Balraj Sahni
Just as I was settling down to write a review of a book on Bollywood films, I came across this post about the great actor Balraj Sahni, among the last of the leftists in modern Hindi cinema. (You can count the names of the living radicals in Bollywood today on the fingers of one hand.) Siddharth Varadarajan has provided a link to a speech that Sahni gave at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1972. What we get here in this speech, from the man who had portrayed the rickshaw puller in Bimal Roy’s “Do Bigha Zameen,” is a meditation on freedom in everyday life. It is also a call for social justice and honesty.
(When you go to Siddharth’s site, read this essay about the Bengal tiger in Belgrade zoo and his robust polemic against Thomas Friedman.)
but sahni was a different kind of leftist than the armchair leftists in academia today - i take no names. did you notice how little chest thumping there was in his speech?
Comment by vijay chauhan — April 26, 2007 @ 3:49 pm