Lockdown classics: Looking back at ‘Sparsh’, a pioneering film on the specially-abled

The year 1980 was crucial for Naseeruddin Shah. It was the year when two of his career’s most decisive films, Saeed Mirza’s Albert Pinto Ko

Gussa Kyon Aata Hai and Sai Paranjpye’s Sparsh were released within months of each other.

While in Mirza’s film the indomitable Naseer played a very angry member of a minority community, in Sparsh he again played an extremely marginalised character from another minority community.

The community of the blind.

Unlike Albert Pinto who was perpetually angry, Anirudh Parmar in Sparsh, loses his cool only when reminded of his physical specialness.

Back then, blindness was known as a handicap.And Anirudh steeped in a righteous pride won’t bear with the ‘h’ word.What makes Sai Paranjpye’s Sparsh such a special film about a specially-abled character is Anirudh’s stubborn refusal to be slotted as a victim.

So dogged is Anirudh in circumventing sympathy and even empathy from those around him that he ends up practising a reverse kind of disability-oriented isolation where the victim appears to want desperately to appear ‘normal’ and so anxious to belong to the mainstream of society that he ends up making those around him feel acutely conscious of how to not allow the specially- abled person to feel disabled for even a second.

Anirudh’s predicament is never sentimentalised. He has a male assistant to help in the blind school where Aniruddh is the principal , and at home where the young assistant makes tea and does sundry chores unobtrusively for Anirudh.He, the blind man who cannot ‘see’ how difficult it is to initiate any emotional or verbal interaction with him,meets a grieving widow Kavita(Shabana Azmi) who has cut herself out of all normal activities.

Both Anirudh and Kavita are isolated by their individual predicament. Who is to say who is more isolated?Sparsh is about two fringe people tentatively reaching out to one another.Actually it’s Kavita who keeps pushing into Anirudh’s voluntary isolation, while he fears losing his independence.

When a blind colleague(Om Puri)’s wife dies leaving the colleague helpless, Anirudh decides to call off his engagement with Kavita. She accepts the snub without complaint. But then he grows even more protective about his isolation, and asks Kavita to stop her association with the school for the blind where he is the principal because according to him, she makes the blind people in the school uncomfortable with her normal sight.

Here’s where Kavita’s only friend(played by the feisty Sudha Chopra) intervenes and helps Anirudh ‘see’ the truth about his blindness towards Kavita’s feelings.

“Between the two of you I wonder who’s really blind.It’s not you who needs her.She needs you,” explains the friend.

Throughout the delicately threaded film, we see Naseeruddin Shah not looking blind at all. The National award for best actor that he received for Sparsh was a meager reward for what is arguably the best portrayal of a blind person and his inner- world in the history of world cinema.And I include such universally-acknowledged portrayals of the sightless as Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark, Rani Mukherjee in Black, Kimura Tatsuya in Love & Honor and Joren Seldeslachts in Blind.

Naseer surpasses all these timeless portrayals of the sightless. His performance is far superior to the film. Sai’s film seems to have suffered from a lack of budget. But it makes up for the rough edges with its unaccented message on humanism.

“Mr Mittal on whom my character was based was the principal of the school we were shooting in. If you ever saw him, you would have seen the most beautiful eyes on him. No one could tell he’s blind. The way he walked, lighted a cigarette, conducted himself was like a completely normal sighted man. In fact, Mr Mittal’s proud self-declaration was, ‘Why do you call me disabled? I am just differently abled.’ That was the first time I heard the term ‘differently abled’ and so many years ago!

He felt he could do anything except drive a car. He hoped someday, there would be a car that the blind could drive“ says Naseeruddin Shah.

Some of the scenes with the children at the blind school are truly heartwarming.At one point when Shabana Azmi buys a candle off a blind boy whose friend is shown to be teasing him about his unsold creation, the overwhelmed boy reciprocates her kindness by saying, ‘Didi,your saree is lovely.’

There is a quaint subplot about the rivalry between two boys at the blind school, one blind the other with normal vision, who fall out when Shabana Azmi seems to favour the blind boy. The one that can see begins to wish himself blind just so that he could be treated equal to the boy who can’t see.

Sometimes the guilt of being normal around those who are exceptionally abled, can be a very tough burden to bear. Shabana’s struggle is a common occurrence in the lives of those have to live with people with special physical or emotional disorders. The struggle to keep the specially-abled individual’s ego away from injury weighs so constantly on the normally-abled individual’s mind that the relationship gets strained beyond repair.

It’s the theme of ‘seeing’ beyond the optical vision thatgives Sparsh that feeling of a film with infinite resonance.A lot of the material is roughly cut. One can see the struggle that went into putting together this brave film. But it holds together because of Naseer’s understated yet resounding performance. Not for a second does he appear blind. And that’s the highest form of acting being applied to Anurudh’s character.