Austin welcomes ‘Tanvi the Great’

Sticking to its motto “Live Here Give Here”, Hindu Charities for America (HC4A) in Austin has been executing community work to fulfill its mission of bridging income disparities through education.

The HC4A has now collaborated with Anupam Kher’s production house and screened ‘Tanvi the Great’, a Hindi movie directed and produced by Anupam Kher and revolving around autism.

The aim is to spread awareness about autism and allay the associated stigma.

Such significant partnerships between filmmakers and charities result in the valuable work of normalising out-of-range behavioural conditions, which eventually enables acceptance and inclusion of the marginalised in the society. Cinema is a powerful medium to shape perceptions and when a filmmaker uses the medium wisely, a socially beneficial movie evolves into a language that resonates with the collective.

The bit of that magic unfolded in the Q&A session organised after the film’s screening. The audience members heartily endorsed the film, empathising with the central and periphery characters, applauding the patriotic nuances and finding echoes with personal experiences.

The HC4A also deserves a salute for its well-orchestrated event, adding a bit of flashlight and flair to create a fitting opening to the film in Texas.

Austin has earned its place as a pilgrimage centre for serious South Asian cinema, thanks to the decade-long work of Indie Meme. ‘Tanvi the Great’ was added by the HC4A to this yearly feast on June 21, 2025, at the Galaxy Cinema, Fiskville Road.

The film boasts a heavyweight roster of talent with Oscar-winning music director MM Keeravani, and a galaxy of actors like Boman Irani, Iain Glen as well as Anupam Kher himself. Yet, it is Shubangi Dutt, the young actor portraying the autistic protagonist, who steals the show.

A student from Anupam Kher’s acting school Actor Prepares, Shubangi has launched herself convincingly as a serious and dedicated actor.

Anupam Kher’s directorial choice of a new face allowed the focus to remain on the character, and not the celebrity. The cast also signifies the shift in Indian cinema — pan-India storytelling has come to stay with its mix of multi-regional cast and multi-lingual lyrics.

The storyline is minus the clichéd climaxes and anti-climaxes. Tanvi, an autistic young woman, aspires to fulfill her father’s dream of saluting the Indian flag at Siachen, the world’s highest battlefield. The simple storyline is offset by the complexity of the condition of autism itself — the intense reactions, eccentricities, meltdowns, fears, quirks, fixations and unique psychological perceptions and connecting of dots — and the drama of family dynamics.

The poignancy of Tanvi’s aspiration is due to the fact that her father had died in a bomb blast on the way to his Siachen posting. Tanvi’s aspiration is significant because it asserts emotional cognisance in variance to the commonly held notion of emotional dysregulation, i.e. the difficulties autistic individuals struggle with in managing and responding to emotions, and even being emotionally lacking.

That Tanvi possesses the sensitivity to identify with her father’s dream, and decides to be the harbinger of it, drives the point autism might have a more compelling narrative than is commonly assumed. In fact, the movie pointedly attempts to normalise the spectrum of human behaviour and conditions — it attempts to shift the emphasis from abnormality to difference and impress upon ‘normal’ people that difference should not be weighed down with stigma.

The film’s value lies in its aims to shift perception of conditions that still face rejection — Tanvi’s often-repeated phrase ‘I am different, but not less’ is actually a maxim for the audience to absorb.

I was reminded of Somerset Maugham’s novel ‘Of Human Bondage’ in which the protagonist has a club foot, a deformity shaping his self-perception and destiny till he realises philosophically that most people have their own club foot, visible and invisible — that it is the very obstacles that one faces that can harness the best of the human spirit.

Tanvi goes on to exhibit emotional growth, she shifts her dynamic with her grandfather, finally calling him dada (grandfather), discarding the more formal and distant title ‘Colonel Raina’. She learns to conquer fixations and learns skills.

Thankfully, the film mostly resists the temptation to overdo the ‘cutsie’ angle, an embarrassing pitfall Bollywood sometimes falls into while depicting the behavioural spectrum. A range of disorders from autism, mental health, dyslexia etc., have been tackled in ‘Barfi’, ‘My name is Khan’, ‘Taare Zameen Par’, ‘Dear Zindagi’, etc.. Dustin Hoffman set the gold standard with ‘Rain Man’, while several Hollywood films as ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ and the Oscar-winning ‘A Beautiful Mind’ have explored the theme in one way or another. It’s a precarious rope and the very attempt to shift stigma has to be applauded.

The film draws attention to a compelling requirement — the attitude of immediate family members in the lives of individuals with special needs and behavioural spectrums.

Pallavi Joshi’s portrayal of a strong single mother balancing her daughter’s needs and her own challenges such as the prejudicial assumptions and castigations from a father-in-law is a reality women bear in patriarchal dynamics. The characters all grow, each evolving through interactions with each other.

Pallavi Joshi, after a nine-month trip abroad for further training, comes home to the new scenario of an evolved and mature daughter making her way to self-reliance and independence. She must learn to let go, allowing wings to unfold and step back.

Anupam Kher, playing the grandfather, has to emerge from reclusion and a sphere of loss (his wife and son), to participate again in family, adjusting his misperceptions and eventually coming to love and embrace his granddaughter, seeing her as ‘normal’ as anyone else. Toward the end of the film, his righteous anger at the Indian Army rejecting her admission is his positive nemesis.

Seared still, in my mind is Anupam Kher’s haunting portrayal of a Kashmiri Pandit in ‘Kashmiri Files’. It always seems once actors play the role(s) of a lifetime — and he has played numerous such legendary roles — no other role could be conjured again to exploit the actor’s ability. But magic happens again and again. There are actors with inexhaustible repertoires and we get to see the brilliance of Kher — he interprets his role as demanding few physical gestures but magnetises our focus on his face — a canvas of myriad fleeting micro emotional responses — restrained, nuanced and subtle, his emoting is point on from beginning to end.

The late Keki Daruwalla, my dear friend and mentor, taught me that no literary review is complete without a balanced evaluation. So, if I had to weigh in, there seemed to be a song or two that the film could have been done away with (even while understanding Tanvi’s passion for music). One had to stretch the mind a bit to factor in the ability of the protagonist to break into effusive lyrical expressions.

‘Tanvi the Great’ was inspired by one of Anupam Kher’s family.

The triumphant title reflects the movie as a creation of immense love. As a poet, I know, the potency of poetry in the service of truth-making for the woman poet. Films like ‘Tanvi the Great’ also contribute to truth-making — the truth being the need for new paradigms in art and cinema to make our societies more inclusive. In Austin, a city’s whose motto is ‘Keeping it weird’, the film announces loud and clear — Weird is normal.

Poet Usha Akella lives in Austin, Texas, USA. She has authored seven books of poetry, three chapbooks, and scripted two musical dramas. She was a finalist for Austin’s poet laureate position in 2025

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