Kashino Dikro (1979)

Debut and sole feature by theatre director and actor Madia, revitalising a Gujarati cinema inaugurated by Rathod’s FFC-supported Kanku (1969). The sentimental melodrama adapted from a noted writer’s story by Gujarat’s two leading stage personalities, Madia and Joshi, tells of Kashi (Ragini) who raises her husband’s (Desai) adolescent younger brother (Rajiv). The young man dies on his wedding night of snakebite. His widowed bride Rama (Bhaduri) is later raped by Kashi’s husband and becomes pregnant. Kashi saves the family’s and Rama’s ‘honour’ by pretending to be pregnant herself and adopting the child as her own. Kashi dies in the end as an icon of saintly motherhood. The rather slow moving narrative promotes a conservative notion of Gujarat’s brahminical joint family culture.