Jis Desh Mein Ganga Rehta Hai (2000)

Jis Desh Mein Ganga Rehta Hai (2000)
Starring: Govinda, Sonali Bendre, Rinke Khanna
Director: Mahesh Manjrekar
Music Director: Anand Raaj Anand
Synopsis: Convoluted piece of drivel. Nonsensical and charmless and totally dire
Reviewed by: Faiz Khan

Jis Desh Mein Ganga Rehta Hai (2000)
Starring: Govinda, Sonali Bendre, Rinke Khanna
Director: Mahesh Manjrekar
Music Director: Anand Raaj Anand
Synopsis: Convoluted piece of drivel. Nonsensical and charmless and totally dire
Reviewed by: Faiz Khan

Mahesh Manjrekar has been a busy man since Vaastav last year. In quick succession he has made Nidaan, a film about AIDS, Astitva, an intelligent drama about a woman's identity, and now this—a film which I honestly struggle to categorise.

Ganga (Govinda) lives in a village populated by people every bit as simple-minded as himself. Very little actually happens beyond the occasional song and dance, while Saanwli (Sonali Bendre) quietly pines away as his sweetheart. The trouble is that Ganga is so astonishingly dim that he barely seems capable of recognising love when it stares him in the face.

Why is it that Bollywood so often mistakes simplicity for outright dementia?

Eventually, Saanwli's parents arrive to ask for Ganga's hand in marriage. At this crucial moment, however, Ganga's parents announce that they cannot possibly consent because they are not, in fact, his real parents.

Cue the inevitable flashback.

Ganga was actually born into a wealthy city family (Shakti Kapoor and Himani Shivpuri), whose young son was struck down by a mysterious illness. After conventional medicine fails, a mystical vaid confidently announces that he alone possesses the cure.

His extraordinary prescription?

The five-year-old boy must spend the next twenty to twenty-five years living among sheep and goats, while no blood relative must come anywhere near him.

It all sounds as though poor Ganga has fallen victim to the wicked fairy from Sleeping Beauty, banished from his kingdom and condemned to spend decades in exile among livestock.

Accordingly, a childless village couple is found to raise him.

Years later, the prescribed period has finally elapsed and Ganga's biological parents decide they would now like their son back. He is whisked off to the city, where he meets his real family for the first time.

His sophisticated brothers and sisters are less than thrilled by the arrival of this rustic country bumpkin, but Ganga simply ambles through life, blissfully unaware that everyone considers him an idiot.

He also meets Tina (Rinke Khanna), and after the obligatory barrage of "jahil gawaar" insults, the inevitable occurs.

The sophisticated city girl falls hopelessly in love with the village simpleton.

Meanwhile, poor Saanwli continues waiting faithfully back in the village.

How will Ganga resolve this impossible dilemma?

Will his real family finally accept him?

What about his foster parents?

And what becomes of poor Saanwli?

The answers, as anyone with even the faintest familiarity with Hindi cinema will already have guessed, unfold in entirely predictable fashion as the film ambles towards its thoroughly foreseeable conclusion.

Mahesh Manjrekar has made a complete dog's dinner of this film.

One is left wondering exactly what he was trying to achieve. Perhaps he simply wished to prove that he could handle every conceivable genre. If this was intended as a comedy, however, it fails spectacularly because it is so painfully unfunny that it actually hurts.

How the director of Astitva could follow such an intelligent film with something this crass and uninspired is difficult to comprehend.

The screenplay is unbelievably weak, and the entire production feels like a forgotten B-grade Jeetendra vehicle from the late 1960s or early 1970s.

In fact, that may be doing Jeetendra something of an injustice.

I found myself thinking of films like Banphool and countless similar melodramas.

To underline just how badly Manjrekar misjudges his audience, he even concludes the film with yet another song—as though anyone would still be sitting in the cinema waiting for it.

Govinda is utterly unable to inject any of his customary sparkle into the title role. In fact, the film is curiously devoid of everything that normally makes him watchable. Instead of appearing charmingly innocent, he simply comes across as a complete buffoon, and one is somehow expected to find this endearing.

I didn't.

Sonali Bendre could easily be mistaken for one of the trees in the background—beautifully upright, undeniably attractive, yet almost impossibly wooden. One only wishes those famous fangs of hers had something more substantial to sink into than yet another lifeless role.

Rinke Khanna, who only enters after the interval, is perfectly adequate. There is nothing particularly memorable about her performance, but she appears reasonably confident.

The music is largely ordinary, although a couple of the songs are attractively picturised.

Overall, this is an absolute dud—dull, tedious and astonishingly boring.

A more appropriate title might well have been Jis Desh Mein Gadha Rehta Hai.

The gadha, of course, refers not only to our hero, but also to all the donkeys like me who actually sat through the film.