Do Bigha Zamin

After watching the Satyajit Ray films, The Apu Trilogy (1955-1959) and Devi (1960), I decided to check out some of the realistic films directed by other Bengali filmmakers during that same era. One of the films I found was Do Bigha Zamin, which won the International Prize at the 1954 Cannes Film Festival.

Although it's a Hindi-language film, and therefore technically a 'Bollywood' movie, the film's director Bimal Roy is from Bengal, thus the film has more in common with Bengali art cinema than it does with mainstream Bollywood as a result. The film does have a few musical numbers, like a lot of other Hollywood and Bollywood movies of that era, but what sets Do Bigha Zamin apart is its greater sense of realism. Beyond the few musical numbers, the film itself doesn't have much melodrama to it and there isn't much of a background score either, which is a good thing to me as a sappy or sentimental score isn't necessary for a film like this.

Do Bigha Zamin is very much a character-driven drama and the actors did a great job in portraying their respective characters. The performances which stand out most are Balraj Sahni as the farmer Shambu, the protagonist of the story, and the child actor Rattan Kumar as his son Kanhaiya. Nirupa Roy also gave a very good performance as Shambu's wife Paro.

As for Bimal Roy's direction, the film has one of the best depictions of poverty I've ever seen, covering both rural poverty in a Bengali village and urban poverty in Calcutta (now Kolkata), including the plight of street kids living in the city's slums. The film's ending was also powerful and it was overall a very moving film.

8/10

Do Bigha Zamin is one of the pioneering films of 1950's starting the trend of parallel cinema. Bimal Roy like his other contemporary Bengali director in golden period of Indian film industry took an important social problem an converted into a 142min of struggle,misery and poverty. Protagonist Shambu (Balraj Sahni) is forced to sell his land 2 Bigha(unit) by Zameedar who wants to build a factory by demanding debt once given on interest.court ordered Shambu to pay in 3 months for which Shambu goes to Calcutta-the cruel city.city takes test of Shambu and his son Kanhaiya(Ratan Kumar) to save each penny. Balraj as usual looked perfect in his character of Shambu Mahto but for me real surprise was child artist Ratan Kumar who outplayed every other actor. Salil Chaudhary used music very smartly to not make film dramatic and keep it as real as possible.Bimal Roy was inspired from Vittorio De Sica's bicycle thieves which is landmark film in world cinema .2 Bigha Zameen was praised by critics internationally and won first Filmfar and international prize in Cannes. Bimal Roy's magic took our Shambu to the heart of west and still maintained Indian.

Bicycle Thieves is a very touching Italian movie. But this one is our own native version of that. With genuine plot and out-of-the-world cinematography, Do Bigha Zamin is Indian masterpiece.

The actors are terrific, totally portraying the characters given to them. Music, direction, screenplay & the execution is all marvelous. Even today, this works because it talks about poverty, life, emotions, relationships & virtues. Fantastic. Moreover, the intricacy with which details are kept in focus should be the USP of this film. 9.1/10.

BOTTOM LINE: Get that DVD right now. A must-watch.

Can be watched with a typical Indian family? YES

Profanity: No | Sex/Nudity: No | Violence: Very Mild | Gore: No | Alcohol/Smoking: No | Drugs: Mild (Hookah)

Of course it is true that Do Bigha Zamin is strongly influenced by Vittorio de Sica's neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves (very improperly retitled Bicycle Thief in the English version). But De Sica's film has influenced virtually every realist film (and many non-realist films) ever since the day it first appeared. It is a crucial reference in world cinema and will probably always remain one.

It was of course particularly influential on all the Indian neo-realists of the fifties, including the greatest of them all - Satyajit Ray. Roy, like Ray a Bengali, would have imbibed that influence before ever he abandoned New Theatres in Calcutta to come to Bombay. He is not an especially innovative director. Devdas (1955) for instance is essentially a Hindi remake of a thirties classic of Bengali cinema; other Roy films show an eclectic range of influences. So it is not surprising to find him in Do Bigha Zamin attempting to adapt the style (and to some extent) the structure of Bicycle Thieves to an Indian context.

Once one has admitted that, however, it should not I think be seen as some sort of shameful plagiarism and one can go on to appreciate some of the real plusses of Roy's film. It is true that it is less restrained than the Italian model; Roy piles on the agony in no uncertain terms and tends to oversentimentalize. Note however that he resists any facile optimism...

The adaptation to a rural Indian context alters the politics of the film, concentrating on the issue (a burning issue to this day in rural India) of the cycle of debt and exploitation to which small peasant farmers in India are subjected (a theme that Mehboob Kahn had already explored in his film Aurat and would do again most famously in Mother India in 1957). This is a less subtle theme perhaps than that of De Sica (where in an urban context it is the poor who steal from the poor and prolong the cycle of misery) but it is nonetheless an important one and Roy (and Balraj Sahni who is excellent) paints a convincing picture of village-life and rural values.

Roy very deliberately counterbalances the picture of misery (rural and urban) with examples of solidarity, of the poor helping the poor, whether on the level of the adults or of the street-boys. And perhaps the most touching and most natural part of Roy's film - and something that owes nothing to De Sica - is his portrayal of the street-kids of Calcutta (which very interestingly prefigures Mira Nair's much later Salaam Bombay). Instead of being isolated companions as in the De Sica film, the father and son in Roy's film experience two rather different aspects of urban life and this layering of the story is perhaps Roy's most significant achievement.

Can one put paid once and for all, finally, to this idea that a realistic film or a film showing social awareness is uncharacteristic of Indian cinema (based on an essentially modern image of "Bollywood")? The golden age of Indian cinema (say 1949 to 1964) abounds in realistic films and films which, while not necessarily realistic in a strict sense of the term, show a good deal of social awareness. It is the period that includes the most memorable films of Satyajit Ray, Rithwik Gathak and Tapan Sinha, the films of Guru Dutt, the early films of Raj Kapoor, those of Bimal Roy, Mehboob Kahn's Mother India but also amongst relatively minor films, Arora's Boot Polish and B R Chopra's Naya Daur. To say nothing of great films in a non-realistic genre such as Mughal-e-Azam (1960) and Pakeezah (largely filmed during the period although not completed until 1972). By comparison with any contemporary cinema anywhere in the world including certainly American cinema, including even that of Japan (also experiencing something of a golden age at that time), it is a very impressive record.

Roy may not be amongst the first rank of cinematic geniuses - I would not put him in the same class as Ray or Gathak or for that matter as Guru Dutt, in my view the finest of the Hindi film directors of the period. He was a populariser (quite determinedly so) and constituted as such an important bridge between the more 'arty' Bengali and more 'popular' Hindi film industries of the time. His contribution remains an important and enduring one to an Indian cinema (and a popular Indian cinema) of real quality that has nothing to do with "Bollywood"...

Made in 1953, with a socialist theme that was typical of many great bengali directors, this was a great film with superlative performances and very real feel to the film. Balraj Sahni, one of the five greatest actors of India ever, was simply stunning in this movie in terms of his natural acting and superior understanding of the life of a peasant first and then a novice rickshaw (two wheel cart pulled by a human, instead of the horse) puller fresh in the city (He naturally doesn't know that once u take a passenger to the destination, u have to hold it down so that the passenger can alight - he nervously waits for his first dime)..Ill have to come back and write more..sorry