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(The director was apparently no fan of Lord Krishna, and may have needed a primmer, Rama-like figure to perform this role.)Īkbar (Rishi Kapoor), on the other hand, is presented as a lifter of veils, and not just in the specific terms offered in the “Parda hai Parda” sequence as the authors point out, he repeatedly speaks (or sings) truth to power, and plays a part in all but one of the film’s musical numbers, being the sole singer for three of the most epiphanic ones.
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In the framing that thus emerges, Amar (Vinod Khanna) the eldest, “Hindu brother” who grows up to be an upright policeman – the cop who never uses his gun who, in fact, buries it in the ground in an early scene when he is still a child, to hide it from his younger brother – can be seen as a benevolent patriarch of sorts, the centre of Desai’s moral universe. Their chief structural decision is to divide the main text into four long chapters: each of the first three makes a case for a particular brother as the story’s hero, and uses the argument to suggest a worldview contained in the film, while the fourth hands the stage to their mother Bharati (Nirupa Roy) is often seen as a pathetic figure with almost no agency or personality, but is given an intriguing new dimension here (and even a voice). The playfulness begins with the fact that it is jointly written by three men who go their own ways and (sort of) unite in the end. Most notably, here is a scholarly work about a popular film that also tries to mimic something of the film’s controlled lunacy, winking at itself every now and again. The authors’ fields of specialization include religion, anthropology and international studies, and their knowledge of Indian culture and history is evident throughout this book: arguments and analyses are supported by heaps of contextual information and references. Saying only this much though can make the “message” seem so obvious and naïve that most viewers wouldn’t even care to think about it – they would take it as a given and get on to the real business of enjoying the film as eye-popping spectacle.īut it’s also possible to go much further than a surface reading, and Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation – co-written by the academics William Elison, Christian Lee Novetzke and Andy Rotman – is among the most in-depth books you’ll read about a single Hindi film. Another way is to acknowledge the film’s subtexts while keeping the level of analysis very basic: one might, for instance, say that the story – about three brothers separated as children, brought up as a Hindu, Muslim and Christian, and reunited at the end – is about national integration, as much of the director’s other work was. Many see it as pure escapism, or “great trash”, to use Pauline Kael’s phrase – a mix of all the ingredients and sauces that go into the best mainstream movies, with Desai’s zaniness adding a special flavour. Manmohan Desai’s 1977 film Amar Akbar Anthony, one of Hindi cinema’s most beloved entertainments, can be viewed through different lenses.