Dushman was an awesome movie too, and the only Indian movie my (non-Indian) SO professes to like. In it he plays a drunken, rowdy truck driver, sleeping with loose women and prostitutes, drinking and driving, and not having a care in the world, until he runs over and kills a farmer in his drunken haze.
He is taken to jail, and, it being a very small village, the man’s family comes to the magistrate. The Magistrate promises them justice, but they weep, saying what good will justice do? Ram (the guy who died) was their sole support in the world, and now the family will starve to death. The family consisting of:
Raam’s blind mother
Raam’s crippled father
Raam’s wife
Raam’s two young sons (like 8 and 6)
And Raam’s younger sister (about 20 or so) (She is engaged at the start of the movie but her engagement is broken off when they cannot pay the dowry.
(In case you haven’t noticed, Indian movies love to pile on the drama).
The magistrate thinks deeply, and ends up giving Rajesh Khanna’s character (Surjit) an opportunity. He’s not going to go to jail, he’s going to go live in Raam’s house, and work the land and the soil, and if the family starves to death, it’s his lookout.
Of course Surjit is aghast, as is the family, and they are extraordinarily reluctant. The first time Surjit walks into the house, the old grandpa hits him on the head with his crutch, drawing blood. The elder child won’t even look at him, and he hears Raam’s wife screaming about having to keep this murderer in her house.
However, he hears the younger child desperately crying for food, and this awakens something in him. He decides to at least try.
The rest of the movie is about him trying to, and eventually fitting in with this new world. Of course it wouldn’t be a Hindustani movie without a villain. The villain is played by a local evil landlord who wants both Raam’s land and Raam’s wife in his bed.
Some truly moving scenes of his first harvest, and the old grandpa crying and falling down in the freshly tilled soil, feeling like his son’s soul might actually be able to rest now.
Surjit even finds himself a girl, the beautiful and buxom and very sexy (IMO) Mumtaz. It is an excellent film…
And the word “Dushman” means enemy. It comes from the very beginning, when the younger child asks who is the man who has come to stay with them, and the elder child says “Woh hamara dushman hai!” “That is our enemy!” Half sadly half sarcastically he introduces himself to Mumtaz as “Dushman” and the kids begin to call him “Dushman chacha” - Uncle Enemy.
