Maya Miriga (1984)

Maya Miriga – the Mirage was the first and the only feature film directed by Nirad Mohapatra. The film was highly acclaimed and has won several awards in India and internationally. It certainly is a milestone in Odia cinema and a period piece that captures the breakdown of a joint family in the mid 1980s. For me, the mark of an excellent film is when you watch it, you forget that it is a film! Only a few directors can do that and Nirad Mohapatra has done that with Maya Miriga. When I saw it for the first time while I was in Zurich, I forgot that I was in Zurich! For 115 mins, I was back in my childhood with my family in my country.

It is a simple story that depicts the family dynamics in a joint family where three generations live under one roof. Raj Kishore Babu (Satpathy) is a school headmaster on the verge of retirement who lives with his mother, wife, four sons and a daughter in Puri (a small coastal town in Odisha). His eldest son Tuku is married to Prava (Manaswini) and they have a baby daughter. The second son Tutu (Sampad Mahapatra) gets a prestigious government job and his marriage is arranged with a spoiled and selfish daughter of a rich family (played by Sujata). Sujata is unwilling to stay in the joint family and so begins the fragmentation of the joint family of Raj Kishore Babu. Tutu and his wife leave and the eldest son Tuku also plans to leave home soon with his family for a better job in another city. At the end of the film, in a particularly poignant scene, Raj Kishore Babu, while playing with his granddaughter asks her “will you too also leave us”.