The Boon

The boon bestowed on the self-pitying black sheep of a rural Indian family by a gnarled deity is a decidedly mixed blessing: a magic root guaranteeing power at the price of celibacy, and bringing knowledge at the price of tragedy. Benegal's delineation - hardly revelatory - of the community's hopeless subjection to the mutually reinforcing tyranny of religious superstition and the local landowner is similarly a mixed bag of fantasy and realism; its intricately established humanist dilemma is undermined by caricatured villainy.