Sajjanpur is a modern-day, hovering-on-the-edge-of-prosperity Indian ‘gaon’, where ‘bijli’ and ‘pani’ have made inroads, as well as ‘kutcha’ roads and rattling buses. But illiteracy is still rampant. Which is why Mahadev (Shreyas), the village’s only ‘padha likha’ young fellow, hangs up a shingle under a ‘bargad’ tree, and makes a living writing letters. And reading them out, also for a charge.
All kinds of people wash up under that tree: a loony aunt (Ila Arun) worrying about her ‘manglik’ niece (Divya), a lovelorn wife (Amrita) waiting to hear from her husband, away for four years in Bambai, a local ‘neta’ (Yashpal) who can easily pass off as a goon, a compounder (Ravi) in love with a pretty widow (Rajeshwari).
Welcome to Sajjanpur stays quirky and engaging even when the pace flags, and the rural accents turns faux, because of the felt screenplay and superbly robust, earthy dialogues by Ashok Mishra (this is a U/A film). The fact that the village is really a set is evident too, but you overlook it all when you see how skillfully Benegal brings up the ills that beset us still, after all these years. If a girl is unlucky, marry her off to a dog. If a eunuch stands for election, get rid of her.
But none of these ‘issues’ are in your face, and the film is saved from becoming the sort of dreaded preachy treatises that the director has been delivering of late. And a large part of that has to do with Shreyas Talpade, who wears his writer-of-letters-and-arbiter-of-lives role like a second skin: comforter of the lonely wife, his thoughts lead him astray, but his heart stays steadfast. But the real hero of the film is the village and the way it melds the past and the present: the profusion of all the Rams (Ram Ashrey, Ram Khilavan, Ram Singh), the references to Sita, and ‘Kalyug’, as well as the acknowledgment that a cell phone text message is also a letter!
The village had all but disappeared from Hindi cinema. Welcome to Sajjanpur.