Celebrating Amar Akbar Anthony, 40 Years Later

This year marks the 40th anniversary of one of the classics of Hindi cinema, Amar Akbar Anthony — Manmohan Desai’s riotous ode to communal harmony. Desai’s genius was that he made AAA in between making three other films that were released that year — Dharam Veer, Chacha Bhatija and Parvarish. By Maithili Rao

- Maithili Rao

Anniversaries are propitious landmarks to look back — fondly and critically, a difficult but not impossible frame of mind — at films and film-makers that have reached a cult status in some, if not all, quarters. Amar Akbar Anthony comes up with its 40th anniversary and now is as good a time as any to plunge headlong into the film’s orchestrated mayhem and hope to come out safe and sane. 1977 was riotously fecund for Manmohan Desai, the uncrowned sultan of the absurd as he churned out four hits in one calendar year — AAA, Dharam Veer, Chacha Bhatija and Parvarish. Three of them were released within 52 days and went on to be hits. AAA was one of the first commercial films to have been screened by BBC at prime time, my research tells me. I haven’t checked but this could be a record of sorts when the success of a film was measured by silver and golden jubilees and not the 100+ crores accumulated through today’s mantra of carpet-bombing the audience into submission over the weekend.

It is mind boggling to think how any director (who also turned producer with