Widely considered Shahani’s most accessible film, Kasba returns to the melodramatic mode he had earlier experimented with in his three-hour epic Tarang. Here he adapts a Chekov story set in a small township in the mountainous Kangra valley. Maniram, an old-style entrepreneur made his fortune adulterating food, has two sons. One is arrested in the city for printing counterfeit currency, the other is mentally retarded and the Shakespearean fool in the story. There are two daughters-in-law, one a canny businesswoman and the other an innocent villager. Much of the film deploys a savage irony, as e.g. the movie star Shatrughan Sinha, who plays the elder son as a small-town braggart, often plays ‘himself’ in his swaggering style. The film’s main generic achievement is to recall to the Indian cinema’s melodramatic mode its original function, of integrating marginalised peoples and their languages. —Ashish Rajadhyaksha