The Naxalites

The Naxalites

Director Khwaja Ahmed Abbus

Producer Khwaja Ahmed Abbus

Music Prem Dhawan

Starting Mithun Chakraborty, Smita Patil,Nana Paliskar,Jalal Aaga,Tinu Anand, Dina Pathak, Imtiaz Khan,Dilip Raj,Pinchoo Kapoor,Yunis Parvej,Jaharlal Kaur

Music: Prem Dhawan

Officially Release: 1980

Language: Hindi and Bengali

Review by Dr Usman Latif Khawaja

K.A ABBAS is a true visionary and his movies reflect the deprivations and vicissitudes of Indian masses, so don’t watch this if you don’t have stomach to watch a man being tortured as an ashtray by the cops with cigarette butts, famished peasants wondering in the lush green Bengal as they drop dead, a man selling his mother on the street as a whore, an orphan living in a grave in a cemetery, for these are the soulful but wrathful images which fill the screen in a requiem for the great Bengali nation in quest for their aspirations and deliverance in this veracious drama.

But do not expect sheer pity or divulging melodrama, as there is a genius at work here who does not want sympathy for his proud characters who want to shake the yokes of centuries of

oppression but rather a passion for their dreams, which makes this a celebration for humanity. For this is the man who made the prestigious Dharti Ke Laal, the best account of the Bengal famine, as he created Shehar Or Sapna and Asman Mahal, two authentic classics of Hindi cinema, what a pity that intellect is not commercially palatable in art, so he only creates money spinners when he writes for the great showman Raj Kapoor, as Bobby and Awara are both penned by the same man. Unlike the eighties movies Mein Azaadhoun on a similar theme which become extremely melodramatic and sentimental at time.

This demonstrates that cult classic like Naxalite should never be remade into a political travesty.

But this is his final offering and it follows the trail of the infamous Naxal Bari movement which was crushed but couldn’t be finished by th...