In memory of Awtar Krishna Kaul

Pleased to see this book, a tribute to the director Awtar Krishna Kaul who died in 1974, aged just 35, shortly after completing his only feature film, the National Award-winner 27 Down. The book is by Vinod Kaul, the director’s nephew, and I contributed an essay to it (a slightly revised and updated version of this piece I wrote more than a decade ago, after watching 27 Down for the first time).

Given the very distinct sensibility of Kaul’s film, and the fact that it was made around the same time as other cornerstones of the Hindi cinema New Wave (e.g. Benegal’s Ankur), his untimely death created one of the great “what ifs” in Hindi-film history. He might have gone on to do some very important work, and this book is a document of a life and career cut short. With some affectionate back-stories about Kaul and his family.

(Available on Amazon, and on Mystore)