If you have watched Malgudi Days, then we have already met! Hello, I’m Master Manjunath, the child actor of the days of yore.
My first brush with the film industry came when I was 3 years old. My parents’ colleague was also moonlighting as a production manager and was scouting around for a kid who was talkative. I landed the role right then and there! I went on to act in 23 movies before bagging the role of Swami in Malgudi Days in 1986 and subsequently, the role of young Vijay Dinanath Chauhan in the film Agneepath.
Though shot as a bilingual film, the producer wanted to make it a series. This proved to be a challenge with Doordarshan being the only channel around those days DD was skeptical as well, about giving the onus of a national series to a“South Indian” team. The persistence of people like RK Narayan, Shankar Nag, helped a predominantly Kannadiga cast memorise and deliver Hindi dialogues to perfection!
Our 100+ crew members shot the series in the summer of 1987 in Agumbe, a small town in Karnataka. The town had one barber shop, one grocery shop as well as a single restaurant . Our crew occupied 65+ houses in the town and easily outnumbered the localites! I felt right at home there by gorging on food and sweets in people’s houses. Also called the King Cobra Capital of the world, there were innumerable Cobras around and as per the localites’s instructions, we ran where the local snakes slithered!
The only railway station was 70 kms away and had only 2 trains passing making shoots a nightmare! We would wake up at 5am, drive an Ambassador car through 70 kms of Western Ghats to a station called Arasalu. Connecting to people was another gigantic task, we would book calls through trunk calls and wait 5 hours just to get connected!
Being an innovator way ahead of his time, Shankar Nag sir did not know the meaning of the word impossible! To do a crane shot, the crew tied two arecanut trees, stole a cradle from a neighbouring village and made the camera person sit in it and tied them together with rope, with a pulley making the cradle go up and down! For an underwater shot, a big drum was taken, the mid portion cut out and a glass welded into it along with water pipes being added for air supply! Between 1987- 1990, Malgudi Days was released in 100+ countries and won many national and international awards. Ironically, it also went on to win the best film award in London although it had an anti – British element in it.
So far as studies were concerned, I had taken the government’s permission to bypass compulsory attendance and our long schedules were limited to summer holidays. When I turned 16, I stopped acting because the quality of roles didn’t excite me which meant I could fully focus on my education. After completing my Masters, I dabbled a bit in an AD agency and found my luck in the Dotcom industry by being the first to put the 10-12th results online and was part of the core team of the Bhoomi project, which digitised the land records and finally landed myself into the Bangalore -Mysore Infra project.
I have acted in 68 films in my 16 year celluloid journey. I have received 6 international, 1 national and 1 state award. But I am glad that I am still remembered as Swami from the Malgudi Days!
Manjunath Nayaker
