Achhut Kanya 1936

Achhut Kanya is a 1936 Indian Bollywood social film released on 1936. The film is directed by Franz Osten, produced by Himansu Rai under banner named Bombay Talkies.

A circular story, told in flashback, in which eternal repetition is only interrupted by death in the form of a relentlessly linear railway engine. The film opens at a railway crossing where a man is about to kill his wife when the narrative spins into the past via a song. The central story is of the unhappy love affair between Kasturi (Devika Rani), the Harijan (Untouchable) daughter of the railway level-crossing guard Dukhia (Prasad), and Pratap (Kumar), the Brahmin son of the grocer Mohan (Pithawala). At first, rumour and mob violence are deployed to lethal effect in order to maintain a 'traditional', oppressive morality. Later, when the main protagonists are about to conform and marry selected partners, rumour and maliciousness again intervene to trigger renewed violence until the on-rushing train of fate stops the strife.

A circular story, told in flashback, in which eternal repetition is only interrupted by death in the form of relentlessly linear railway engine. The film opens at a railway crossing where a man is about to kill his wife when the narrative spins into the past via a song. The central story is of the unhappy love affair between Kasturi (Devika Rani), the Harijan (Untouchable) daughter of the railway level crossing guard Dukhia (Prasad), and Pratap (Kumar), the Brahmin son of the grocer Mohan (Pithawala). At first, rumour and mob violence are deployed to lethal effect in order to maintain a traditional, oppresive morality. Later, when the main protagonists are about to conform and marry selected partners, rumour and maliciousness again intervence to trigger renewed violence until the on-rushing train of fate stops the strife. Enchanced by Wirschings contrasted imagery, the plot suggests that bothe conformity and nonconfromity are equally impossible options, the latter being punished by society, the former unable as social stasis. Even fate, associated with the archetypal symbol of modernity and progress, is denied its ultimate victory; the spirit of the defeated lingers, haunting the crossroads, testifying to the ineradicability of desire. The films narrative structure and its eruptions into visual stylisation can be seen as more intelligently complex way of addressing the encounter between Indian and European notions of history than many attempt to take East-West differences as an explicit theme. With this film, Bombay Talkies also invented its became a studio stereo type (Janmabhoomi, 1936; Durga and Kangan, both 1939; Bandhan, 1940), resisting the generic shifts in the formula intiated by S. Mukherjee and Amiya Chakravarty. Hero Ashok Kumar later said that he felt his acting in this film to be babyish. [Source: Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema] Check out this page for more updates on Achhut Kanya.