This title is part of a retrospective of films featuring Smita Patil. She was an important and successful actress in the sub-continent from the mid 1970s until the late 1980s; she died only aged 31 in 1987.
Many of her best films were part of India’s parallel cinema; a counter cinema to the mainstream cinemas of which the Mumbai / ‘Bollywood’ is the best known. These films were closer to art cinema, often consciously critical and even revolutionary and eschewing the melodrama, songs and dances that epitomize the dominant film mode. Patil worked with a number of major parallel cinema directors, including the best-known Shyam Benegal and Mrinal Sen.
This movie was directed by Ketan Mehta and co-written with Chunilal Madia, adapted from one of his Gujarat short stories. The story is set in a small village in 1930s British colonial India. It is not clear if this is an area directly ruled by the British or is a part of one of the supposedly independent kingdom’s or principalities.
The village is visited by a Subedar [tax collector] with his accompanying troop of armed horsemen.
Such tax collectors were noted not just for the brutal way they enforced collection but in addition taking village valuables, resources and even women for their own use. In this case the visiting Subedar (Naseeruddin Shah) is taken with Sonbai (Smita Patil), the wife of Shankar who leaves the village to work on the Railway, that iconic network in the subcontinent and Indian Cinema. The village is divided by caste and the village Mukhi (leader – Suresh Oberoi) seems to have exploited and stolen the land of the poorer members through usury.
The women from poorer households work nearby sorting and processing red peppers, a site known as the factory. The title of the film translates as ‘Hot Spice’ and the peppers function as an actual and symbolic prop in the drama. Indeed the movie is saturated with the colour red. There is little sign of the men of the village involving in work and they clearly dominate and restrict the women.
Two sub-plots in the narrative involve the wife of the Mukhi, Saraswati (Deepti Naval) attempting to enrol her daughter Munni in the local school. The school master (Benjamin Gilani) is a lone follower of Gandhi in the village. Meanwhile the Mukhi’s younger brother (Mohan Gokhale) wants to elope with Radhu (Supriya Pathak) but her lower caste stands in their way.
The Subedar threatens the village men with reprisals if he cannot lay hands on Sonbai. The only resistance is by the school master: Abu, the watchman at the factory: and some of the fellow women of Sonbai in the village.
This is a powerful drama which dramatises both the sexist structure of the society and the repressive weight of the colonial occupation; though we never see or hear the British colonial authority. Patil is excellent as are her fellow actresses as the village women. The players of the male characters have minor roles, except for Om Puri as Abu and with the Subedar larger than anyone or even life. The film follows the style associated with the spaghetti western, which was very influential in Indian film in the 1970s and 1980s: as with the star vehicles of Amitabh Bachchan like Sholay (1975).
This was a screening of a digital transfer; there do not seem to be any 35mm prints, either in this programme of in the Festival itself. The quality was good and the important colours looked fine. It was shot in 1.66:1, in Hindi and has English sub-titles. The running time was given as 128 minutes, but I thought it was more like 120 minutes: Movie Database gives 121 minutes.
Unfortunately this is the only title of the five in the retrospective screening at the Picture House. Indeed, the number of Festival titles here seems down on 2023 and that year was lower than the pre-pandemic era. Given that the Festival originally started at the cinema, along with the development of the Friends, I find this disappointing.
Friends of Hyde Park Picture House 