Gehrayee (1980)

This unheralded little production from the early ’80s is possibly one of the finest horror films yet to emerge from Bollywood. The film focuses on a small middle-class, well-educated South Indian family that has to deal with some financial difficulties and is tightening the economic belt to provide the kids with a decent education and the oldies a comfy retirement.

At the head of the family is Dr. Lagoo, who has inherited a large tract of land from his father. At the beginning of the film, a solemn Lagoo arrives at his ancestral lands to an adoring faithful servant who is overjoyed at welcoming the Chhota sahib to his grounds.

The servant shows him around the lands, proudly displaying the trees and fields he has lovingly cultivated over a lifetime of devotion. Then Lagoo stuns the servant by informing him that he has sold the land to a soap manufacturing factory and that in weeks all his beloved trees and fields are to be levelled and replaced by a monstrous concrete and metal giant.

The servant, Baswa, is incensed and later that night goes into a rabid rant against what he considers is the rape of his mother – the land. He is outraged by the very thought that a man could “sell his own mother” for financial gain, and he goes into a total frenzy about the impending arrival of the soap factory. He seethes in a rage over the “rape of the land” and promises to devote himself to rectifying the situation and overturning this terrible outrage.

Lagoo leaves the following day, not realising what a devastating effect his decision to sell the land has had on Baswa and many of the other inhabitants of Lagoo’s former lands.

Time moves on by a handful of years, and we see that Lagoo lives happily in his new Bangalore home with his typically traditional goodie-two-shoes wife and his two young children. Anant Naag is just out of college and young school-going daughter Uma (Padmini Kolhapure). They appear to be a contented, well-respected family without any severe problems in life. The kids consist of a bright young son with good prospects, his charming steady girlfriend, and a chirpy, cute young daughter who tops in her class and has a winning personality.

Lagoo runs his business from his city office a little bit like he runs his own house, with an iron fist and little time for democratic discussion. His lovely wife is the typical long-suffering doormat of a traditional eastern woman with her typically superstitious beliefs and customs and her complete reliance on religion for every explanation in life. Her husband conversely has no time for what he considers to be utter mumbo jumbo.

There is a gradual change in the young girl’s personality, and she begins to lose her sparkle and appear glum, moody and sullen. Her report card from school indicates a severe drop in performance and interest levels, and she complains of fatigue, painful eyes, and a sore head. The film’s first half-hour is a gradual build-up of tension where the audience is expecting the worst, but nothing happens.

Then Uma suffers her first fit where she seems to take on an alien personality and starts speaking in a strange masculine voice recounting bizarre tales of injustice. The parents remain baffled despite trips to the medical experts. While the father is insistent on discovering scientific, logical explanations, the child’s mother turns to spiritualism and traditional religious “priests” to find the reason for her daughter’s torment.

These differences begin to tear the family apart. Then finally, a bombshell is dropped by young Uma in one of her fits when she accuses her father of being a murderer and a lecherous womaniser. They not only deprived his old servant Baswa of his beloved land but had also sullied his wife in an afternoon romp that had left her pregnant and disgraced. Later, Baswa’s wife committed suicide in the local well due to her tangle with Lagoo.

The family begins to crack under the strain of the daughter’s increasingly dire condition, along with the burden of these dark secrets dragged out into the open. Anant Naag and his mother seek spiritual help for Uma but are duped by two successive quacks. One uses the child’s condition to extract as much cash as possible from them, and the other (played by Amrish Puri) tries to use the daughter to reincarnate his evil Devi. However, it’s the third time lucky as the family servant brings along a saintly priest who finally appears to make some progress in getting grips with the situation.

When Padmini seems cured, a disillusioned son goes off to the ancestral grounds to find Baswa, only to discover that he has been dead for a while. However, he does find his answer in a chilling final scene when Basma’s tormented, the vengeful spirit returns once again and reveals exactly why it was that he chose to wreak havoc on Lagoo’s family.

This film is remarkable among Bollywood horror films for its sheer subtlety and lack of typical hackneyed horror techniques that are such the hallmark of the genre. Gehrayee is perhaps the only tale of possession that doesn’t involve spinning heads, levitation scenes, flying vomit and objects and the like.

Though it is similar to The Exorcist in that the target of an evil, disgruntled spirit is a young school-going pubescent girl, that is really where the similarity ends. Gehrayee eschews cheap horror thrills and relies on its gripping plot and excellent performances to make it work. There are no insufferable comedians (like Jagdeep, Rajendranath, Satish Shah) to endure this time around and nor are there cheesy gore or special effects.

Padmini Kolhapure is brilliant as Uma. She may not have been a traditional beauty, but she made up for what she lacked in bombshell looks with heaps of delightful charm and natural spontaneity. After Jaya Bhaduri retired, Padmini stepped in to fill the vacuum with the same good-natured wholesome, infectious free spirit. In Gehrayee, Padmini turns in a remarkable performance especially considering she was barely 12 in reality. She is natural as the kid slowly taken over by an evil spirit, never self-conscious or overwrought. It’s a superb performance by an actress who deserves to be remembered as one of Bollywood’s finest performers of the ’80s.

Dr. Lagoo is also relatively restrained and doesn’t thankfully resort to the horrendous hamming that began to affect his roles shortly afterwards badly. Anant Naag, who made a name for himself in Benegal’s Ankur, also performs well as Indrani Mukherji as the wife/mother. Rita Bhaduri makes a brief but memorable appearance. Full marks to the director for having the courage to refuse the cheap, loud gimmickry virtually inherent in the genre.
Gehrayee is a stylish, excellently acted film with a rich subcontext. A notable Bollywood horror film.