Debutant Hindi filmmaker Prem Prakash Modi spoke to Kritika Dua about Panchlait and his penchant for author Phanishwar Nath Renu
When Phanishwar Nath Renu’s work Mare Gaye Gulfam was reprised on the silver screen for the first time, the result was National Award winner Teesri Kasam starring Raj Kapoor and Waheeda Rehman by the acclaimed filmmaker Basu Bhttacharya. But many promises would have been made and broken during the 50 years since the movie was made before the another director has decided to put the author, who brought the silent regional voices into the mainstream Hindi literature, again under a spotlight.
Prem Prakash Modi has picked up Renu’s work, Panchlight to craft a movie. Panchlight is a kerosene lamp with paraffin and a hand pump which is used to pressurise, to light it up, in older times. It plays an integral part in the villagers’ life and possessing one is a mark of honour. The film revolves around a specific village community — Mahato Tola and how they acquire the coveted Panchlait after much ado and the chain of incidents which lead upto it.
On reprising the novel Panchlight into an eponymously named Hindi film, Modi said, “Actually, I read the story when I was in class 9th or 10th. I belong to a very small place, and every time I read this story, I always connected with it. Phanishwar Nath Renu is a renowned and credited writer, and when I became a part of the film industry, I had already decided to do a film on this story.” Renu has written 63 stories, and the one thing about him that always pulled Modi towards him was his simplicity which was reflected in his work. “There was a regional flavour too, which I could relate to. So, even when I became an actor, I knew I wanted to do a film on this someday.” He started his career as an assistant director with Aparna Sen and has also worked with Tapan Sinha, Anjun Dutt, Gul Bahar Singh, Shyaman and Jalan, Indranil Goswami among others.
Often, people in the industry face problems in finding producers for content-driven films, especially if no big name is associated with the movie and this venture was no different. Modi said that the most difficult task was finding a producer to back such a story. “I finally found the producer which took eight years and now I am able to bring this story to the big screen. One will see the simplicity and religious background of our culture in this movie. As a director, I feel it is my responsibility to make a movie that has a social message and tells something relevant to the audience about our roots and the diversity of our culture.”
This is his his second directorial outing after Arjun:Kalimpong E Sitaharan, a Bengali film. Modi gravitates towards literary works. Arjun was based on a novel by Samaresh Mazumder and featured Sabyasachi Chakraborty, Dipankar Dey, Churni Ganguly and others.
He has not made any major changes to Renu’s novel Panchlight to retain the authentic flavour “I have made an original movie. I haven’t made a lot of changes as I wanted to do justice to his work. My scriptwriter, Rakesh Kumar Tripathi and I had a lot of discussions about how to go forward and our main idea was to keep the content intact and put our interpretations to it. There are no big changes in it; it is our work on the original story. But every time a piece of literature is picked up to be adapted as a film, some things are bound to be tweaked, but we did our best to stick to the story,” he said. The movie will also have an announcement in the beginning which would say that if anyone finds fault with the script, it would be the film maker’s fault and not the influential writer Renu’s.
The story is simple: a village has different communities, and every community has kerosene lamp, except for one. They suffer from inferiority complex and crowdfund to get it. They do buy one but none of them knows how to light it up, which creates an interesting situation. The protagonist of the story knows how to use it, but he was shunned from the community because he fell in love with a girl, and her parents complained to the village head about it. Another reason why he was shunned was because he refused to give donation for the kerosene lamp. The story then proceeds when the villagers asks the protagonist to return and try to bribe him by cancelling his punishment.
Renu originally wrote, towards the end of the story that the brightness of this light lit up the village, and it is through this light that we try to fight the casteism in India.
Talking about the challenges that came his way, Modi said, “Besides finding a producer, we found a real location and went there. We had to shoot in front of people who had never seen a shooting before and that too was a big challenge.”1
On filtering the actors, he said, “I think, my grooming in the film industry has always been such that I have always been associated with serious filmmakers like Aparna Sen. Every time we have created a character, a vision of him/her has first appeared in our mind and for the characters of this movie, I knew the kind of look I needed. The main cast of the movie was already decided from the very beginning and for others, we held auditions and then shortlisted them.”
But will the story of a kerosene lamp strike a chord with the hip audience of todayIJ “literature never gets old. It needs to be read, and every parent needs to inculcate it in their children. Nowadays, most of the movies that are being made are from English literature or from contemporary Indian writers like Chetan Bhagat but I think our desi Indian flavour and Hindi literature needs to be brought to the front. I think when people will watch it, they will be able to connect with it, and they themselves will say that there is a need for such kind of films to be made more often. We can see our culture and its roots kept intact in this movie.”
Gauging from the trailer, the film has an old-world-charm and portrays villagers in an authentic manner. “I think it is because we took a real location for the shoot. We shot the entire film 60 km interior from Deoghar in Jharkhand and we found our perfect location there. I myself belong to Jharkhand. I researched about the costumes a lot, our entire costume team and we worked hard on it.”