General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Chomana Dudi (ಚೋಮನ ದುಡಿ)

Chomana Dudi (ಚೋಮನ ದುಡಿ, "Choma's Drum") is a 1975 Indian Kannada-language drama film directed by B.V. Karanth, based on the 1933 novel of the same name by the Jnanpith Award-winning Kannada writer Kota Shivaram Karanth. It tells the story of Choma, an untouchable bonded laborer in rural Karnataka who longs all his life for a piece of land he is forbidden to own, and who dies beating his small drum after losing his family. The film won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film (the Golden Lotus) for 1975, and its lead actor M.V. Vasudeva Rao won the National Film Award for Best Actor.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	ಚೋಮನ ದುಡಿ (Chomana Dudi), also released internationally as The Choma Drum / Le Tambour de Choma³
Release	1975, India, Kannada language⁴
Director and music	B.V. Karanth, who also composed the music⁵
Source	Shivarama Karanth's novel Chomana Dudi (1933)⁶
Lead cast	M.V. Vasudeva Rao as Choma; Padma Kumta as Belli, Choma's daughter⁵
Production	Praja Films; producer Ashok Kumar⁷
Major awards	National Film Award for Best Feature Film (Golden Lotus, 1975); National Film Award for Best Actor (M.V. Vasudeva Rao); Filmfare Award South for Best Film and Best Director (1976)¹^•⁸

Spoilers

Plot

Choma is a member of the mari holeya, an untouchable community in the southern part of Karnataka whose members are barred from possessing or cultivating land of their own.⁹ He works as a bonded laborer for a landlord, and his deepest desire is to farm a piece of land of his own. He raises a pair of oxen he found as abandoned calves in the forest, but caste prejudice prevents him from ever using them to till land of his own, and his dream remains unfulfilled.¹⁰

The story follows the disintegration of Choma's family. In the film's account, two of his three sons die, one drowning because onlookers refuse to touch an untouchable to save him, while the third seeks to escape his social status by converting to Christianity. His daughter Belli is seduced by the landlord's secretary and then submits to the landlord himself in the hope of settling the family's debt.⁹ A Christian priest tries to convert Choma by promising him two acres of land, but Choma refuses.³

When Choma discovers his daughter's relationship with the landlord, he goes to the forest, releases his precious buffaloes, breaks his plow, and dies a lonely old man madly playing his drum.⁹ The drum, the dudi of the title, is the means through which Choma expresses every emotion of his life, and he plays it until his final breath.¹⁰

The novel and its author

Kota Shivaram Karanth (1902–1997), a Jnanpith Award winner and one of the major figures of twentieth-century Kannada literature, wrote Chomana Dudi in 1933; it is regarded as his major work.⁶^•¹¹ The novel depicts the life of a landless laborer of the holeya caste in the Dakshina Kannada region and the social conditions of the 1930s, including untouchability and the bonded-labor (jeetha) system.¹⁰

A scholarly assessment notes that the novel is remarkable for its period because an untouchable asserts his right to land persistently throughout the story, even before land reforms came into effect, and that it was perhaps one of the earliest works to convey this anxiety.¹² Karanth, though not himself a Dalit, wrote a narrative of untouchable life that was the first of its kind in Kannada literary history, influenced by Gandhian reformist zeal; later criticism also questioned the limits of his progressive commitments, particularly his refusal to allow conversion to Christianity as an alternative for Choma.¹³

Production and crew

B.V. Karanth, a leading figure of the Kannada New Wave, directed the film and composed its music; it was his second feature after Vamshavruksha, and the first he directed independently.⁵^•¹⁴ Shivarama Karanth wrote the screenplay and dialogue.¹⁵ The crew included S. Ramachandra as director of photography and P. Bhaktavatsalam as editor.⁵ Girish Kasaravalli, later one of Kannada cinema's most honored directors, served as associate director, and T.S. Nagabharana as assistant director; both went on to significant directing careers of their own.¹⁵

The film was produced by Ashok Kumar for Praja Films.⁷ Sources disagree on its running time and format: the Bengaluru International Film Festival lists 141 minutes,⁴ the Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema lists 140 minutes (120 minutes in a shorter cut) in black and white,⁶ while Moviebuff lists 2 hours 21 minutes and describes the film as color.⁹

Awards and reception

The film won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film (Golden Lotus) for 1975, the twenty-third film so honored since the award's inception in 1953.¹ M.V. Vasudeva Rao, a non-professional actor who played Choma, received the National Film Award for Best Actor, listed in the Directorate of Film Festivals retrospective of Best Actor winners for 1976.² At the Karnataka State Film Awards for 1975–76 the film was named first best film, with awards for best actor (Vasudeva Rao), best supporting actress (Padma Kumta), best story and best screenplay (K. Shivaram Karanth), and best audiography (Krishnamurthy).¹⁴ It also won the Filmfare Award South for Best Film and Best Director in 1976.⁸

The film is counted among the successful examples of the ruralist New Indian Cinema of the 1970s, and it helped establish the Kannada parallel-cinema movement of that decade, alongside films such as Samskara and Vamshavruksha, that drew national and international attention.⁹^•¹⁶ Fifty years after its release, the film's story returned to public attention through a new Kannada production, Bicchugatthiya Bantana Ballirena, described as stepping into the world of Chomana Dudi.¹⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Indian films (individual works) › Kannada films before 2010

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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