The first cowboy film in India

The idea of ‘Mosagallaki Mosagadu’ came from my brother Krishna. My brother became popular with James Bond films like ‘Goodachari 116’ and ‘James Bond 777’ and others. In Chennai, Hollywood films like ‘Meckanna’s Gold’, ‘Good Bad and Ugly’ were screened successfully. With those films as inspiration, my brother decided to make an action film with cowboy backdrop. I went to scout the location at Bikaner. We couldn’t put a lot of money at that time, because there was a constraint on budget. We planned in a big way with colour and shooting outdoors. The distributors gave only half of the money for this film.
For ‘Mosagallaki Mosagadu’ my other brother Hanumantha Rao took leave and joined the production. Popular producer Chakrapani was my father’s friend and he encouraged my brother Krishna. Every day he used to come to our sets and after seeing the costumes, he commented, ‘who will watch this film?’ Immediately, my brother Hanumantha Rao replied, the way you are coming for the last few days, the audience will also come to theatres. Arudra was the writer and KSR Das directed the film which was shot in Bikaner and Shimla and because of the budget constraints, only Krishna, Vijaya Nirmala, Nagabhushanam and Jyothi Lakshmi travelled on flight and all the other actors travelled by train. Today, the producer is like a cashier, but at that time producer’s involvement was a lot in filmmaking. We needed a desert so we went to Rajasthan and used the local forts and other locations for the film with Rs 7 lakh and it was a huge success. We completed the film in 35 days. The film screened for film people in Chennai, but many gave negative reviews. NT Rama Rao also watched the film and told Krishna that family audiences may not watch this film. But the film was a big hit and it was the first cowboy film in India. The film was dubbed into many other Indian languages. We approached the Russian Embassy and got people’s help to dub the film into Russian and likewise the British Embassy to dub it into English. The film was a big hit in Hindi, Tamil, Bengali and other languages too.