22 June 1897

Poona was visited by the pestilence of bubonic plague which took a heavy toll of life. But the plague had another indirect and far-reaching consequence on the politics of the country. The behaviour of the military which was called out to deal with the situation arising from the pestilence caused great indignation.

On 22 June 1897, British officer Charles Walter Rand Assistant Collector of Pune and Chairman of the Special Plague Committee, Pune, and British Army officer Lieutenant Charles Egerton Ayerst, were assassinated on the Ganeshkhind road, Pune, on their way back from a Government house party celebrating the Diamond Jubilee anniversary of the coronation of Queen Victoria.

C. W. Rand of the ICS was appointed to take charge of the plague control measures and had successfully contained the epidemic; but his methods of evacuating the people, of fumigating their dwellings, and burning the contaminated articles, evoked tremendous hatred amongst certain sections of the society, which led to his assassination.

The climax scene is the shooting after the midnight party finished, the carriages started moving out of the Government House, one of the boys in that group watched from outside the gate. As Rand came out, he gave the signal. Another boy began running with the carriage. As he reached the spot where Damodar, Balkrishna, and others were waiting, he shouted to them 'Gondya ala re! (Gondya has come)'. Balkrishna jumped on the carriage and shot the occupant. But there was a mistake. It was Ayerst whom he had killed. They realised their mistake. When Rand's carriage came to the spot, Damodar climbed on it and shot Rand. Ayerst was killed on the spot, and Rand died in hospital on 3 July 1897.[1][2]

The film is based on true life events leading up to, and the consequences of, the assassination of Charles Walter Rand, Assistant Collector of Pune and Chairman of the Special Plague Committee, Pune, and British Army officer Lt Charles Egerton Ayerst.[3] Ayerst was Rand's military escort[4] on 22 June 1897 by the Chapekar brothers – Damodar Hari, Vasudev Hari, and Balkrishna Hari and Mahadeo Vinayak Ranade, Khando Vishnu Sathe a schoolboy was charged as a co-conspirator and sentenced to 10 years rigorous imprisonment.[5]

Film's director and producer Nachiket Patwardhan

The film was the directorial debut of Jayoo and Nachiket Patwardhan, commissioned by the National Film Development Corporation of India (NFDC) on a shoestring Rupees 350,000 budget. Jayoo Patwardhan scouted for locations in Wai and Pune for the period look, poring over scores of photographs obtained by her grandfather, and spending months researching the details. The film was shot entirely on locations in Pune, Wai and Mumbai in March and April 1979. The co-director considers the film "a solid piece of history with huge archival value". Vijay Tendulkar its dialogue writer considered that "the film is significant because it shows the way history needs to be treated in cinema – in a deglam manner where martyrs are also shown as human beings", and judged the effort to be stupendous given the tight budget and other limitations of the time. "The dialogues I wrote were brief and simple, just like the script demanded," felt Tendulkar.[6]

The credits for the film are as follows:[1]

• Script: Nachiket Patwardhan
• Screenplay: Shankar Nag, Nachiket Patwardhan
• Dialogues: Vijay Tendulkar
• Production Team:
  • Sadanand Borse
  • Dilip Limaye
  • Gangaram
  • Makrand More
  • Prasad Purandare
• Assistants:
  • Rekha Sabnis (Script, Continuity)
  • Dinesh Mehta (Camera)
  • Kalshikar (Sound)
  • Karekar (Make-up, Costumes)
  • Islam (Editing)
  • Bhalekar (Equipment)
• Sound Recordist: Vinay Shrivastav
• Music Director: Anand Modak
• Editor: Madhu Sinha
• Art Direction, Costumes: Jayoo Patwardhan
• Cameraman: Navroze Contractor
• Direction: Nachiket Patwardhan and Jayoo Patwardhan

Most of the performers in the film belonged to Theater Academy, Pune.[8] The cast of the film is as follows:[1]

• Damodar Chapekar: Prabhakar Patankar.
• Vasudev Chapekar: Udayan Dixit.
• Hari Vinayak Chapekar: Vasudev Palande.
• Dwarka Hari Chapekar: Shanta Jog.
• Daughters-in-law : Arundhatti Rao, Sujal Watve, Dipali Kulkarni.
• Govindmama: Satish Khare.
• Ranade: Sadanand Borse.
• Apte: Shrikant Gadre.
• Dutta Bhuskute: Suresh Bhasale.
• Ganesh Dravid: Jairam Hardikar.
• Ramchandra Dravid: Sanjiv Ambika.
• Nilu Dravid: Vikas Deshpande.
• Havaldar Rama Pandu: Mukund Chitale.
• Walter Rand: John Irving.
• Bal Gangadhar Tilak : Sadashiv Amrapurkar.
• Inspector Brewin: Rod Gilbert.
  Supported by:
  Ulrich Merkel, Mervin Popplstone, Mihir Thatte, Shri Pendse, Pramod Kale, Harry Falk, Father Lederle, Mathew Manning, Shirish More, Suhas Kulkarni, Kishore Joshi, Shirish Bodhani, Subhash Awchat, Zareer Reporter, Robert Manning, Anand Hagir, Peter Saylas, Frank and Dipa Handrich, Shaila Joshi, Dilip Limaye, Bali Awasthee, Priti Limaye, Jim Benson, Guy de la Chevalerie and others.
  The character of Balkrishna Chapekar was portrayed by Ravindra Mankani. It was his first film. Then a student of College of Engineering, Pune, he was spotted by directors on stage there. Mankani has said that "It was a learning experience for all of us, and the film launched my acting career". "It was a straight shot of nine minutes and 57 seconds without any retakes simply because we could not afford to waste footage," Mankani has been quoted recalling his debut shot.[6]

The film was released on its 25th anniversary, by Rudraa Home Video in its 'Modern Classic' series on 22 June 2005, VCDs with English subtitles and each original VCD. It is listed under Best of Marathi cinema.[1]

• Calcutta '80: Regional Film Festival, April 1980
• Trivandrum, Kerala: Regional Film Festival, October 1980
• International Film Festivals at:
  • La Rochelle, France, June 1980
  • Montreal, Canada, August 1980
  • Mannheim, West Germany, October 1980

The book One Hundred Indian Feature Films: An Annotated Filmography, calls the film, made by the Patwardhans, practising architects, a leaf out of history more as an exercise in cinema than in patriotism, faithful in every detail and structurally controlled, an unusual attempt at bringing a new visual perception into the mechanisms of film making. It finds the faces, mostly from Marathi stage, powerful in their authenticity, chiselled of grim determination, with firelight dancing on them, rugged stone walls, skirting narrow paths, the pillared inner courtyards of traditional dwellings, all into place in an intensely moving dramatic experience.[9]

Gokulsing et al. write in their book Popular Indian Cinema, that the film cinematises a violent incident in Indian history, the determination of a group of Brahmin youths to challenge two of the elements of British imperialism – the English language and Christianity, the killing of Rand and events before and its aftermath.[10] Mukta Rajadhyaksha, Mumbai based theatre and media critic, writing in The Times of India, considers this film an honourable exception amid the degeneration that Marathi cinema went through after its golden age, the decades of the 50s and 60s. She feels that the film should have won the Golden Lotus for best film, but did not as Marathi cinema, unlike cinema from Bengal and the South lacked a powerful lobby at the national level.[11] Namrata Joshi writing for Outlook opines that commercial Marathi cinema did not benefit from arthouse films made by filmmakers like Jabbar Patel (Sinhasan, Umbartha), Jayoo and Nachiket Patwardhan (22 June 1897), Vijaya Mehta (Smriti Chitre), Amol Palekar (Bangarwadi), Sumitra Bhave and others.[12]

film.at writes that while the Indian independence movement is known in the West only in connection with Mahatma Gandhi, the film tells one of the most important chapters of the early armed independence attempts in India.[8] Spicevienna.org considers the film a modern classic of Indian cinema[13]

• The film has been included in the book One Hundred Indian Feature Films: An Annotated Filmography, a representative selection from the first Indian talkies to the present day (1988).[9]
• The film has been included in the selected list of Indian films and videos in the US Library of Congress. This collection is included in the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress. The Library describes this collection as one of its richest and most interesting. This collection consists of ninety feature films and one hundred short films.[14]

The film has been a winner of a couple of State and National Awards[1]

• 22 June 1897 at IMDb