ANDHI GALI

(Blind Alley)
1985

 
CAST
Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Deepti Naval, M. K. Raina, Shyamanand Jalan, Satya Banerjee, K. K. Raina, Sangeeta Naik, Mahesh Bhatt & Basu Chatterjee in Special Appearance

CREDITS
Producer – Bikram Singh- NFDC
Script, Music & Direction – Buddhadev Dasgupta
Story - Debyendu Palit
Dialogues - Gulzar
Cinematographer – Kamal Nayak
Editing – Ujjal Nandi

STORY
Andhi Gali deals with the theme of gradual corruption of idealism in contemporary urban India and explores the dilemma of an average educated person torn between trying to lead a life involving decency, love and commitment on one hand and “succeeding” in a materialistic, competitive society on the other. The story spans a decade and takes place in Calcutta and Bombay.

The protagonist in Andhi Gali, like in Dooratwa, is a Left intellectual revolutionary, who escapes being shot by police repression and flees for safety. Settling down in a comfortable job in Bombay, he gets enraptured into things that give him happiness and joy. He falls in love with a good-looking girl who has a mind of her own. The girl agrees to his proposal to marry him taking him to be an idealist and a man of principle.

Tensions of life and the need for fulfilling human desires soon crop up. The protagonist lets his wife to model with a view to earning an extra penny for the household. His idealism is on the wane. He even goes to the extent of taking huge advances from the advertising agency, where his wife works as a model, in order to buy a flat for themselves. The ad agency, commissioned to take photographs of the model as a tribal girl at the behest of their clients, ‘shoot’ pictures of her exposing her bosom here and there. When the agency finds that the pictures are not adequate, they call upon her services for another photographic session. This irks her and she complains to her husband. She gets the surprise of her life when her husband, without being annoyed at all at the provocative pictures already taken, insists on her posing again according to the directive of the agency.

This serves as the last straw in her disillusionment with her husband and her marriage. With no hope left, the wife jumps off the 6th floor of her newly acquired flat and ends her life.