Death Defying Princess

WHEN he made Samskara in 1970 (and won the Golden Lion in ’73 at Locarno) he was 50. Today, at 81-plus, Pattabhi Rama Reddy prepares to...

WHEN he made Samskara in 1970 (and won the Golden Lion in ’73 at Locarno) he was 50. Today, at 81-plus, Pattabhi Rama Reddy prepares to apprise I&B Minister Sushma Swaraj of Savithri, his new production. The years between have marked him with pain and loss. Tragedy struck five years after Reddy’s acclaimed film version of U R Anantamurti’s Kannada novel Samskara. His wife Snehalata, a Bangalorean Christian who starred in Samskara, was jailed during the Emergency and died of illness in captivity.

Born into a prosperous family at Nellore in Andhra Pradesh, Reddy was sent to Santiniketan in response to the then boycott of British-run schools. ‘‘Gurudev Tagore was very much around. But I found the atmosphere so romantic and sentimental that I rebelled,’’ chuckles Reddy.

So he wrote a set of 12 scathing, irreverent poems that broke the rules of Telugu prosody and metre: ‘‘It set off a revolution in Telugu poetry,’’ he says, with a residual glint of teenage cheek. ‘‘They went on about the moon and the jasmine bowers in fluffy verse. I set one poem in China Bazaar, a derelict area of Chennai, and asked what the moon could possibly mean out there.’’

At college he made a friend in K V Reddy, who was to become a ‘superhit’ director and creator of the Vijaya Vauhini Studios, and co-produced three commercial movies with him. The first, Pellinaatu Pramaanalu was a megahit, followed by another superhit, a mytho with NT Rama Rao and Nageswara Rao climaxing with a superflop that drove Reddy out of business.

‘‘I lay low for a long time. But one day, at a party in our house, I overheard Kannada MP Gopal Gowda telling Dr Ram Manohar Lohia and Madhu Limaye the story of Samskara ‘by that fellow U R Anantamurti’. My wife and I were both fascinated. Those days you could make a Kannada film for as little as Rs 2 lakh — even a Raj Kumar starrer. So we did it!’’

And made history. The ascetic Acharya’s dilemma of faith passed into national folklore, boosted by the novel’s sensational serial avatar in The Illustrated Weekly.

Reddy’s current project, researched and written by him, is a curiously elliptical ‘samskara’ in itself. It is based on Sri Aurobindo’s mammoth recreation of the Puranic tale, in which Princess Savitri stubbornly marries the doomed, exiled prince Satyavan. When Yama, Lord of Death, arrives for his soul, Savitri gets her husband back with fortunes restored. ‘‘I never like the Puranic ending. But Aurobindo constructs a logical argument in which Savitri proves that death is merely a switch-over to new life,’’ says Reddy. For this family production involving son Konarak and daughter Nandana and her husband, Reddy has cast Tabu as the death-defying princess. Rahul Dev will play Yama and Vijay Raaz will play Narada. Satyavan himself is yet uncast. With Devdas invited to Cannes, Reddy is confident that the neo-classic suits the temper of the time. ‘‘But the biggest reason to watch this film is that you will no longer fear Death,’’ smiles Reddy serenely.