At about the halfway mark of the 1971 Hindi film ‘Mere Apne’, directed by Gulzar, Anandi Devi (Meena Kumari) tells Shyam (Vinod Khanna): “Let’s leave this city and go back to my village. I have a mango orchard and some land. It’ll be enough for us. My village is much better than this ugly city.” At first, Shyam seems to agree. But then, he changes his opinion: “No, I must stay here. I must stay here till my last breath. I must fight to survive.” An unemployed young man, Shyam has formed a gang with a few other young men in the neighbourhood. His gang is locked in a violent rivalry with another gang, led by Chhenu (Shatrughan Sinha).
‘Mere Apne’ was Gulzar’s debut film; it was adapted from the 1968 Bengali film ‘Apanjan’, directed by Tapan Sinha. As Gulzar recollects, Sinha had initially intended to direct the Hindi remake himself, with Kishore Kumar and Waheed Rahman in the lead, and SD Burman scoring the music. But when he dropped the idea, Gulzar approached producer NC Sippy with the Hindi screenplay he had written. The Bengali original had Swarup Dutta as Robi and Samit Bhanja as Chheno, the leaders of the two gangs. Chhaya Devi acted as Anandamoyee, the same character that Meena Kumar played in the Hindi version. ‘Mere Apne’ was Meena Kumari’s last film.
Sinha’s original — as well as Gulzar’s adaptation — were very successful at the box office, and won a slew of prizes, evidently because they resonated with the contemporary mood of discontent in the country. In 1967, only a year before the release of ‘Apanjan’, the far-left Naxalbari movement had started in North Bengal, and it would soon engulf large parts of the country in revolutionary violence and brutal state repression. Calcutta (Kolkata) was the epicentre of the turmoil, and clashes between rival gangs, political assassinations, police “encounters” (euphemism for custodial murders), and frequent disturbances were not uncommon. Sinha’s previous film, ‘Sagina Mahato’ (1970) and ‘Ekhoni’ (1971), as well as the Calcutta trilogies of his contemporaries Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen, attempted to document.
In the final scene of ‘Apanjan’, as the two gangs clash, Anandamoyee tries to stop them. But a stray bullet hit her, killing her on the street. “The final scene dissolves into one of the most heartfelt and hurtful images of neo-realist cinema,” writes Paganopoulos. “In tragic irony, the film ends with the image of the orphaned brother and sister, running behind the ambulance that carries the dead body of their adopted granny to the hospital to affirm her death.” The police arrest the members of the two gangs and take them away, extinguishing all their youthful hopes. The Bengal film sets up a complex relationship between the personal realm of the family and the public realm of politics, brought out ironically through its title; though Gulzar’s film borrows the title through a literal translation, it perhaps falls a little short in exploring this aspect fully.
‘Mere Apne’ and ‘Apanjan’ are significant markers of their eras, capturing the anxieties and frustrations of political disillusionment, the corrosive influence of opportunistic politics, and the tragic consequences when communities are fractured along lines of loyalty and desperation. The films emerge from a time of crisis in India’s post-colonial history, but the persistence of similar patterns in political life reinforces their continued relevance, a stark reminder that cycles of alienation and institutional failure are yet to be broken.
Uttaran Das Gupta is an independent writer and journalist
