The cunning truck driver and bandit Sarnam Singh saves the beautiful Bansari from being raped. They fall in love, but their future together is destroyed when he is thrown into prison for a petty offense. After his release, Sarnam searches for Bansari, unaware that she has fallen victim to human traffickers. During his search, he meets the attractive, younger Singh Shivraj and hires him as a bus cleaner. An intimate relationship develops between them.
The film’s central themes, human trafficking and homosexuality, are the most probable explanations for the Central Board of Film Censors’ “Adults Only” rating for the initial, now lost 132-minute cut. Only the edited version for international distribution from the Arsenal Film Archive (83 min) and an incomplete but longer picture and sound negative from the NFDC - National Film Archive of India have survived. Three different versions are now available. The primary distribution version (108 min) is based on our print supplemented by a sequence contained only in the sound negative. The long version (112 minutes) includes an additional 4 minutes of extra soundtrack at the end of the first act without picture. The short version (83 min) corresponds to the copy in the Arsenal archive.
‘I thirst for you’: the inside story of Badnam Basti, India’s first queer film - article in The Guardian, December 2024
The digital restoration was made possible by a grant from the Cultural Preservation Program of the German Federal Foreign Office. The film is now available for rental as DCP with English subtitles.
