'Peepli Live' is my tribute to Premchand: Anusha Rizvi

When Anusha started developing the characters in her debut film `Peepli Live`, her thoughts kept going back to Premchand and the hero of his 1936 novel `Godaan`.

New Delhi: When director Anusha Rizvi started developing the characters in her debut film `Peepli Live`, her thoughts kept going back to Premchand and the hero of his 1936 novel `Godaan`.

Rizvi says she could not resist the temptation of using the novel as a metaphor in her film and decided to include Hori Mehto`s character to convey the helplessness of a farmer. "Hori kept coming to my mind when I was developing this character, so I decided to keep the character. Also, I wanted to show the sense of continuity from the time of ‘Godaan’ to the present day. We used Hori Mehto`s name as a symbol to convey that there has been no change in farmers` situation in all these years," Rizvi told reporters. Considered one of the greatest novel of modern Indian literature, Premchand`s last novel depicts the socio- economic deprivation as well as the exploitation of the village poor through Hori. `Godaan` was also made into a Hindi film in 1963, starring Rajkumar, Mehmood and Shashikala. Rizvi was aware that not many will be able to recognise the allusion but says she could not find a better symbol to tell her story. Rizvi, who worked as a TV journalist before moving into documentary filmmaking, says she was not thinking about turning director when this idea came to her. "It was not a career choice for either Mehmood (husband) or me. But when this story came to me, Mehmood said it was something substantial and I should work on it. We wanted to tell this story and that`s how direction happened," says Rizvi. But having the right story was not enough for the director, who worked for almost six years to make the film possible. "I worked on the story for about five and half years. I remember when I had the script ready I saw Aamir`s interview that he wanted to produce good stories. I wrote a mail to him and when he came to Delhi I narrated the script and he liked it," she says, adding that film was further delayed because Aamir got busy with directing `Taare Zameen Par`. Rizvi says Box Office response was the last thing on her mind when she started working on the movie. "I was never worried about the Box Office response because I had a story and my first priority was to tell it properly. A lot of hard work has gone into the making of `Peepli Live` and at the end of the day we are happy with our effort. That`s more important," she adds. PTI