black

One of the accusations leveled against Hindi films is that it is relatively easy to spot obvious ripoffs from Western literary and Hollywood cinematic sources. My first encounter with a commercial Indian film was when I saw a flick in Delhi called Nishabd,an affair between an 18-year old Non-Resident Indian woman(Jiah Khan) holidaying in Kerala, and a married 60-year old photographer(the legendary Amitabh Bachchan).

If Vladimir Nabokov's novel-subsequently-turned-Stanley Kubrick film Lolita comes to mind, then you are absolutely right.

Fast-forward months later,in Fr.Nick Cruz's Asian Film class. Immediately after winding up the second part of Lagaan, another film from India is fed into the DVD player. The first scenes unfolding in the big screen are not Lagaan's parched, sun-baked deserts of Gujarat and Rajasthan but in the old British hill station of Simla,where the skies are slate-gray and winter falls intermittenly. Mr.Debraj(Big B again)is an alcoholic, iconoclastic teacher of the deaf and blind with unconventional views on authority and convention. One day,an Anglo-Indian couple, the McNallys, approach him with an unusual problem. Their daughter, 8-year old Michelle,was an uncontrollable, accident-prone blind,deaf-mute inches away from being sent to an insane asylum.

Debraj proposes a drastic solution. After an unpleasant first encounter with the McNallys, Debraj forsakes his salary and other privileges,and isolates an uncooperative Michelle in order to teach her proper manners and table etiquette. Breaking in Michelle recalls the heartrendering education of Helen Keller(to whom Black is dedicated to in the film's preface),depicted in the 1962 film The Miracle Worker starring Anne Bancroft in her Academy-Award winning role as Annie Sullivan and Patty Duke as the young Keller.

Just as our class was absorbing the scene at the water fountain, the film was stopped midway,just like in Lagaan.