not directly from Bhavai, but which I have been able to use because of the freedom that Bhavai provides—addressing the audience, for example, depicting an event and jumping immediately into the social analysis of the event, the asides, then moving from dialogue to the poetic/rhyme form including folk jingles, that kind of thing. AK: And the cortlic strip? Where do you think you have used that the most? KM: Mainly in the performance of the king. In fact in the acknowledgements I have mentioned Goscinny, the great comic-strip artist, whose style I had been very influenced by when I envisaged the king. Then some of the stray images—the bell falling on the man's stomach, which is a completely comic strip effect. Ashish Rajadhyaksha: I had a question about the music. While some of it was obviously the simpler folk kind, much of the rest, and the narration itself by the old man, was heavily orchestrated. Why did you use an urban, almost commercial film-music in those crucial scenes? KM: That was in fact a take-off on precisely the commercial film music, in particular the Gujarati commerical cinema. Vivan Sundaram: It didn't come off though, that didn't seem to work. KM: No it hasn't really worked, I know. In fact the narrator-sequences, where the tale is told around the fire, did not really come off as I had hoped they would. This is not an apology, it is something I can recognise now. VS: The rest of the environment is totally naturalistic, isn't it? How could you have succeeded in a take-off on commercial film music in that context? KM: No it isn't naturalistic; in fact in Gujarati and some Hindi cinema that is the stock position of the tiarrator. We saw Prabhat's Sant Tukdram yesterday, and there too Tukaram's position on the hilltop or the field was exactly the way the old man's position is in Bhavni Bhavai. The images, as much as the music, were lifted from stock situations in commercial films. What happened, in my opinion, is that Gujarati cinema has itself borrowed so much from its folk theatre that the distinction I wanted to make between the two did not come off, at least not as starkly as I had hoped. There are parts where I think the take-off has worked, for instance in the romantic song between Rangia and Ranglee on the courtyard, the lawns, which is vintage commerical Gujarati cinema. In that song in fact Journal of Arts and Ideas 55