Sukanya Savitri (1922)

Recently restored by the NFAI, this is the only surviving work of Rathod and the important Kohinoor studio. It tells two relatively independent stories from the Mahabharata. The first parr features the princess Savitri, who stands by her husband, the woodcutter Satyavan, when he is marked by Yama, the god of death. When Yama fulfills his prophecy and takes away Satyavan's life, Savitri pleads with him and eventually wins her husband back. The extraordinary scene showing Savitri's pleas with a god sitting astride a buffalo somewhere between heaven and earth is intercut with shots of the couple's idyllic life as Savitri tends to her blind parents-in-law. The flash-back construction and the cross-cutting to the . 'tableau' of Savitri arguing with Yama provides a more sophisticated temporal structure than is evident in e.g. Phalke's work of the period. The second half narrates the legend of Sukanya, the daughter of Sharyati. Seeing a large ant-hill, and unaware that it has been built over the meditating sage Chyavana, she blinds the sage and, in return, is forced to marry him. She tends to the old and decrepit man, and he changes into a handsome youth. The surviving print mentions the Krishna studio in its inter-titles, possibly because former Kohinoor partner Maneklal Patel reissued it under his new banner.