'Mere Apne': Unhappy young men, alienation and political violence

Adapted from Tapan Sinha's Bengali blockbuster, 'Apanjan', Gulzar's debut feature captured the restless youth of the 1970s on screen

At about the halfway mark of the 1971 Hindi film ‘Mere Apne’, directed by Gulzar, Anandi Devi (Meena Kumari) tells Shyam (Vinod Khanna): “Let’s leave this city and go back to my village. I have a mango orchard and some land. It’ll be enough for us. My village is much better than this ugly city.” At first, Shyam seems to agree. But then, he changes his opinion: “No, I must stay here. I must stay here till my last breath. I must fight to survive.” An unemployed young man, Shyam has formed a gang with a few other young men in the neighbourhood. His gang is locked in a violent rivalry with another gang, led by Chhenu (Shatrughan Sinha). 

 

 

As campaigning for elections starts in the city, the two gangs are hired by rival political candidates. While Chhenu’s gang joins the incumbent Anokhelal (Mehmood), Shyam and his boys join his challenger, Biloki Prasad (Asit Sen). Each gang is given the responsibility of putting up posters, campaigning, organising street-corner meetings, and intimidating supporters of the rival team. In a 2021 interview with the journalist and film director Khalid Mohamed, Gulzar recollected the immediate context of the onscreen violence. “(I)n the ‘70s, the youth fought one another with bicycle chains and hockey sticks,” he said. “Over time, they have used guns, rifles, and grenades.” 

 

‘Mere Apne’ was Gulzar’s debut film; it was adapted from the 1968 Bengali film ‘Apanjan’, directed by Tapan Sinha. As Gulzar recollects, Sinha had initially intended to direct the Hindi remake himself, with Kishore Kumar and Waheed Rahman in the lead, and SD Burman scoring the music. But when he dropped the idea, Gulzar approached producer NC Sippy with the Hindi screenplay he had written. The Bengali original had Swarup Dutta as Robi and Samit Bhanja as Chheno, the leaders of the two gangs. Chhaya Devi acted as Anandamoyee, the same character that Meena Kumar played in the Hindi version. ‘Mere Apne’ was Meena Kumari’s last film.

 

Sinha’s original — as well as Gulzar’s adaptation — were very successful at the box office, and won a slew of prizes, evidently because they resonated with the contemporary mood of discontent in the country. In 1967, only a year before the release of ‘Apanjan’, the far-left Naxalbari movement had started in North Bengal, and it would soon engulf large parts of the country in revolutionary violence and brutal state repression. Calcutta (Kolkata) was the epicentre of the turmoil, and clashes between rival gangs, political assassinations, police “encounters” (euphemism for custodial murders), and frequent disturbances were not uncommon. Sinha’s previous film, ‘Sagina Mahato’ (1970) and ‘Ekhoni’ (1971), as well as the Calcutta trilogies of his contemporaries Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen, attempted to document. 

 

In a 2024 article, social anthropologist Michelangelo Paganopoulos writes that these films reflect their contemporary “youth unemployment and political corruption leading to explosions of police violence and student protest throughout India in the 1970s.” These included massive anti-corruption movements in Bihar and Gujarat, as well as a strike by railway workers, leading eventually to the imposition of the Emergency in 1975. For Gulzar, his debut film continues to be relevant, “which, unfortunately, is not a happy sign. …the politicians haven’t changed. …Faces have changed, the lecture-baazi hasn’t.” At the same time, violence has also continued to be an integral part of politics, as evident in the recent West Bengal elections.

 

Even as the second and last round of polling concluded on April 29, the media reported incidents of violence between supporters of various political parties in several districts of West Bengal. Similar incidents of violence were also reported during the panchayat elections in 2023, with at least 11 people killed and dozens injured in clashes. While political violence is common in Indian politics, West Bengal is an exception. According to a US-based non-government organisation, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, 3,338 cases of political violence, including murders, were recorded in the state between 2016 and 2023 — the highest for any Indian state except Jammu and Kashmir.

 

Ambar Kumar Ghosh and Niranjan Sahoo of the Observer Research Foundation write in a 2022 report that political violence in West Bengal is exceptional, in intensity and form, with no parallel anywhere in India. Tracing its origins in pre-1947 anti-colonial movements as well as communal violence, Ghosh and Sahoo argue that violent incidents in the state are driven by attempts at establishing partisan hegemony, and it is not driven by ideological or social issues (such as religion, caste, etc.). In another 2024 paper, political scientists Suman Nath and Subhasish Ray argue that “the rise of the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] has altered the dominant mode of political campaigning in the state since the 2016 state assembly elections”, with increased professionalisation as well as a communal turn. Evidently, it has a detrimental effect on the economy and democracy in the state.

 

In the final scene of ‘Apanjan’, as the two gangs clash, Anandamoyee tries to stop them. But a stray bullet hit her, killing her on the street. “The final scene dissolves into one of the most heartfelt and hurtful images of neo-realist cinema,” writes Paganopoulos. “In tragic irony, the film ends with the image of the orphaned brother and sister, running behind the ambulance that carries the dead body of their adopted granny to the hospital to affirm her death.” The police arrest the members of the two gangs and take them away, extinguishing all their youthful hopes. The Bengal film sets up a complex relationship between the personal realm of the family and the public realm of politics, brought out ironically through its title; though Gulzar’s film borrows the title through a literal translation, it perhaps falls a little short in exploring this aspect fully.

 

‘Mere Apne’ and ‘Apanjan’ are significant markers of their eras, capturing the anxieties and frustrations of political disillusionment, the corrosive influence of opportunistic politics, and the tragic consequences when communities are fractured along lines of loyalty and desperation. The films emerge from a time of crisis in India’s post-colonial history, but the persistence of similar patterns in political life reinforces their continued relevance, a stark reminder that cycles of alienation and institutional failure are yet to be broken. 

 

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Uttaran Das Gupta is an independent writer and journalist