Do Bigha Zamin: Traces of Italian neo realism and Socialist Realism in Indian Cinema

Film: Do Bigha Zameen (1953)

Director: Bimal Roy

Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zamin is a confident foray in the field of neorealism in Indian Cinema. Reminiscent of Italian neo-realist films of the likes of Vittorio de Sica and the Socialist Realist films of the Soviet era, Do Bigha Zamin secures a comfortable place among the classics of Indian neo-realist cinema among other classics of Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Shyam Benegal, etc. 

The film opens with a close shot of the soil where Shambhu's (Balraj Sahni) family has toiled for years. This is the Do Bigha Zamin the film refers to. A narration follows in the backdrop informing the audience that the village has suffered for the last two years because of a devastating drought. But a few seconds later, the gloom seems to disappear as the camera moves up to the shot of a cloudy sky, and a song celebrating the imminent downpour begins, along with the downpour itself. 

Farmers, who have been placed in the situation of precarity because of irregular monsoon patterns in India, seem to be lifted out of their misery all too naturally, easily and within the first five minutes of the film. The biggest villain so to speak is conveniently defeated by the torrential downpour right at the beginning of the story.

This places in a critical context the actual villain of the story- that being the fact that even if the farmers are palliatively lifted out of their precarity, through nature itself, the man-made Capitalist apparatus poses and equal if not a more ominous threat. The occurrence of droughts have been the common adversary of protagonists in Indian cinema, but by sidelining natural adversaries as almost trivial, the plot serves an interesting and effective socialist purpose very cleverly.

Soon the figures of the Bourgeois Mill-owner and the Feudal Zamindar are introduced into the landscape of the rural village. Their intentions cut across clearly establishing the fundamental conflict of the film. The Mill Capitalist wishes to buy the lands of the farmers (which actually are owned by the Zamindar) to open his mill. However, there's one catch. A part of the land, the 'Do bigha zamin' the mill owner wants to possess, is owned by Shambhu who owes a heavy debt to the Zamindar. 

The initial and most fundamental conflict gets established when the peasants are seen talking amongst themselves about the certainty of losing their land, to which one of the peasants interjects by stating that a fraction of the Land belongs to Shambhu and Shambhu reaffirms that he will never be willing to sell the land, thereby hoping that others too retain their landholdings.

The Landlord and the Mill-Owner are also aware of this obstacle but the Zamindar assuages the fears of the capitalist by telling him that Shambhu is indebted by himself and that he shall snatch away his land by any means possible. This scene establishes early collusion of the Feudal remnants of the society like the Zamindar, with the nascent ruling class of capitalists in newly independent India. Another matter of detail is the fact that the Zamindar is worried that he will have to undergo 'enforced dissolution' (Heilbroner) of his money capital in circumstances of 'uncertain recapture', introducing the audience to the basic primal fears of the feudal class while undertaking these newly springing capitalist ventures as they become increasingly forced to adapt from a Feudal Mode of Production to a Capitalist one. This fear of the feudal landlord is addressed by the Capitalist as he says 'money attracts more money" as a minor hint towards the M-C-M' circuit of Capitalist production, while the camera skillfully moves to the bloated abdomen of the capitalist which trembles as he laughs.

Ultimately, through financial trickery, Shambhu is forced to repay the debt of Rs. 265 (whereas the original debt was much less), within a period of three months and, is rendered utterly helpless about the accumulation of the sum. Perturbed by this problem, Shambhu sees migrating to Calcutta in search of a temporary vocation to accumulate the funds. Eventually, Shambhu travels to Calcutta, accompanied by his son, Kanhaiya whom he adoringly refers to as 'Bachua' in hopes of a better life.

The shot that establishes the father-son duo in the city of Calcutta is heavily reminiscent of the landmark Italian neorealist film 'The Bicycle Thieves' by Vittorio de Sica. A gullible and vulnerable central object, the father-son duo, navigating the lanes of a big city, completely baffled and at the same time dejected by its many amusements and disappointments respectively. They sleep at the footsteps of a landmark on their first night in Calcutta, only to be shoved away by a policeman displaying the inherent class bias present in the Feudal-Bourgeoisie State apparatus. Their belongings which also had all their money get stolen minutes after they fall asleep, establishing the morality of the city as a whole. The subject of thieving is established in the first place here to which we shall return later in the analysis.

Shambhu is portrayed effectively as an orthodox idealist, who believes in everything that is good in the world. This trait is established through frequent actions of the character like giving the money that he had earned by driving a fellow flatmate's rickshaw on account of the flatmate being sick, to the flatmate. He beats up his son when he gets to know that his son had committed an act of theft to bring him money to help the family. He drives two children to their school for free even after their father had discontinued the service due to financial constraints. He believes that the only way of reaching somewhere in life is through good old hard work. The climax, when the family gets dispossessed of their land due to non-repayment of the debt, makes the audience wonder that things would have turned out differently if Shambhu had accepted the money that his son had stolen.

On account of the theme of thieving in the film, three notable acts of theft occur. Again, reminiscent of 'The Bicycle Thieves' when finally the father-son duo also steals a bicycle, Shambhu's son in the film acts similarly. Kanhaiya's friend, who is a pickpocket, remarks that theft is not immoral since the pockets of these rich people are nothing but banks that have his own money deposited in there. This one dialogue has the potential to cast profound questions on the system of the s divide, and more importantly, on the concept of appropriation of surplus-value. A Marxist take on the dialogue would all too conveniently reveal the fact that the money in the pockets of the bourgeois class is nothing but stolen or appropriated surplus value which is actually produced by the working class. Thus, on the morality of the act of thievery, social commentary is effectively placed in the film asking the viewer to raise important questions. 

Capitalism has, over the years sold to people this fantasy of merit and reward in a capitalist society. The fantasy that the harder you work, the more rewarding your reward is, has been the pet favorite of advocates of capitalism over two and a half centuries. This film particularly exposes this myth by playing a dialectical device. The harder Shambhu worked, that is, the faster he ran with his hand-rickshaw, the riskier it became eventually leading to an almost fatal accident making him injure his limbs and breaking his hand rickshaw. Moreover, the family literally 'did their best' as Shambhu worked tirelessly the entire day, his wife worked as a construction worker even while she was pregnant, and their son polished the shoes of rich people all-day. Despite their best, the family is not able to repay the debt of Rs. 235. This fact raises important questions of whether merit is actually valued in a capitalistic society and whether stealing and thieving become the only logically valid acts of succeeding under capitalism. 

There is also a depiction of strong solidarities of the working class in this film. Shambhu's neighbor teaches him to drive a hand-rickshaw, Kanhaiya's friend teaches him to polish shoes and even gives his earnings and that of their other friends to Kanhaiya on account of the treatment of his injured father, highlighting the dictum of 'from each according to his ability to each according to his needs', and Kanhaiya's pickpocket friend gives him the gold chain that he had scored after learning about the situation of the indebtedness of the family. Even the elderly landlady of Shambhu in Calcutta expresses peculiar bonds of solidarity with his family. Another form of social solidarity is found between two women, one being Shambhu's wife and the other being her upper-class friend. The notable point in this particular solidarity is that the upper-class friend advances funds to Shambhu's wife after seeing her plight, thus formin a feminist solidarity cutting across class structures.

Technically, influences from Soviet formalism and Socialist Realism also are derived in the film. One of the most defining shots of the film, where the protagonist Shambhu is racing across the streets of Calcutta, increasing his speed with every step as he is commanded to do so by the elite passenger, a second montage shot is inserted, that of a horse forcedly dragging away a carriage beside Shambhu, increasing its pace with every step as he is whipped by his owner. The two shots cut to each other in a fluctuating manner creating the impression of absolute similarity between the two situations acting as a technique to reduce Shambhu (and representatively the Proletariat) as a mere animal being commanded by his master. This type of montage is what the Soviet Formalist filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein termed as an 'Intellectual Montage' where two seemingly different shots form to find a coherent whole from which a higher, transcendental meaning is to be derived which is deeper and closer to the truth than those individual shots treated separately. This scene thus represents an excellent depiction of the Kuleshov effect as performed by Sergei Eisenstein through the device of the 'Intellectual Montage'. However, 'Do Bigha Zamin' departs from Eisenstein's style of filmmaking as a portrayal of collective emotions instead of individual and subjective understandings of the psyche. In this sense, 'Do Bigha Zamin' presents a highly individualized style of filmmaking which is reminiscent of the work of other Socialist Realist filmmakers like Pudovkin's 'Mother' and Mikhail Kalatozov's ' The Cranes are Flying' representing oppression through individual agony.

 A running theme in the film is made up of how the peasant family is continually dispossessed of their means of subsistence through different agents. First was the idea of accumulation of dispossession by the nexus of the Zamindar and the Capitalist, then dispossession of judicial rights by the judiciary with its inherent class bias itself, then dispossession of their belongings by a thief, a reflection of the metropolitan/urban ethics, who we see only briefly emphasizing the role of the systemic structure in manufacturing of thieves and not the thief as an individual himself, then dispossession of their right to use the public space for sleeping by the police, then Shambhu's wife being dispossessed of her savings by a lecherous rapist, symbolizing all too conveniently the all-pervasive misogyny of the society, then Shambhu being dispossessed of his means to work by a rich couple, using the working class as their playthings, then Shambhu's family being dispossessed of their future child due to a car accident, and finally the family as a whole being dispossessed of the very land that was theirs, being dispossessed of the very soil itself, which Shambhu when picks up towards the final scene in the movie, is quickly rebuked by the guard of the mill, to throw away.

And of late, one could make the claim that the working class protagonist has been dispossessed ruthlessly of their place in Indian cinema too.