BENGALURU: Siddalingaiah, who died on Thursday, was perhaps the second most famous director in Kannada, after Puttanna Kanagal. Siddalingaiah excelled in bringing out the drama of the villages in an idiom that was neither bleakly arthouse nor condescending in the manner of the masala film.
If Kanagal was the master of the middle class, Siddalingaiah was the champion of the farming class. His biggest films, Bangarada Manushya, starring Rajkumar, and Bhootayyana Maga Ayyu, which pitted the popular film hero Vishnuvardhan against the theatre stalwart Lokesh, are village-centric, and paint a range of emotions against a farming backdrop.
Siddalingaiah’s first film Mayor Muttanna (1969) tells the story of a golden-hearted villager who ends up in big, bad Bengaluru, and rises to become its mayor after overcoming innumerable hurdles. Well-known film critic M K Raghavendra believes the film represents the optimism of the 1960s, when an innocent man from the hinterland could dream of becoming the mayor of a snooty city. In the Kannada films of the 1990s such as Om And Jogi (not directed by Siddalingaiah), starring Rajkumar’s son Shivaraj Kumar, the city is hostile and unwelcoming, argues Raghavendra, and the innocent villager is pushed to violent crime. Raghavendra places his contentions in the context of a conflict between national and regional identities.
Siddalingaiah’s films were free of such despair. For Bhootayyana Maga Ayyu, based on a story by Gorur Ramaswamy Iyengar, Siddalingaiah created in his screenplay the noble Devaiah to match the miserly Bhootayya.
The miser’s son transcends his animosity, and the torn village reaches a point of reconciliation after he risks his life to swim in the swirling waters of a flood to save his enemy’s wife. In fact, Bangarada Manushya is said to have even inspired some educated young men to return to their villages.
Perhaps there was something of Siddalingaiah’s own experience in his debut film Mayor Muthanna. He had begun life as a floor boy, doing menial work at a studio in Mysuru, before becoming a junior artiste and then assistant to director Shankar Singh. He then went to B Vithalacharya, maker of mythologicals and magical fantasies, to learn the directorial craft.
In the late 1970s, Siddalingiah tried his hand at comedies like Bhoolokadalli Yamaraja and Narada Vijaya. The first film brought down Yama, the god of death, to earth, to place him in a contemporary setting. The second film worked better, with Anant Nag playing the double role of Narada Muni and a detective; the narrative capitalised on the comic talent of the hero, and on the confusion when one character is mistaken for the other. Siddalingaiah could manage comedy with a good cast, but he was out of his depths trying to make mysteries such as Ajeya, in which he introduced his son Murali.
Siddalingaiah remade the film in Tamil. Murali then went on to become a popular hero in Tamil films. While Siddalingaiah continued to make films in Kannada till 1999, Murali settled in Chennai. People close to Siddalingaiah say he never recovered from the death of Murali in 2010. Murali died of a heart attack.
The Karnataka Open University had announced a doctorate for Siddalingaiah, and had asked him for a time to do the honours at his house.
But that moment never came. Siddalingaiah was being treated for swine flu when he died in a Bengaluru hospital on Thursday.