Director: J.P. Dutta; Producer: Habib Nadiadwala, Faruq Nadiadwala; Cinematographer: Ishwar Bidri; Editor: Deepak Wirkud, M.D. Worlikar; Cast: Dharmendra, Reena Roy, Mithun Chakraborty, Smita Patil, Naseerudin Shah, Anita Raj, Kulbhushan Karbanda, Bharat Kapoor, Mazhar Khan, Om Shivpuri, Sulochana Latkar, Reza Murad, Surendar Pal, Avtar Gill, Mahendra Varma, Ram Mohan, Master Shaka, Deepika, Anjan Srivastav, Rajan Haksar
Summary: Violent ruralist melodrama about Rajput
oppression in the desert of Rajasthan. The hero
Ranjit Singh (Dharmendra), son of a Jat farmer,
leads a popular rebellion against the corrupt
zamindar (Shivpuri) and his three nephews.
The hero is aided by a policeman (Kharbanda)
whose son had been killed by the nephews,
and an army officer from a Jat regiment
(Chakraborty) who decides to use his military
skills to defend his community from the
rapacious Thakurs. On the side of the zamindar
is his son-in-law, the police officer Sultan Singh
(Shah). However, the cop’s wife Sumitra (Patil)
is sympathetic to Ranjit Singh’s cause. The Jats’
objective is to capture and burn the account
ledgers of the moneylending thakur
community to free themselves from bonded
labour. They eventually succeed though the
hero dies, leaving his wife Moran (Reena Roy)
and infant son to continue the struggle.
Rajasthan’s arid desert landscape, its vultures
and shots of the famous folk fair at Pushkar (a
major tourist attraction) give the film both an
exotic and a primitivist atmosphere. However,
it went beyond poetic metaphor in several
inflammatory scenes addressing the region’s
charged communal situation. The scene where
the hero’s mother rushes into the villain’s
house to save her son without taking off her
slippers, and is then humiliated by being forced
to put the slippers on her head and walk out,
led to riots in several small cities in Rajasthan.
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