‘In gloomy 2013, I was spellbound by these characters’: Tracking down the 20-year-olds of a 1967 India

Chapter 1: MIDNIGHT’S GROWN-UPS

•2015 

For most of last year, practically every fortnight, I dialled a house in Troy, Michigan, trying to speak to a man I had seen in a film half a century old. Let me admit, up front, that I failed. T.N. Subramaniam was unwell when I first called, his wife told me, and if he ever recovered enough for us to have a conversation, I never learned of it; abruptly, in August, his home turned unreachable, the phone ringing endlessly away. No one called back. After months of searching for Subramaniam and thinking about him, I lost my chance to ask him the questions that had gathered, like giant snowdrifts, in my mind. 

My obsession with the film he was in, I Am 20, began in the early autumn of 2013—a dispiriting season for India, a season vacant of cheer or promise. There had been a parade of bad news: outsized corruption, a gummed up economy, politicking of wearying vileness. An uninspiring election was drawing nearer. The nation’s affairs felt soiled and beleaguered, and the very project of India seemed to have gone awry in some profound way. In this troubled climate, I watched I Am 20 for the first time, and then dozens of times more, spellbound by its characters and by the messages it held.

To be sure, I couldn’t easily have seen it before then. Commissioned by the state-run Films Division in 1967, it had kicked around as a filler in cinemas and then for a while on television; only in September 2013, when the Films Division posted a batch of its old productions on YouTube, did I Am 20 become widely available. I can’t remember how I stumbled upon it—following some trail from social media, no doubt—but I do recall the way my skin prickled in recognition. Here were our thoughts and deep worries of today, but fixed on film forty-six years earlier. What sorcery of repetitive history was this? 

The conceit of the documentary—nineteen minutes, black-and white—is straightforward. In 1967, twenty years after the British left India, the filmmaker S.N.S. Sastry was asked to interrogate a host of twenty-year-olds about their fledgling nation. He produced a succession of talking heads, interpolated with images of India that have the cool, detached quality of found footage: trains barrelling over bridges, a tribal folk dance, tall palm trees on a beach, villages and farms and factories, M.A.K. Pataudi (the Nawab, as he was then known) batting in a Test match. Sastry himself never appears on screen, so we can only reconstruct the questions he posed. How much progress has India made? What do you want out of your life in India? Are we better off now than two decades ago? What problems still plague India? What does freedom mean to you? 

What does your country mean to you? 

Stacked up, these questions leak anxiety, as if Sastry asks them in the full expectation of uncomfortable answers. He gets plenty: ‘I don’t have any love for my country,’ declares a gangly fellow hunched over his ukulele, who only moments earlier was crooning the first few bars of the Beatles’s ‘I Should Have Known Better’. One young woman: ‘I think of India when I think of long queues. People waiting patiently for buses, for rations.’ Freedom, an engineering student says, has only meant ‘that man has freedom to starve, to go naked, to die of hunger, and to go uneducated’. 

Complaints emerge about the bribes needed to get into a university, about the swelling population, or the lack of machinery to plough a farm. Some students admit to unexceptional ambitions. ‘I’d like to be a rich young man,’ one says. ‘I believe in high living.’ In the villages, people discuss their poverty—without rancour, but also without visible hope. Perhaps a third of Sastry’s subjects talk in Indian languages: Bengali, Tamil, Hindi or Punjabi. The rest speak English, and the relative loftiness of their class allows them, amid thoughts about dancing and travel and meteorite research, to make some stray expressions of faith in their country. These moments gleam like nuggets of gold in a heap of coal. Behind the images, by way of a soundtrack, runs a sprightly little jig, but as the disappointment congeals, the melody begins to feel ragged and manic. My ear heard discordant notes even when there probably weren’t any. 

More than two dozen people flicker in and out of the film, but there is an undisputed star. He’s the only one allowed the privilege of an introduction. ‘My full name reads T.N. Subramaniam,’ he says, his voice nasal but pleasant. ‘T stands for Tinnevelly, that’s the name of my village. N stands for my father’s name, Neelakanthan. And Subramaniam, of course, is my name.’ He sits at a desk, a plump calculus textbook set before him as a prop. His dense, dark hair would be wavy if he grew it out, but you get the sense that he’d never permit himself such indiscipline. His face is slim; he has a way of tilting it downwards and gazing up at the camera that, combined with his toothy smile, gives him the look of a wise imp. He holds his thick, black-framed glasses in his hands as he speaks, turning them over and over, professorial even at twenty. He is absurdly articulate, and Sastry adores him. 

In turn, Subramaniam adores India. He regards it as an explorer would an unfamiliar land, keen on traversing it thoroughly to chart it for himself. He wants to observe and record his impressions of his compatriots, he says: ‘their songs and their dances … the agony, the anguish and the anger, the fertile soil, the pastures—anything. So that one day, I could open the book and remind myself what I’m part of and what is part of me.’ He starts his sentences with ‘Well,’ as if he has deliberated upon these ideas for years: ‘Well, it seems to me the fashion today to denigrate the country, and when two people meet, they get into a sort of competition about who can abuse the government better.’ He urges the long view: ‘I would say our achievement is that we have a hopeful tomorrow. Our failure is that our today is very precarious.’ The film’s last words are his. ‘If all the people in this country who didn’t fancy their prospects in it were allowed to quit, I think I’d stay. Because it’s something big. It’s a huge experiment, and I would like to be a part of it.’ 

I was drawn to Subramaniam, this garrulous man only two years older than my father, their names a tweak away from each other. But really I was curious about everybody in the film: the pessimists and the optimists, the brash and the thoughtful, the chap who sang the Beatles and the woman who was tired of standing in queues. In that gloomridden September of 2013, locating the men and women of I Am 20 began to feel like a vital and urgent task. I wanted to know what they had done with their lives, how their opinions had held up, and what they thought of our country today. 

This essay was first published in The Economist-1843 in 2015 and has been anthologised with permission in The Web Beneath the Waves (2026).

Excerpted with permission from Samanth Subramanian’s The Web Beneath the Waves: And Other Reports from Our Tangled World, Westland Books (2026).