Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda (The Seventh Horse of the Sun) is a 1992 Indian Hindi film directed by Shyam Benegal. The movie is based on a novel written by Dharamvir Bharati of the same title. I am not sure about how much adaptation was done for the screen as the story is narrated in a non-linear style. It uses various techniques, a story inside the story, spatial and time discontinuities, and stories narrated in different threads with hook points to relate them.
Above all the story mixes facts and fiction and leaves the conclusion to the viewer also called an open-ended movie.
The story is enriched with so many beautiful characters played by some great actors. The movie does not have one central character, there are two narrators in the story but the importance is not given to them but rather to the characters they narrate.
The director uses different threads to develop the characters, the viewer comes to know the characters gradually with every story. I haven’t seen an Indian movie that has employed so many narration techniques. It keeps the viewer engrossed in the different stories, switching between fact and fiction.
At the end of the movie, I felt as if I was a kid and Benegal like my grandma told a fairy tale. You tend to believe everything when it is told, but after the story has ended and you look back at the story and say “that cannot be possible, it is not true”.
The movie comes together like a cloud formation and vanishes leaving you groping for the truth.
If you are a fan of good movies/literature/non-linear style stories and don’t mind off-beat movies, check out the movie don’t read the post anymore. For all those who will never see this movie here it is.
The story begins
The story starts with Raghubir Yadav in a modern art exhibition. He comes across this picture which reminds him of his mohalla (neighborhood) and his college days.
He starts narrating his days and starts talking about Manik Mullah (Rajit Kapur) a railway employee who was a great storyteller and how he and his friends would go there whenever they get free time and how Manik would tell them stories.
The movie now shifts to a flashback where young Raghubir Yadav and his friends discuss the current literature and romance. They ask Manik to tell them a romantic story in his own style. Manik starts the first story “Being true to one’s salt”.
Manik who is sitting in the window looks down at the next house and sees a cow tied to the shed and a girl walking towards the cow. He starts the story that when he was young they used to have a cow and the next-door neighbour girl used to frequently visit their house.
Even though Manik starts talking about his story, the main character becomes Jamuna (Rajeshwari Sachdev). Jamuna is kind of a romantic and dreamy character who is in love with another neighbor boy named Thanna.
Jamuna is lonely and spends time thinking about Thanna and reading romantic books like Devdas. Thanna is afraid of his father’s Mahesar Dalal and does not want to do anything against his will.
In this first story, you hear the voice of the father shouting to his son who is looking at Jamuna and there are also references to what kind of character he is, but you will never see who the person really is. In the next story, he is revealed as Amrish Puri.
Jamuna keeps talking about Thanna to Manik and slowly Manik and Jamuna fall in love. Jamuna later gets married to an older man.
At the end of the story, Manik and the gang start discussing the moral of the story in a humorous tone. When the gang asks more about the fate of Jamuna. He shows the horseshoe in the house and starts the next story “The Horseshoe”.
Jamuna married a rich zamindar who is childless, she often goes to the temples with a tanga (horse cart) driver Randhan and he promises her that if she wears a ring made out of horseshoe she will have a child.
Her frequent temple visits with Randhan bring her closer to him. Jamuna starts having an illicit relationship with Randhan and bears his child.
Again the gang starts discussing the moral of the story and they further enquire about what happened to the diff characters in the story. Manik starts the 3rd story. The 3rd story starts with the other side of the first story.
Now you see Amrish puri the father, the story moves ahead and joins the initial point of the first story when Manik meets Jamuna near the cowshed. The same story also starts describing the other women Lilly (Pallavi Joshi) and Satti (Neena Gupta). Lilly is chosen as the bride for Thanna.
Thanna has a child with Lilly and he dies in a train accident. The story also starts developing the character of Amrish puri as a womanizer.
Satti is a low-class soap maker living with her uncle Chaman Thakur. Mahesar Dalal makes advances toward Satti and she resists it. Suddenly there is nobody in Chaman Thakur’s house and a villager says that he saw Chaman Thakur driving a cart filled with his belongings and a body covered with white clothes.
The people conclude that probably Mahesar Dalal and Chaman Thakur have killed Satti.
The next day the gang again asks for more stories and Mulla starts the story of Lilly. Again a story discontinued in time. Manik and Lilly are in love. Lilly is about to get married to Thanna, Manik once again backs up and asks Lilly to forget him.
Lilly gets married to Thanna. The gang again discusses the story and someone says that Manik’s stories are plain and straight forward and he does not employ any technique in his stories.
Manik answers by saying that only people who do not have anything to say use techniques and he is a fan of improvisation and pure storytelling. He says he likes to make impromptu stories about any object that he sees and he likes Flaubert, Maupassant, and Chekov’s way of storytelling.
He narrates an incident with Chekov where he told a lady that “writing story is not hard. keep any object before me and I will weave a story around it”. Then one of the gang members challenges him to tell the story of Satti around a knife that is in Manik’s room.
Manik says he doesn’t have to make the knife as the center as it is, a very important part of the story and in fact, it is the same knife that Satti had when she met him the last time.
Manik starts the story of Satti. He frequents her place to help them with their soap business accounts. Manik and Satti kind of get close to each other. Mahesar Dalal befriends Chamman Thakur, buys him drinks, and gives him money to marry Satti.
Mahesar Dalal rapes Satti. Satti comes to Manik’s house escaping from her uncle and Mahesar Dalal and pleads with Manik to take her somewhere. Manik asks her to sit in another room and reports it to his brother. His brother brings Mahesar Dalal and Chamman Thakur, she fights them with the knife but is overpowered by the 2 and she is taken away by them.
The story ends with the previous scene in the third story where a villager narrates that he saw Chamman Thakur riding a cart with a body.
Again they start discussing the story and Manik says he regrets his decision of betraying Satti and after her death, his poetries are filled with morbid thoughts. Manik then says he has to go to work and the gang asks him to buy tea for everybody.
Manik agrees and on the way to the tea stall, Raghuvir Yadav says that when Manik was narrating the story he had a lot of imagination, he says he saw a rainbow and a cart being pulled by Mahesar Dalal with three children the children of Jamuna, Lilly, and Satti and the served legs of Chamman Thakur walking, etc. Manik after hearing it says that his ability to imagine is a gift and that he should reform his dreams into a story.
He goes on to say that stories are a medium to mold one’s dreams with reality to fulfill one’s own desires and stories are a strange mixture of reality and dreams. As he is talking about this to the gang some beggar woman asks for alms, Manik turns and is shocked.
It is Satti with a child and Chamman Thakur in a cart that she was pulling. Satti is also shocked looking at Manik and she backs off and runs to the cart .manik runs behind her into a fog. Raghuvir Yadav ends his narration by saying that he never saw Manik after that, but he has become a successful writer now.
As the movie ends, you are left with hundreds of questions about what is real and what is fiction. Did Manik invent the stories on the fly with the objects that he saw?. If it is true then what about Satti?
Manik’s confession that he likes Flaubert makes you realize that the Jamuna character has a resemblance to Madame Bovary, it again puts a question of what is real and what is fiction. when talking to Manik Lilly reference’s one of his characters called Jamuna which again adds to the confusion. If he was making up the stories why was he shocked to see Satti ?.
If you come out of Manik, then there is a higher-level narrator Raghuvir Yadav. Going back on his statement that he has become a successful writer makes you wonder how much was the reality in what he told.
Did he give shape to his imagination? Did he mold his imaginations with reality? Did he invent the whole story on the fly after seeing modern art? The movie leaves you dumb folded by its complex narrative style.
