Ghatashraddha

<p>Udupa (Ramaswamy Iyengar) runs a run down Vedic school, operating from his house in a village. Apart from his uncontrollable and unruly students, he lives with his young daughter, Yamuna (Meena Kuttappa), already a widow. Naani (Ajit Kumar), the innocent boy from a distant village, is a new student. A bond develops between a homesick Naani and Yamuna. Yamuna has a lover, a school teacher, whom she meets clandestinely. She is also pregnant by him. As Udupa goes out of town to raise funds for his crumbling school, things go out of hand at the school. The students go out of control and soon the entire village knows about Yamuna’s pregnancy. The traditional village members excommunicate Yamuna. Her lover gets the baby aborted without anyone’s knowledge. Udupa returns and on finding out what has happened, performs the last rites of his living daughter. Amidst all these, Naani is the only person in the village determined to support her but not for long for his father comes back to take him away. Yamuna is shaved bald and is abandoned under a banyan tree. approached for the rights of through dramatist . Ananthamurthy, who was in the at the time, gave his go-ahead on hearing the screenplay from Kasaravalli, on his return to India. It was on the former’s suggestion that Meena Kuttappa, his former student, was signed to play the female lead in the film. During February 2024, US film publication announced that the ‘s World Cinema Project, ‘ Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation and ‘s (FHF) have partnered to restore the film in time for its 50th anniversary from the original camera negative preserved at India’s -National Film Archive of India. The restored version of the film was showcased in the Venice Classics section of the 81st , where it was given the English-language title . It was also screened at the under the Restored Classics section.</p>