Every year, Ganesh Chaturthi comes and all the pandals begin to play Ganpati film songs. Not that there are as many significant songs associated with the deity on screen and which explains why we still play the same old ‘Deva ho deva’ from the 1980 release Humse Badhkar Kaun or ‘Murti Ganesh ki, andar daulat desh ki’ from Takkar where Jeetendra, Sanjeev Kumar and Vinod Mehra expose the villains who have hidden the temple treasures inside the idols placed inside the truck.
While the mainstream filmmakers have always looked for song situations to project the festival, our serious filmmakers looked upon the celebration as an excuse to infuse drama and the best example of this is director Shyam Benegal’s 1981 release Kalyug. It was the first film to portray the immersion procession in all its glory where hero/ Shashi Kapoor is caught in the festival traffic and the chaos on the street reflects his personal turbulence. Sunil Dutt, another sensitive director, projected an emotional moment in the 1983 film Dard Ka Rishta. Inspired from his personal life it told the story of a father-daughter relationship, where Baby Khushboo is battling with cancer and Sunil Dutt brings the deity to the hospital.
To be continued