and unadorned dish.

So you wish Manjrekar had pushed his film a little further, averted the trite cliches associated with the Dacoit Dramas of the 1960s, and confronted caste and economic discrimination headlong by using the innocent child’s rape as a flashpoint. Though compromises creep over the narrative in unfortunate ways Pitaah nevertheless draws out the pain and sorrow of a family that’s driven to impotence in the face of high-powered evil virility.

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