Anantapur, Andhra Pradesh: It’s a traditional Indian cinema fight-in-the-desolate track scene. Against the background of dunes and depressions with a tiny sprinkling of scrub flowers, the hero rises from the burning sands of a barren wasteland to overcome the bad men to a pulp. Adding masses of warmth and dirt to that already bestowed by nature, he brings the movie to a happy end (besides for the villains). Countless Indian movies have staged those scenes in some desolate desert of Rajasthan. Or even in the ravines of the Chambal valley in Madhya Pradesh.
Only, this arid desert scene (see video clip) used no locations from Rajasthan or the Chambal. It was shot deep inside the southern peninsula, in Andhra Pradesh’s Rayalaseema place. This particular patch of a few 1,000 acres in Anantapur district – as soon as protected by using millet cultivation – has over many many years become an increasing number of a desert. That has been pushed using regularly paradoxical elements – and created the type of area that filmmakers ship out place scouts to look for.
In Dargah Honnur village, wherein the foremost landowners of this patch reside, it was tough to get everybody to accept as true with we had been now not movie place scouts. “Which movie is this for? When is it coming?” changed into both an express query or one on their minds. With a few, you may see a quick ebbing of hobby once they discovered we had been reporters.
The makers of the Telugu movie that made the place famous – Jayam Manade Raa (Victory is Ours) – shot the ones combat scenes right here between 1998 and 2000. As any diligent commercial filmmakers would, they tinkered with their ‘set’ to decorate the desert effect. “We needed to uproot our crop (for which they compensated us),” says Pujari Linganna, forty-five, whose own family owns the 34 acres where the combat changed into a shot. “We also removed a few plant life and small timber so it might appearance extra actual.” Deft camerawork and the intelligent use of filters did the relaxation.
If the makers of Jayam Manade Raa had been capturing a 20-years-after sequel these days, they might do lots much less. Time and tormented nature, and incessant human intervention have effected all the wasteland upgrades they might ask for.
But it’s a curious desolate tract patch. There remains cultivation – because there’s still groundwater very close to surface. “We hit the water in this patch at simply 15 ft under,” says P. Honnureddy, Linganna’s son. In an awful lot of Anantapur, borewells won’t discover water earlier than 500-six hundred ft. In components of the district, they have got breached the 1,000-foot mark. Yet here is water gushing out of a 4-inch borewell as we communicate. That a whole lot of water, so close to the floor, in this warm and sandy patch?
