Simple mirrors reflect complex inner tensions, while the lamp at the door with its inscription Ghar Amar Mansi Ka (the home of Amar and Mansi) and a smiling photograph of the couple mock their current state of disenchantment. The set design, mostly of interiors, includes props that acquire significance in the course of the film. I leave your house, father, I am going to my beloved’s country. Your courtyard is now like a mountain, and the threshold, a foreign country. The four (coffin) bearers lift my palanquin. Echoing the couple’s heartbeats, off screen singers ( Jagjit and Chitra Singh) tenderly perfect a rendition of the classical song Babul Mora: They remember the poetry of their courtship, the resistance of Mansi’s father to their marriage and the aggression of an earlier anniversary night spent in the same room that now closes in on them.Īmbient sounds are blended into their claustrophobic, insular world. Sitting up in bed on probably their second anniversary night, Amar and Mansi stare vacantly, at times violently at each other. The pace of the film is slow, its tone understated, its mood reflective, almost brooding. Astonishingly for an Indian film, there is no appeal made to the audience to love or even like the characters. There is a less obvious, intangible gnawing at their innards – the loss of the khwab and the khwaish (dreams and desires) in the daily grind. It is not that Amar’s involvement with an intelligent female colleague becomes the last straw leading to final combustion. It is not that Mansi resents picking up her husband’s clothes or that she feels martyred in staying at home to look after their child. Rajesh Khanna and Sharmila Tagore in Aavishkar (1974). We then enter the lives of Amar and Mansi, an unambitious middle class couple once lost in love and now disillusioned in marriage. A soulful montage includes the intertwining of their real names and a lilting melody sung by Manna Dey floats over the sequence. Nostalgia for the hit film pair of the late 1960s and early ‘70’s ( Aradhana, Amar Prem, Daag) is stirred up in the opening credits of Aavishkar.
The difference was that now, for possibly the only time in his meteoric career, Khanna was given the scope to offer more than the signature mannerisms that his audience had once loved and then loved to hate.Īavishkar also brought to the screen Khanna’s oft-cast screen partner Sharmila Tagore in an older unbelievably uncoquettish avatar, her dimples the only reminder of An Evening in Paris (1967). The cleft in his chin was still deep and his hands were still the hands of an artist. While this Rajesh Khanna still had zits that defied makeup, a spreading girth and bad hair days, he also had the same persuasive smile and the soft voice of his superstar years. In 1974, when the Rajesh Khanna phenomenon had begun to wane, director Basu Bhattacharya’s Aavishkar (Discovery) unearthed a new and older version of the man who once was king.