Driven From Home - I

My Mirror column (24 May 2020):

It’s time to revisit Bimal Roy’s 1953 neorealist melodrama, Do Bigha Zamin, which remains one of the earliest and most moving depictions of the urban migrant in Indian cinema

Another poster for Do Bigha Zamin (1953), designed by the artist Chittaprosad

A poster advertising Do Bigha Zamin in the 15 May, 1953 issue of Filmfare contains eight moments from the film etched into memorable black-and-white linocuts by the artist Chittaprosad. Linocut 5, at the centre of the page, foregrounds a young boy, barefoot, a palm held up to his face, as if he's just been slapped. The blank wall to the right is occupied by “Vote For” graffiti, above which is a strategically-placed poster of a gun-toting gangster, captioned “Criminals”. Behind the boy, the Indian city is pared down to its essentials: a mailbox, a lamppost, tall buildings -- and two other children: one polishing shoes under a streetlight, and the other being marched away by a uniformed policeman.

If you have never seen Bimal Roy's era-defining film -- or even if you have -- now is the time to revisit it. Perhaps in this cruel summer of 2020 you will see, as I did, that it is not some timeless tale of a single hard-working farmer stripped of his land by feudal exploitation, but a very particular postcolonial Indian story, in which Shambhu's dispossession is caused much by pre-modern landholding structures as by modern-day legal injustice (perhaps you'll hear the mocking laughter of the lawyers in the courtroom scene, as the non-literate Shambhu's oral calculation of his dues is superseded by the zamindar's duplicitous figures, for which Shambhu's own fingerprints become legal 'evidence'). Perhaps you'll see that this is a film as much about the city as the village, and that while it pinpoints the shortages and shortcuts that already marked the lives of India's urban poor, it is also, like the early cinema of Raj Kapoor, KA Abbas and others, filled with the warmth of nascent urban communities. Perhaps you'll see, like the great Chittaprosad did, that as crucial as the film's adult tragedies are the moral dilemmas of Shambhu's little boy Bachhua (played by Ratan Kumar, a much-favoured child actor of the time, who was soon to be seen polishing shoes again in Prakash Arora's 1954 film Boot Polish, produced by Raj Kapoor). Perhaps you will notice the film's depiction of 1950s Calcutta, with its white colonial buildings gleaming in the sunlight and its neon signs for Kodak and Polar and Castrol and KC Das glittering through the nights, and the poor homeless people who sleep under them – and think about whether the city currently suffering the debilitating effects of Cyclone Amphan is any different.

Bimal Roy, who had begun his career as a camera assistant at Calcutta's New Theatres, moved to Bombay in the early 1950s with a team of talented crew members that included such future stalwarts as Salil Choudhury and Hrishikesh Mukherjee. He had already made his directorial debut in Bengali with Udayer Pathe, which Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen describe in their Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema as “introducing a new era of post-WW2 romantic-realist melodrama that was to pioneer the integration of the Bengal school with that of De Sica”.

Do Bigha Zamin, Roy's Hindi debut, was crucial to continuing that trajectory, and it is unsurprising that it took him back to Calcutta. The film reveals a very particular constellation of influences, reflective of the time and the people who came together in it. The core idea, of a peasant robbed of his small plot by an avaricious zamindar, came from a Rabindranath Tagore poem in Bengali, called 'Dui Bigha Jomi'. The poem was turned into a short story by Salil Choudhury, which also formed the basis of Satyen Bose's Bangla film called Rickshawala. Choudhury's story was reworked into a 24-page screenplay by Hrishikesh Mukherjee (also credited as Editor and Assistant Director), which became a Hindi film with the assistance of Paul Mahendra's Hindi dialogues.

The IPTA connections were also important here. Launched in 1943, the Indian People's Theatre Association was informally affiliated to the Communist Party of India, and had links with the Progressive Writers Association (PWA). It was a nationwide network composed of travelling musical and theatre groups focused on reclaiming and working with vernacular folk traditions in various parts of the country, particularly Bengal, Telengana, Kerala, and later also Assam, Punjab, Orissa and urban centres like Mumbai. “For a brief period following WW2 and in the early years of independence,” write Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, “virtually the entire cultural intelligentsia was associated with or influenced by IPTA/PWA activities...”. Salil Choudhury was a self-taught composer who had been a peasant activist in Bengal, and began his musical journey scoring for IPTA plays. Bimal Roy's own Udayer Pathe also drew heavily on IPTA style. Sahni, too, was a regular IPTA actor, and had previously played a peasant in the IPTA-backed film Dharti Ke Lal (1947).

The Tagore poem does not contain the spectre of the factory as the zamindar's reason for land-acquisition. In it, the dispossessed farmer becomes a mendicant's assistant. But the film -- informed as much by Vittorio De Sica's visuals of a father-son duo grappling with the city in Bicycle Thieves as by the Indian left's understanding of the pressures of industrialisation and urbanisation -- turned its protagonist into a rickshaw-puller on the streets of Calcutta. 

The first part of a two-part column. The second part is here.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 May 2020.