Director: K. Raghavendra Rao; Writer: K. Raghavendra Rao, Kader Khan; Producer: Krishna; Cinematographer: K.S. Prakash; Cast: Jeetendra, Sridevi, Amjad Khan, Waheeda Rehman, Satyen Kappoo, Shakti Kapoor, Shoma Anand, Asrani
Duration: 02:30:20; Aspect Ratio: 1.778:1; Hue: 135.807; Saturation: 0.082; Lightness: 0.474; Volume: 0.180; Cuts per Minute: 13.868; Words per Minute: 87.638
Summary: Ravi (Jeetendra), a government engineer,
arrives in his ancestral village to right all the
wrongs perpetrated on his family by the
villainous Zamindar Sher Singh Bandookwala
(Khan) and also - on behalf of the State - to
introduce welfare measures represented by the
dam he is to build on Sher Singh’s property.
Sher Singh, who runs his own ‘parliament’ and
system of dispensing justice, had earlier forced
Ravi’s upright father (Kappoo), a school
teacher, into bonded labour and raped Ravi’s
mother (Rehman). The villains now force Ravi
to donate his sister Padma in marriage to the
evil Shakti (Kapoor), but in the end he reforms
the villains. The hero bullies Sher Singh’s
initially arrogant daughter Rekha (Sridevi) into
supporting him and opposing her father. This
modernisation melodrama, of the same
generation as e.g. Bangarada Manushya
(1972) and some of Bhartirajaa’s films, was
also a vehicle for the successful entry of South
Indian production capital into Hindi cinema
and the best-known of the several Jeetendra-
Sridevi films usually referred to as ‘South’
pictures in the Bombay media. This shift
sometimes created unusual rhetorical structures
as it sought to transpose local idioms onto a
‘national’ terrain: e.g the opening sequence in
which Ravi’s mother tells him of the family’s
unhappy history is narrated in quickfire, quasidocumentary
imagery with freeze frames and
cutaways providing ‘information’
accompanying the mother’s strident voice-over.
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