The Hindu : National : She was gearing for meaningful cinema

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Apr 18, 2004

National

National

She was gearing for meaningful cinema

By K.V.S. Madhav

HYDERABAD, APRIL 17. Having played the glamour girl and the weepy, sacrificing wife for too long, she was all geared up for serious and meaningful Telugu cinema. Serious cinema in a film world dictated more by commercial considerations? It did not matter to her. If the genre was extinct in Tollywood, she decided to revive it by making one.

Close on the heels of her national award winning maiden Kannada production, Dweepa, directed by Girish Kasaravalli, Soundarya decided to reproduce the magic of meaningful cinema in Telugu and also act in it. Kamli, with the national award winning critic-turned-filmmaker, K.N.T. Sastry, wielding the megaphone, would have been her tribute to serious cinema in the Telugu tinsel world. But fate decided otherwise.

The film sets out to explore the plight of poverty-stricken women in the Lambadi tribal hamlets of Andhra Pradesh. Here, people sell their girl children to adoption agencies to keep the hearth burning. "Soundarya was an extremely forthcoming lady and wanted to make good cinema in Telugu. This was to be her way of thanksgiving to the Telugus who had made her what she was. And she wanted to do only those films that she firmly believed in," recalled Mr. Sastry who narrated all of a 100 stories to her.

Six months of scouring for stories later, she zeroed in on his documentary, Harvesting baby girls, which was made in the thick of the child adoption controversy in Andhra Pradesh, and stirred the collective conscience of the nation. "She was seized by the idea. The thought of a mother selling her girl child for a few hundred rupees moved her immensely."

In one of her last interviews, she said: "I am no feminist, but I believe that men and women are equal. I have always been impressed by the manner in which classical Indian poetry and the arts use elements of nature as a metaphor for the feminine principles. The character of the never-say-die lady in Dweepa and her indefatigable spirit despite being on the verge of displacement by a dam under construction influenced me to make the film. I am also making a Telugu film in which I have an offbeat role."

The reference apparently was to Kamli. "We dramatised the concept of child adoption and the predicament of the Lambada women, got the musical score ready and Soundarya even began rehearsing the script," Mr. Sastry recollected. Mita Vashist and Tanikella Bharani were to have played important roles in the film.

The coming elections pushed the launch of Kamli to May 24. "With Soundarya joining the Bharatiya Janata Party and campaigning extensively, she wanted the film to be launched after the elections," he recounted. "She was introduced to politics though she was not all that keen. She was so much into the film's concept that she even suggested that we change the name of the film as she did not want people to identify it with the symbol of the party she campaigned for," he said.

"Why do politicians have to put good people and good projects in jeopardy like this," the disappointed filmmaker faced with the Herculean task of finding a replacement for Soundarya, the actress and the producer, asks. Will they share the same passion for the subject Soundarya had, is what bothers the national award winning Telugu filmmaker.

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