Pehla Adhyay (1981)

Mathur’s debut is an avant-garde feature about Ravi (Dinesh Shakul), a young man from a small village who goes to Bombay University and finds himself unable to relate to life in the city. Unable to connect with the city, Ravi tries to establish contact with a fellow student but his sense of being ‘out of place’ remains until his pent-up anxieties and fears explode into a violent physical outburst and breakdown. The film ends on a cautious note of optimism as Ravi seems to recover. Mathur tries to make the lived and obscurely threatening sensations of displacement into the very substance of the film. He avoids the way questions of belonging are usually formulated in communitarian terms (religion, class, national or regional identity, etc.). The film was not released. Mathur’s next major film, made years later, was The Flying Bird (1989).