Arundhati's Annie: How a cult film captured the architects of a generation

A 4K restored version of 1989 film 'In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones' will be screened at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival next month

After watching a screening of the 1989 film In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, at the International Film Festival of India, Derek Malcom, then film critic for The Guardian, turned to the film’s writer, Arundhati Roy, and declared: “You’ll have to change the title because ‘giving it those ones’ doesn’t really mean anything in English.” Recalling the incident in her memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me (2025), Roy wishes she had told Malcom: “Well, obviously, Mr Malcom, in England you don’t speak English anymore.” As she goes on to explain, in Delhi University slang, “giving it those ones” meant “doing one’s usual shit.”

 

 

“My script was about life in the School of Architecture,” writes Roy, “the wacky anarchy of that campus, the stoned, bombed-out students and the dialect of English that we spoke — an inventive mix of Hindi and English.” When it was first screened at Max Mueller Bhavan, the German cultural centre in Delhi, she recollects, the hall was packed with students “who began to yell, roar with laughter and wolf-whistle through the film”, as they “recognised themselves, their language, their clothes, their jokes, their silliness, and were delighted to have been deemed worthy of cinema.” The film’s director, Pradip Krishen, recently told PTI that “no one was making films about people like us, about the English-speaking subculture where characters spoke their own patois.”

 

Krishen also regretted the fact that despite its popularity, the film went out of circulation after a single screening on Doordarshan. The government-owned TV network had financed the film, which also won two awards at the 36th National Film Awards, including Best Screenplay for Roy. (She returned the award in 2015 in protest against the murders of rationalist writers Govind Pansare and MM Kalburgi.) A 4K restored version of the film will be screened at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival next month. Once assumed to be lost, the film’s original negative was restored by the Film Heritage Foundation, the National Film Development Corporation, the National Film Archive of India and its director Krishen.

 

The film’s action takes place in 1974, and its titular Annie is architecture student Anand Grover (Arjun Raina). Annie is repeating his fifth year for the fourth time, unable to graduate as he is victimised by the school’s principal, Y D Bilimoria (Roshan Seth), also known as Yamdoot. Annie had, several years ago, ridiculed Yamdoot. His fellow students are a motley crew — Mankind (Isaac Thomas) and his roommate, the Ugandan student Kasozi (Moses Uboh), the teachers’ pet Lalita Saxena (Divya Seth), table tennis fanatic Papey (Idries Malik), and Radha, the spunky non-conformist who steals cigarettes from Yamdoot, sprays an eve teaser with black paint and asks a professor if men lose their virility if they think about the architecture of a kitchen. Unsurprisingly, it is Roy herself who plays Radha. Shah Rukh Khan, who was not yet a shadow of the superstar he would eventually become, also stars in the film as a student, and is seen in the early scenes, he hand in a sling.

 

Journalist Suchitra Behal writes that the film “aptly conveyed the frustration and idealistic dreams of a generation”. And Roy writes, in her memoir, that her National Award citation read: “For depicting the agony of students.” However, as she adds, “Some wonderful, deeply political films were being made about the state of the country, violence against women, and the feudalism that we couldn’t seem to shake off. Annie was nothing like them. I was still nowhere close to confident enough about my skills as a writer to take on those big themes.” The big themes, however, are conspicuous by their absence.

 

In 1974, university campuses around the country were roiled by student movements against corruption in government. While university students in Gujarat started a widespread agitation, known as the Navnirman Andolan, against corruption in the state government, the Bihar Movement by students at Patna University and other educational institutions, and eventually led by Jayaprakash Narayan, turned against then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Far-left Naxalite movements had already led to violence by and against students at universities in Calcutta (Kolkata) and Delhi. As historian Vijay Prasad writes in his 1996 essay, student movements were one of the several reasons that prompted Mrs Gandhi to declare the Emergency in 1975. Yet the architecture school in Annie seems insulated from the echoes of such turmoil.

 

The only exception to this is Radha’s final thesis presentation, during which she argues that urban architecture has been compromised by a commercial preoccupation. While architects focus on constructing building for their clients, they exclude those who are underprivileged. “Every Third World city consists of two parts — a city and a non-city,” says Radha, “and the city and the non-city are at war with each other.” The non-citizens are excluded from the institutions of the city. Exclusion along lines of class, caste and religion have been studied extensively by geographers and urban scholars. When one of the examiners tells her that she must be practical when she becomes and architect, Radha responds that perhaps the only solution is to “not want to be an architect.” It is a remarkably radical solution, an aesthetic and political choice of rejection.

 

Decades after it disappeared — and often uploaded on YouTube and other sites as bad prints — Annie returns, less like a kitschy curio and more like a quietly defiant archive of a world that refused to translate itself. Like its linguistic code-switching between English, Punjabi, Hindi and university patios, its irreverence and seeming political innocence are not evasion as much as an assertion of presence. It reminds us that culture is often radical by being specific and an act of rejection, like Radha’s, can itself be a deeply political act.

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Uttaran Das Gupta is an independent writer and journalist