“Well, Sam, I’ll tell you how it is. You see, I married a widow, and this widow had a daughter. Then my father, being a widower, married our daughter so you see my father is my own son-in-law.”
“Yes, I see.”
“Then again my step-daughter is my step-mother, ain’t she? Well, then, her mother is my grandmother, ain’t she? I am married to her, ain’t I? So that makes me my own grandfather, doesn’t it?”
This tiny anecdote titled Very Closely Related was published in the US in 1883, in the book, Wit and Humour of the Age, featuring conundrums, jokes, plays and stories by Mark Twain, Eli Perkins and others.
Many centuries earlier in India, the legends of King Vikram and the evil spirit, Vetal, included one in which the mischievous paranormal being tells the wise monarch the tale of a father marrying a woman whose mother marries his son.
Vetal then posed a riddle to Vikram that goes something like this: what would be the relationship between the children that the two couples subsequently bear?
Very Closely Related is said to have been an inspiration for the hilarious song I’m My Own Grandpa that has been performed and adapted by numerous artistes in the West, including the country music icon Willie Nelson. Humour was far from Tamil filmmaker K Balachander’s mind though, when he was inspired by Vetal’s confounding question to write and direct the emotional screen drama Apoorva Raagangal (meaning: Rare Melodies).
A Landmark Film
Balachander clearly had his finger on the pulse of the audience with his choice of genre. Apoorva Raagangal was a box-office hit, proving to be a turning point in the careers of two out of its four lead artistes, Srividya and Kamal Haasan, both of whom went on to become superstars.
Haasan had been acting for a few years by then, as a child and an adult, but Apoorva Raagangal marked his breakthrough as a hero. He starred in a total of 36 films by Balachander, he told me in an interview in 2015, in which he said he believes the auteur not only “discovered” him, “sometimes I suspect he could have invented me.”
That the future superstar Rajinikanth—who was an acting student at the time—debuted in this film in a small but significant supporting role is just one of its many calling cards. The music by MS Swaminathan is another. Balachander received the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 2010.
In the half century since Apoorva Raagangal was released on 15 August, 1975, it has been a subject of study among film scholars and historians. As cinephiles mark the golden jubilee of its release this week, it continues to be considered a landmark in Tamil cinema, both for its unusual themes and artistic accomplishments.
Srividya in Apoorva Raagangal played Bhairavi, a renowned Carnatic singer in Chennai, who is returning from a concert one night when she chances upon a young man lying grievously injured on the road. She takes him home and nurses him back to health. The youth in question, Prasanna played by Haasan, had been beaten up for abusing the passengers of a car that splashed water on him as it drove by.
He is of a revolutionary bent of mind, and had left Bengaluru after a fight with his father, Mahendran, who had long disapproved of his activities. When Prasanna waylaid a truck carrying food grains, distributed its contents to the poor, and set fire to the vehicle, in protest against the rising price of rice, an angry Mahendran had finally given up on his son and reported him to the police.
What Made the Film Stand Out
(Caution: Spoilers ahead)
Soon after they meet, Prasanna falls in love with Bhairavi. She is hesitant to get involved with him because she is older, and due to her past as the single mother of a daughter, Ranjani, born outside the socially approved institution of marriage. Ranjani had recently walked out upon discovering that she was Bhairavi’s biological daughter, and not an adopted child as she had thought until then.
Unknown to Bhairavi and Prasanna, Ranjani meets Mahendran and is attracted to him. When she expresses a desire to marry him, he strongly and repeatedly opposes the proposal due to the large age disparity between them.
While the entire screenplay was derived from Vetal’s question to Vikram, Ranjani became a vehicle for literally articulating it in the film.
The puzzle befuddles Mahendran to such an extent that she has to repeat it again and again for his benefit: “Ennuda appa yaarukku maamanaaro. Avaruda marumakalka appa en maganukku maamanaar. Appo avarukkum enakkum enna uravu?” (If my father is father-in-law to someone, and that person’s daughter-in-law’s father is my son’s father-in-law, then what is the relationship between me and that person?)
The bond that develops between Bhairavi and Prasanna was extremely progressive for its time, and remains so even in the present, in an India still averse to acknowledging that women who are mothers are also sexual and romantic beings. After her initial reluctance to reciprocate his feelings, Bhairavi too finds herself drawn to Prasanna, and is reassured by the intensity of his commitment to her. The writing and acting generated an unmistakable chemistry between the two.
Twenty-six years after Apoorva Raagangal challenged conservative viewers by depicting an older-woman-younger-man romance in which the couple ultimately part ways, no doubt to assuage the same conservatives, Farhan Akhtar debuted as a director with the pathbreaking Hindi film Dil Chahta Hai (meaning: The Heart Desires), which too teased the subject but skirted all-out rebellion.
Akhtar avoided giving the older woman, played by Dimple Kapadia, and the younger man, played by Akshaye Khanna, a conventional happily ever after. Towards this end, he killed off Kapadia’s character in the script. This writing choice, in a film that was positioned as hip and with it, and came out over a quarter of a century after Apoorva Raagangal, further underlines the magnitude of Balachander’s defiance in the 1970s.
Keeping this in mind might help us understand the decision to give Bhairavi’s arc a mawkish, ultra-traditionalist conclusion. Late in Apoorva Raagangal, her previous lover, played by Rajinikanth, returns. Despite his earlier betrayal and despite receiving what could be considered his ‘blessing’ for her relationship with Prasanna, when he dies she wipes the kumkumam off her forehead, signifying that she now considers herself a widow and intends to lead a life of renunciation, in a bow to one of the worst among India’s oppressive cultural practices. She is then shown leaving with Ranjani and without Prasanna, while he is reunited with his father.
This twist in the finale could be interpreted as having been driven by commercial considerations rather than as an indicator of Balachander's own inclinations, but the casting in Apoorva Raagangal tells a somewhat different story.
According to multiple sources, Srividya was just a year older than Haasan. She also looked as youthful as he did. Yet, she was selected for the role of Prasanna’s supposedly older amour. On the other hand, for the older-man-younger-woman relationship, Balachander picked a veteran male actor, Sundarrajan, who was not only over two decades senior to Jayasudha, who played Ranjani, but also looked old enough to be her father.
Legacy of Apoorva Raagangal, 50 Years Later
Commercial cinema across Indian languages by and large continues to view middle-aged and elderly women actors as less sexually desirable than young women (or entirely unattractive), while male stars are deemed to be eternally hot and perennially cool. This is reflected in the very limited number of stories that come to our screens in which women hook up with men who are even a few years younger.
The mindset is also evident from the fact that powerful male superstars in all Indian film industries persistently get women actors who are junior to them by two, three and even four decades, to play their girlfriends and wives (and even their sisters), pointedly steering clear of their female peers, while these men themselves most often play characters whose on-screen age is far removed from the actor’s real age.
In contemporary India, where a significant number of voices are increasingly being raised against such age-inappropriate and gender-prejudiced casting, some writers have begun to incorporate weak explanations or self-deprecating jokes into their scripts to justify these choices.
The ageism towards women artistes remains, nonetheless. In that sense, the casting in Apoorva Raagangal 50 years back does not stand out. It is particularly disappointing though, since it is at odds with the point apparently being conveyed by the story of Bhairavi and Prasanna.
Apart from its uncommon subject, Apoorva Raagangal is highly regarded for Balachander’s evolved storytelling. In an interview to The Hindu’s Gowri Ramnarayan in 2002, producer-director Mani Ratnam credited Balachander, along with other stalwarts Sridhar, Bharathiraja and Mahendran “for weaning the audience away from theatricality”. Ratnam specifically pointed to a sequence in Apoorva Raagangal in which “the shadow of the woman upstairs drying her hair falls across the path of the rebellious young man sneaking out of the house. It is enough to stop him. This scene could have been dramatic, with lot of dialogue. Instead you get a silent visual.”
Apoorva Raagangal contained several memorable scenes. One of the most well-remembered among them had a drunken man talking to his own shadow and throwing a bottle at it. None of this, nor even the multiple awards that it won, is sufficient cause to sweep the film’s conservative or mindless plot points under the carpet. Such as the fact that Prasanna’s love for Bhairavi translates not only into his embrace of music, which of course is touching, but also in his move to ultimately give up activism.
Five years after Apoorva Raagangal’s release, in Varumayin Niram Sivappu (The Colour of Poverty is Red), Balachander had Haasan playing a short-tempered idealist alongside the great Sridevi. By then the writer-director had seemingly invested greater thought into his concerns about the impracticality of unthinking revolution, and wrapped up his script with a far more credible, sensible, socially desirable and politically conscious resolution.
As it happens, Varumayin Niram Sivappu also featured a fabulous duet between its protagonists: in the charmingly conceptualised Sippi Irukkuthu, Haasan’s and Sridevi’s characters take each other’s thoughts forward in an endearing fashion, and compose a song in real time as they sing.
Sippi Irukkuthu rivals one of Apoorva Raagangal’s most unforgettable scenes, in which Balachander had sparks flying between Bhairavi and Prasanna though they were not even in the same room for the most part. This comes after Prasanna, who had declared early in the film that he hates music, learns to play the mridangam. He hears Bhairavi singing in the shower at one point and responds on the percussion instrument.
The lure of his beats is so strong, that she keeps singing. This jugalbandi between them continues for a while before she, unable to hold herself back, runs out without getting fully dressed, to see for herself who is accompanying her song so effectively. If sexual chemistry were to be assigned a defining background score, then this passage in Apoorva Raagangal should be it.
Ultimately, the palpable fire between Bhairavi and Prasanna—and Balachander’s keenness to celebrate this fire half a century back—is what makes Apoorva Raagangal as relevant today as it was back then.
(Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She can be reached at @annavetticad on Twitter, at @annammvetticad on Instagram, and at AnnaMMVetticadOfficial on Facebook. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)