The TV serial that created history in Indian television will be back, but in a new avatar.
The new avatar of the 1984 soap serial Hum Log is named Hum and it will be telecast on Doordarshan beginning August this year. DD will air Hum twice a week during weekends in the beginning, says a media report.
While 26 episodes have already been commissioned, DD is said to have given the go-ahead to a proposal for double that number. Shobha Doctor, producer of Hum Log, will be associated with Hum as mentor.
Hum is going to be different from Hum Log. Apart from moving the locale to Bihar from Haryana, the new serial will focus on the lives of five families in Sitamarhi, Bihar, instead of one in the orginal.
The characters in the new serial will drive Scorpios, have cell phones and TV sets at home, a far cry from the matchbox-sized room where the trials and tribulations of three generations were played out. The characters Lallu, Nanhe and Chutki turned Rajesh Puri, Abhinav Chaturvedi and Loveleen Mishra and many others into TV stars overnight.
The grandfather was affable, the grandmother crude, the son an alcoholic, the wife long-suffering and children had their own idiosyncrasies. Each episode ended with a little homily delivered by actor Ashok Kumar.
More than 25 years later, the cast isn't the same nor the story. The format and treatment will bear resemblance to that of the original show. And Sushma Seth, who played Dadi in the original, will sum up each episode this time.
“It is a take off on Hum Log. But this time instead of a family, we have a village. But the style and sensibility remain the same,” says Shobha Doctor, producer of the original series and the mentor of the new one.
Doctor, 66, was suffering from depression after her husband's death three years ago. It was then that her close friend Keerti Srivastava persuaded her to get back to television. She then met Dr Aruna Sharma, director general of Doordarshan, and both decided to bring back the format of Hum Log which had once played a major role in Doordarshan's success.
“We did not want to make a sequel because there was nothing left to explore in the lives of Basesar Ram's family now. We instead thought of taking the serial to a village in Sitamarhi district of Bihar,” she says.
The Hum Log team is not what it once was either. Writer Manohar Shyam Joshi and director Vasudev Kumar are no more. And most actors have moved on to do bigger and better things in life, feels director-producer Sanjay Tripathy who has taken over the mantle this time for a 52-episode soap.
“But the shades of all the characters from Hum Log can be seen in the characters of Hum. With Hum, we hope to bring back the days of realistic situations,” feels the director.
While Suhasini Muley's character in Hum will be inspired by Seth's in Hum Log, the other four women characters played by the likes of Mona Vasu, Sadia Siddiqui will definitely remind you of Badki, Majhli and Chutki.
With the number of general entertainment channels increasing by the day, it looks over-ambitious on the part of Doordarshan to reinvent their old programming strategies. But Tripathy feels that it is a gamble worth taking.
“Good content wins over everything else. If Hum Log skyrocketed television viewership in India, Hum could grab eyeballs too,” he says.
Veteran actor Vineet Kumar who plays the role of a zamindar in the show too is happy with the return of concept-based soaps. “When a script is pre-written, you have a fair idea about how the serial is going to turn out,” feels Kumar, who also stresses on the fact that Hum is the modern day Hum Log.
Sushma Seth, who played the role of grandmother in the original show, will be returning as the ‘sutradhar' or story-teller, a role that was handled by the late Ashok Kumar in Hum Log.
Says Sushma Seth: “Those days, we got bound scripts. It was very systematic, the script-writing by Manohar Shyam Joshi was strong and the execution by director, P. Kumar Vasudev, was exemplary”.
The episodes of Hum Log were shot in a studio belonging to yoga guru Dhirendra Brahmachari in Gurgaon. Sushma Seth later went on to play countless Dadimas in film and on TV.
Says Shobha Doctor: “While Hum Log was a milestone with powerful characters, we hope to recreate equally strong characters with Hum”.
Hum Log in the Eighties used to attract high ratings according to IMRB. At the peak of its popularity in 1985, almost 80 per cent of the nation's 3.5 million TV viewers were said to tune into the serial for their daily dose of the soap.
