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Midas touch that made every film an occasion
Bengali films lead National Film Awards with 22 wins, while Kannada cinema, once prominent, struggles for recognition despite Puttanna Kanagal's legacy.
If you were to make a pie chart showing the distribution, by language, of the winners of the 71 National Film Awards for Best Feature Film given out since 1954, when the National Film Development Corporation and the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting began awarding them, you will see that the biggest slice belongs to the Bengali film industry, which has won 22 times (the Malayalam industry slice, at 13 awards, is a distant second).
It is another matter that the chart doesn’t tell the whole story; it has been 17 years since a Bengali film won – in the same duration, Malayalam films have won four times, Marathi films thrice, and Kannada not at all.
It wasn’t always this way. Kannada films have received the honour six times – the first, in 1970, went to T Pattabhirama Reddy for Samskara; the last, in 2001, was won by director Girish Kasaravalli (for a stunning fourth time) for Dweepa. Of all the auteurs who worked in that golden period of Kannada cinema, only one dared, at the risk of alienating both camps, to walk the fine line between art cinema and popular cinema, delivering the kind of blockbusters that would make him a beloved household name among an entire generation of both critics and fans – Puttanna Kanagal.
Had he not died unexpectedly in June 1985, at only 51, Kanagal, none of whose films won a National Film Award, but most of which “ran for 100 days”, would have been celebrating his 93rd birthday next week. As it was, he died before he could complete Masanada Hoovu, his 24th Kannada film (he also made a few movies in Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam, and one in Hindi, a remake of his massive 1972 hit, Nagarahaavu, which marked ‘Saahasa Simha’ Vishnuvardhan’s debut). Masanada Hoovu was completed by Kanagal’s long-term associate, KSL Swamy, who would himself go on to win a National Film Award, for Best Children’s Film in 1989, for Jamboo Savari.
Born in the village of Kanagal near Mysuru in an impoverished family that could not afford to send him to college, the young Puttanna worked a variety of menial jobs before he was hired as a driver by the celebrated movie director, BR Pantulu, founder of Padmini Pictures.
In 1957, he debuted as an assistant director on Pantulu’s film, Rathnagiri Rahasya. Ten years later, his first Kannada film, Belli Moda, a story about a young woman who steadfastly rejects the man she loves when he returns to her in remorse for his past betrayal, shook up Kannada audiences and established the young director as an iconoclast. Belli Moda, based on a novel by the feminist Kannada author, Triveni, and headlining the legendary Kalpana, also set the tone for his future films, many of which would be women-centric, based on popular Kannada novels, unafraid to take on taboo themes like marital infidelity, postpartum depression, and emotional neglect within marriage, and, yes, feature Kalpana.
Remarkably, even as Kanagal introduced actors who would go on to become some of the Kannada film world’s biggest stars – Aarathi, Vishnuvardhan, Srinath, Jayanthi, Ambareesh, Vajramuni, Leelavathi, Shivaram, Jai Jagadish, and, in his last film, Aparna – to the silver screen, and made superstars out of much-feted actors like Kalpana, he became the real draw; a Puttanna Kanagal film, like a Dr Rajkumar film, was not to be missed. And while his feminist themes made him the darling of women filmgoers, he would have troubled relationships with the women in his own life.
Forty years after his death, the Kannada film industry is yet to find a director whose oeuvre is as large, bold, or as signature as Kanagal’s. His films – and the many beautiful songs and visuals that featured in them – continue to be discussed, analysed, and sorely missed.
(Roopa Pai is a writer who has carried on a longtime love affair with her hometown Bengaluru)
