The Activist Artiste

On Balraj Sahni’s birth centenary,Kalpana Sahni,her cousin Pariskhit Sahni,and other family members will get together to celebrate Balraj’s contribution to cinema at the annual Habitat Film Festival in Delhi,which opens today. Kalpana fondly recalls her uncle as someone who was humble,adventurous and jovial. But since she was mostly away at boarding school at The Lawrence Scool,Sanawar,she could only spend holidays with him in Mumbai.

Sitting next to a portrait of her father,Bhisham Sahni,she remembers the bond that the brothers shared. “While cinema gave him (Balraj) work,it also gave him a new insight. Rather than pontificating about life from an arm chair,Balraj wanted to involve himself with the masses,” she says. And in the early ’40s,at the height of the nationalist struggle,Balraj’s wish found resonance through the Independent People’s Theatre Movement.

The nine-day festival will screen Dharti Ke Lal on May 12 as part of a retrospective including his other films,Do Bigha Zameen (1953),Seema (1955),Waqt (1965),Kabuliwallah (1961),and his last film Garam Hawa (1973). Apart from these,award-winning features and documentaries from last year will also be shown at the festival.

Towards his latter years,Balraj immersed himself into literature and wrote volumes on Punjabi poetry and also started learning Urdu. “This creative streak,perhaps,came from his mother who was fond of the literature and arts. But it blossomed only towards the second half of his life,” says Kalpana. His last public appearance was in 1972,at the JNU convocation,before his sudden death in 1973. The festival is on till May 19.

The schedule is available on http://www.habitatfilmclub.com