Tracing Sriram Raghavan’s journey from a 29-minute student film to Andhadhun
(Rewritten, based on an article I wrote in 2018)
In 1987, a group of final-year students at the Film and Television Institute of India made a 29-minute fantasy film called The Eight Column Affair. It won the Rajat Kamal for Best Short Fiction at the 35th National Film Awards.
The director was Sriram Raghavan. The editor was Rajkumar Hirani. The cinematographer was Hari Nair. And Nana Patekar played the actor within the film.
Four names. One diploma project. Decades of mainstream Hindi cinema between them.
There is a persistent myth about national film school graduates – that they emerge wearing the wardrobe of old-school intellectuals, allergic to commercial cinema, destined for festival circuits and nothing else. Raghavan’s career is a quiet rebuttal.
After The Eight Column Affair, he made a 70-minute docu-fiction on the serial killer Raman Raghav, featuring Raghubir Yadav. Ram Gopal Varma saw it and signed him for Ek Hasina Thi (2004), a neo-noir loosely drawn from Sidney Sheldon’s If Tomorrow Comes. That was his Bollywood debut.
Then came Johnny Gaddaar (2007), a heist-gone-wrong thriller so tightly constructed it got remade in Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam. Agent Vinod (2012) followed – an espionage film that refused to play by Bond rules and paid the price at the box office. Badlapur (2015) pushed further, charting a protagonist’s descent into something monstrous while its antagonist found unlikely redemption.
And then, Andhadhun (2018).
When I first wrote about Raghavan in 2017, Andhadhun was still in production under the working title Shoot the Piano Player. I remember speculating that it might draw from L’Accordeur, the French short about a piano tuner who pretends to be blind. I wrote that if Raghavan found his inspiration there, the film would lead the box office.
It did more than that. Andhadhun became one of the highest-grossing Hindi films of 2018, swept the National Awards, and earned Raghavan comparisons to the Coen Brothers. It also proved that a film school sensibility and mainstream success are not mutually exclusive – they never were.
What strikes me now, looking back at The Eight Column Affair, is how the seeds were already there. The playfulness with genre. The refusal to hand audiences easy answers. The interest in characters who are not quite what they seem.
Raghavan’s batchmates followed their own paths. Hirani became one of the most commercially successful directors in Indian cinema with Munnabhai MBBS, 3 Idiots, and PK. Hari Nair shot everything from Shool to Theevram. Nana Patekar collected three National Awards. Sivakumar Subramaniam, who played the marathon runner in that student film, wrote Parinda, 1942: A Love Story, and Chameli.
All of them started in the same place. A campus in Pune. Black-and-white film stock. Limited resources. A diploma project.
The next time someone tells you that film school produces out-of-touch artists, point them to The Eight Column Affair. Then point them to Andhadhun.
The line between art and commerce was always thinner than the myth suggests.