Year: 1980

Director: Sai Paranjape

Cast: Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana Aazmi

Music: Kanu Roy

 

True to its title Sparsh (meaning touch), this movie literally touches you with its sensitivity. Long before Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black portrayed the battle of a visually impaired and physically challenged girl, Sai Paranjape’s Sparsh had cast a piercing look at the dark world of visually impaired people bringing forth not only their uplifting fight against disability but  also voicing their real and unreal fears and frustrations.

 

Aniruddha (Naseeruddin Shah) is the principal of a school for blind children. Being blind himself, his main grouse against the ‘normal’ people is the pity they feel towards physically challenged. “We want your help, not your pity”- is his constant rebuke. Accidentally, he meets Kavita (Shabana) - a young woman who has shunned herself from the world after her husband’s death. Giving in to Aniruddha’s idealist ideas, Kavita starts teaching the blind children, in the process finding the lost zeal and zest for life. She realizes that despite their physical handicap, how such children are trying to make the best of their lives and how much happiness and brightness she can bring into their darkened world just by giving her time and company to them.

 

Naturally Aniruddha and Kavita are drawn together and decide to marry. A casual remark by Kavita that she is doing it for it is the right thing to do and a couple of other incidents, make Aniruddha rethink about the marriage. Always very touchy about his ability to manage his own affairs without anybody’s help, he just loathes the thought of becoming dependent on a ‘normal’ woman who might be marrying him just as a sacrifice. In reality, even Kavita is unable to come to terms with the thought that she has fallen in love with another man and is trying to color her feelings as some kind of a social duty to cover up the guilt of letting go her late husband’s memory. So metaphorically Sparsh becomes a story of two people groping in the dark and unable to come to terms with that. Will they both be able to ‘see’ beyond their prejudiced ‘vision’?

 

Sai Paranjape’s superb direction keeps the film flowing. The blind-school sequences are touching and never take the dry preachy documentary tones. How Naseeruddin portrays the blind person’s idealism and pride on one side and suppressed anger and inner vulnerability on the other is a lesson in great acting. Azmi's role of a woman learning to take her life into a new direction is complex and beautifully executed.

 

Social consciousness, emotional complexity and subtle story-telling gives Sparsh a must-see status.