Page 36 - Seniors Today - February Issue

Once Upon a Time | Films

The Cry of the

Land

Deepa Gahlot throws light on a less-successful Balraj Sahni starrer about the

plight of farmers

Dharti Ke Lal (1946) under the manmade Bengal famine of 1943 in
As the farmers’ stir rocks our country, and which five million people reportedly died of
draws attention to the men and women who hunger.
slog to put food on our tables, it is worth The film was produced by the Indian
watching a film that portrayed the plight of People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), the
farmers, made by a man whose writing and group of activists who reached out all over
cinema was always socially and politically India with their plays reflecting the reality
aware—Khwaja Ahmad Abbas. of the underprivileged. That explained the
Dharti Ke Lal (1946), co-scripted by
Abbas and Bijon Bhattacharya, based on
a play, Nabanna, by the latter and a story,
Annadaata by Kishan Chander, the film
predated Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin (1953),
which is also about the calamity befalling a
farmer, and is credited with heralding neo-
realism in Indian cinema. Balraj Sahni was
the common factor in both films.
It was Abbas’s first film as director, and
he had the courage to show the audience Dharti Ke Lal was one of the few films that documented a
poverty and suffering of the farmer, crushed forgotten Indian tragedy

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