Sharapanjara (1971)

The culmination of Kalpana’s long association with Kanagal (cf. Bellimoda, 1967; Gejje Pooje, 1970). The happily married Kaveri (Kalpana) becomes pregnant and suffers an attack of hysteria in which she recalls having gone to Nanjangud on a picnic with an unnamed man. She returns to the picnic spot and frantically searches for something she believes she ‘lost’ there. Her husband (Gangadhar) has her interned in an asylum and starts an affair with an office colleague (Leela). Released from the asylum, Kaveri finds that everyone keeps reminding her of her ‘insanity’, including the new cook (Shivaram), the neighbours, her father (Ashwath) and her mother-in-law. She eventually has to return to the hospital for the rest of her life. Kalpana’s spectacular performance and the film’s blatant but unacknowledged psychoanalytic dimension holds the story together. The conflict between virtue and unconscious desire is given a mythological dimension in the song Hadi nalaku varusha comparing Kaveri to Seeta returning from exile in the Ramayana. Kanagal’s neo-expressionist idiom is most in evidence in the scenes of Kaveri’s hysteric episode, the mysterious boyfriend’s presence being confined to the soundtrack only.