A history of Hindi cinema: The 1950s

Welcome to a seven-part series on the History Of Hindi Cinema. Through individual films and the larger oeuvres of some Hindi filmmakers, we’ll explore the highlights of 70 years of cinema, starting with 1950, just three years after India won its independence from British rule, and ending in the 2010s.

You may have at least a passing familiarity with international blockbusters like Lagaan or RRR. But in-depth coverage of the Indian film industry is a daunting task. India officially recognizes 22 languages (even more are not recognized, and many have dozens of dialects). Films are made in most of those languages, and each of those separate film industries is vibrant and popular, influencing Indian cinema as a whole with a variety of outlooks, artistic conventions, and traditions.

Of these, Hindi cinema tends to be the most widely exported, owing in part to the diaspora of Hindi-speaking Indians, but also due to the buying power of the Hindi film industry, which is headquartered in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), in the state of Maharashtra. However, international awareness of Indian films in languages from other regions of the country has skyrocketed in the last 20 years, especially films made in Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam. 

Were this a series about seven decades of Indian cinema, it would entail watching seven decades of films in at least as many languages, as well as research into how these different eras impacted different film industries and the cultures in which their audiences went to the movies. I was born in New Delhi, and left with my Hindi- and Bengali-speaking cinephile parents for America at the age of nine. I grew up regularly watching and reading about Hindi and Bengali films. As much as I’d love to honor all the film industries of my home country, Hindi cinema is a good starting point for anyone who would like to explore the South Asian subcontinent’s cinematic output.

A few notes about the selection criteria:

– Hindi films (and most Indian films in general) are often structured like musicals, featuring at least four songs. If you can feel an emotion, there’s probably a Hindi song about it. In the early days of the industry, a film’s score was an enormous draw for the audience—film music was and is released months prior to the premiere, to drum up interest in the film—and this remains true today. Music is an essential part of Indian culture, appealing to everyone regardless of class or religion. Working-class filmgoers in particular had to save up for ages to afford movie tickets, and wanted to be lost in a narrative that took them away from their daily troubles, hence songs set in beautiful fields, elaborate wedding dance numbers, and grandiose choreographed fantasy set pieces. Hindi directors figured out that music alone was a way to sell tickets, so many underwhelming films feature spectacular music. This is occasionally successful, but films should be films, not a few scenes of dialogue-linking songs. The selected films have a proportional relationship between quality of film and quality of music—and, at least in the 1950s, good quality films with good quality music were the norm, not the exception.

– Each decade of Hindi cinema is dominated by a handful of excellent directors. Though the films are listed in no particular order, sometimes a director’s entire filmography is worthy of exploration.

– This list is by no means exhaustive. If your favorite isn’t listed here, feel free to mention it in the comments!

– The 1930s and 1940s—both important periods of Hindi cinema—are not included because while prints can be found on YouTube, their quality ranges from mediocre to unwatchable. More importantly, the Hindi film industry properly took off post-independence, incorporating lessons from the fight for self-governance as a theme into stories about poverty, women’s rights, and equality. At that point in Indian history, cinema was the only form of popular media under private control. (The nation’s public radio broadcaster, Akashvani, formerly known as All India Radio, has been in state hands since 1936; India’s first private radio station began broadcasting in 2001, and private production of television news began only in 1995.) Filmmakers felt compelled to incorporate some form of social messaging into their movies. This became a diminished priority as time went on, as we’ll explore in the 1960s through 2010s.

Raj Kapoor’s directorial filmography, especially Awaara (The Vagabond) (1951)

It would take several volumes to explain the impact of the Kapoor family on not just films, but Hindi-language pop culture as a whole. Sometimes I compare them to the American Newmans, seemingly all of whom write music. If you’re a Kapoor, you are likely, on some level, involved in the moviemaking business; that name will appear frequently in this series.

Raj Kapoor’s father Prithviraj is considered a founding member of the Hindi film industry, and he stars in Awaara as the strict, moralizing Judge Raghunath, who firmly holds that the son of a good man will himself be a good man, while the son of a criminal will always turn out to be a scoundrel. Jagga (K. N. Singh), a man the judge convicts of rape without any proof, vows revenge and kidnaps the judge’s wife, Leela (Leela Chitnis), but releases her when he learns she is pregnant. In a direct parallel to the story of Rama and Sita in the Hindu epic the Ramayana, gossip fuels suspicion that Leela was impregnated by Jagga, and Raghunath casts his wife out into the street.

Now impoverished, Leela scrimps and saves to turn her son Raj (played in childhood by Raj Kapoor’s youngest brother Shashi, who would go onto an illustrious career in film as an adult) into a judge, just like his father. Her anxiety for her son’s future causes her to become temporarily insane; desperate, Raj turns to petty crime. 

His first theft lands him in juvenile detention: Raj is arrested because he steals bread to feed his mother. A piece of bread lands on his plate during lunch at juvie, and Raj begins laughing, mania gleaming in his eyes. It’s a disturbing, unnatural sound, the emotional devastation of its timbre something no child should know. Awaara seamlessly segues to his adult years—Raj is now played by Raj Kapoor himself, whose physical performance tips a hat to Charlie Chaplin, who had a profound influence on him—and the smash hit song “Awaara Hoon” (“I Am A Vagabond,” said to be one of Chairman Mao’s favorite songs). Even though Raj’s happy-go-lucky nature is evident in the jaunty tune, it’s just as clear that beneath that cheery veneer is a sea of madness, desolation, and shame.

There are films and TV series throughout history in which the audience can tell the two leads are in love off-camera. Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer in True Blood, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep; both Juzo Itami and Federico Fellini conveyed their love for their wives Nobuko Miyamoto and Giulietta Masina, respectively, via their camera lens. The long-married Raj Kapoor conducted a nine-year affair with Awaara star Nargis, and the moment when Raj, now a lifelong criminal, rekindles a relationship with his childhood sweetheart Rita (Nargis), the screen almost audibly crackles. His eyes crinkle in flirtatious amusement, her face trembles with joy. There may not be a more erotic sight in black-and-white Hindi cinema than the moment Raj and Rita stand close, drowning in the other’s gaze, Raj’s hand playing absentmindedly with the draped end of Rita’s chiffon sari. Rita’s love inspires Raj to go straight, but no one will hire a former felon. Awaara repeatedly questions the values of a society that so severely limits its social safety net that a child is punished for trying to help feed his mother, but refuses to play a part in eliminating recidivism.  

As per the proud Hindi film traditions of karma and not escaping your past sins, Raghunath comes face-to-face with his son—the former, an old friend of Rita’s father, is now guardian to her and fostered her ambitions to become a lawyer. He rejects Raj as a candidate for marriage, and is even more convinced he’s done the right thing when the young man is accused of murder. Rita, now Raj’s attorney, argues self-defense, since Raj killed his criminal underworld boss who attacked Leela, but Raghunath testifies in court that a man who has no information about his father’s identity is guaranteed to commit crimes. Something breaks inside Raj when he’s on the stand. His scruffy, carefree demeanor gives way to the delirium beneath, and he cries out that he’s guilty, he knows he is, but that the court should care about the other children being dehumanized by deprivation and poverty at that very moment—children who will also turn to crime as a way out of their lot in life. 

Despite its untraditional ending, Awaara is an ancestor of the masala film model that became popular in the 1970s. It was common for an early Hindi film to combine social themes, romance, thriller elements, and family drama to create a varied palette. Later in the 20th century, it became standard practice to add even more ideas: very literal acts of god, Hollywood-inspired action setpieces, item songs, etc. Awaara’s strength lies in its balancing act. Brief moments of Raj interacting with stray dogs (Kapoor was a dog lover) hint at his inner humanity. Nargis is the heart of the film, with a no-nonsense, sophisticated exterior and a sweet, loving interior. Every character has a fully developed backstory, their motivations clear, their evolution understandable. Aside from certain interior spaces, the film’s locations are all real places in and around Mumbai, allowing the audience to see what their newly independent nation looked like.

Certain aspects of the film, however, haven’t stood the test of time, including Raj’s physical abuse of Rita. Nonetheless, Awaara was a landmark Hindi film, a blockbuster not only in India, but also in China and the Soviet Union, where the film set box office records that stood for decades. Both nations only permitted the screenings of international films that portrayed socialist themes, and generations of moviegoers in those countries grew up loving the film’s melodies and characters. Awaara is even referenced in Jia Zhangke’s 2000 film Platform; set during the Cultural Revolution, the film opens with a packed audience rapturously watching Kapoor sing.

Though other Kapoor films will be featured over the course of this series, Awaara remains groundbreaking. Its performances influenced every actor who came after—generations of Hindi film actresses talk about studying Nargis’ performance, and male actors to this day try to imitate Kapoor’s emotionally charged yet vulnerable vagabond; its writing and direction provided a slightly different model to the socially conscious storytelling common at the time, proving that concern for society could be coupled with romance, suspense, and comedy. Its music is as recognizable today—in multiple countries including Bulgaria, Afghanistan, and Turkey, where the film was remade eight times—as the Indian national anthem. The film competed for Palme d’Or at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival. And at the time of the film’s creation, Kapoor was only 27.

Guru Dutt’s filmography, specifically Baazi (The Gamble) (1951) and Kaagaz Ke Phool (Paper Flowers) (1959)

India has never produced a director as talented or influential as Guru Dutt, which is why it’s an incredible crime that not a single interview with the writer, actor, and director survives to this day. Everything we know about him, his ethos, his ideas, is based on the recollections of those closest to him. Still, you can’t go wrong with watching any of his films. His acting was rooted in sensitivity and pathos. His writing, depending on the occasion, ranged from eclectic and moody to insouciant and silly. His unparalleled direction challenged his contemporaries to explore their reliance on conventions. Dutt was an auteur, exerting extreme artistic control over his work, which he largely performed with the same creative team. What they achieved together remains more meaningful than any of their independent efforts.

When Dutt was new to the Hindi film industry, he met up-and-coming leading man Dev Anand (who grew into one of India’s biggest stars and will appear more in the 1960s). They promised each other that if Anand was hired for a film, he’d ensure Dutt directed it, and if Dutt directed a film, he’d hire Anand as its lead. Under these auspices, along with a little bit of inspiration from Charles Vidor’s Gilda, Baazi was born. 

Legendary actor Balraj Sahni’s sole screenwriting credit, Baazi created the genre known as Bombay Noir. All the classic noir tropes are present: a femme fatale who knows her way around an acoustic guitar and gowns that ride the line between tasteful and slinky; shadows, smoking, gambling, hidden identities. But Dutt’s direction plays with the growing public realization that the city was a center of vice, where deprivation and uncontrollable urges led to danger. Like Ross Macdonald and Dashiell Hammett’s treatment of Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively, Dutt’s Mumbai is shrouded in darkness, the truth is ever evasive, and competing interests prevent you from doing your job.

The story is fairly simple: Madan (Anand), an intelligent, daring gambler, dressed rakishly in Western attire including a tilted newsboy cap and a casual cravat (these became Anand’s trademarks), is hired by the shady boss of the Star Hotel to lure wealthy patrons to its underground casino. But Madan only gambles because he can’t find work, and has to cobble money together for his tuberculosis-ridden sister. The club employs Leena (Geeta Bali), a dancer and singer who is immediately attracted to and feels protective of Madan; for his part, while he’s not romantically interested, he is drawn to her warmth and they serve as each other’s confidante. 

Given that this is from the ‘50s, when the protagonist’s love interest had to be purer than pure, Kalpana Kartik plays Dr. Rajani, the daughter of a wealthy man who has set up a clinic in the slum where Madan lives. The latter distrusts her motives—and there’s a fair amount of sexist dialogue in their interactions—but he’s moved by her sincere efforts to help his sister obtain medical care. Naturally, Rajani and Madan fall in love, and even more naturally, her nameless father (K. N. Singh) disapproves of the match. Complicating Madan’s work and love lives is the presence of Inspector Ramesh (Krishan Dhawan), Rajani’s childhood friend and suitor, who spends his working hours trying to unravel the secrets of the Star Hotel.

Baazi isn’t without drawbacks. Kartik was never a good actor, and compared to Leena’s effortless charm and wit, Rajani is wooden. Unlike many of the films on this list, Baazi hews faithfully to convention. What merits its inclusion, though, is Dutt’s direction and V. Ratra’s cinematography. The Star Club’s owner is shady, literally: his office is a cavern, lit so he remains shrouded in darkness, while any visitor is fully visible to him. Cigarette smoke winds its way through the frame, concealing intentions while inviting the audience to think more deeply about its morally compromised characters. Ratra’s career includes several films that will appear in this series, although interestingly, cinematographer V.K. Murthy, whose seminal work with Dutt we will explore shortly, served as Ratra’s chief assistant. He claimed that he actually did all the work on Baazi because Ratra was too busy having a good time on set, and Dutt, impressed by Murthy’s ideas and their mutual commitment to perfectionism, hired him as the cinematographer for all his future films.

Bali’s costumes are also remarkably daring for the time. In her opening song-and-dance number, “Sharmaye Kahe” (“Why Shy Away?”), she dons a crop top not dissimilar to a sari blouse, but her nipples are covered, and therefore highlighted, with circular patches. For a film industry home to a 27-year-gap between on-screen kissing (first in 1933’s black-and-white Karma, second in 1960’s Mera Naam Joker), this is quite the bold marker of a woman’s choices.

Awaara and Baazi are both antecedents to the “angry young man” trope that Amitabh Bachchan would mine into a blockbuster career starting in the 1970s. Films built along these lines held that few turned to crime out of an innate desire to wrong others; instead, thievery and gambling were the only things that had given these young men any sense of security, hope, or achievement. Society’s prejudices denied them the right to a life where they could hold up their heads, and higher education, plus the white collar professions to which it led, were a pipe dream for anyone not born to an educated, upwardly mobile household. There is an element of deep tragedy in the ’50s version of this male hero, but by the ’70s, this archetype changed its appearance, embracing violence and crime as a response to psychological trauma and a country not designed to handle millions of unemployed young people.

Kaagaz Ke Phool is a film you let wash over you, and after the end title rolls, it stays within you, carved into your soul. It’s a film that questions the loyalty of a system that will lay out the red carpet when you do what it likes, just as quickly as it’ll snatch it from under your feet. It’s a film that depicts the impossibility of love in a place that only wants emotion from you when someone yells “Action!” Its stunning visual and textual self-reflexivity stands shoulder to shoulder with Fellini’s 8 ½.

Suresh (Dutt) is a director who, even at the height of his fame, feels bemused by the adoration of his viewing public. He gives filmmaking his all, but isn’t sure what to make of the rapturous reception he receives. One of the film’s best early sequences shows Suresh standing far down the corridor of a particularly palatial movie theater. As the crowds exit the screening, he slowly, somewhat reluctantly, walks toward them. They sing his name, beg for autographs, snap photos, drape him in garlands. All Suresh can do is look stunned as the fans emerge like a tidal wave, drowning him as they move the current along. And Sachin Dev Burman’s haunting “Dekhi Zamane Ki Yaari” (“I Have Witnessed The World’s Friendship”), sung by Mohammed Rafi in a mournful voice practically slurred by tears, plays in a tumultuous roar.

Kaifi Azmi’s lyrics are both beautiful and chilling. My (very rough) translation of the song from Suresh’s perspective is as follows:

I have witnessed the world’s friendship / one by one they left till none remained / What do I have left with which to meet the world / I have nothing but tears / Once there were only flowers in my domain / now I do not even hope for thorns

But it’s the next stanza, from the world’s perspective, that lands like a one-two punch to the soul: 

Time is gracious / and desire still alive / who has time to worry about tomorrow? / Let this moment continue, let these forms collide / Let colors bounce, let wine enchant / The whole night the world is your guest / And when the night is gone, so is happiness

There are fewer fans in Suresh’s private life: his ex-wife, who has long since fled their marital home for her wealthy, snobby parents’ mansion, refuses to grant him joint custody of their teenage daughter, who is always happy to see her father when he visits her boarding school, but is consumed by insecurity and wants her parents to get back together. Insufficient evidence is given to explain what caused his ex-wife to leave, but there’s a haunting moment that implies deep trauma. Someone phones his ex after Suresh is in a car accident. The camera slowly drifts up the stairs, listening to her side of the conversation. She expresses concern for his condition, but her repeated refusal to tend to him causes her voice to rise in panic. We see only a sliver of her after she hangs up, and she’s hyperventilating. 

Shanti (Waheeda Rehman) is a sole bright spot in Suresh’s world. They meet on a rainy night. He scolds her for being without a coat, she replies that she’s poor, and he gives her his. When she turns up at his studio to return the coat, she accidentally walks into a take, and instead of calling “Cut!” Suresh asks her questions, inadvertently filming a screen test. He decides she should be the heroine of his upcoming film, but there’s a deeper recognition at work too. Wordlessly, Shanti and Suresh fill in the gaps in each other’s lives, their love blossoming out of a silent respect and empathy for each other’s pain. The film they make together is a hit, but their love simply cannot be. Their impossible relationship is explored in a song practically every Indian knows, and even if “Waqt Ne Kiya Kya Haseen Sitam” (“Time Has Done A Great Injustice”) wasn’t an all-time classic—S. D. Burman’s plucky strings practically feel like thorns pricking your body—its cinematography and direction are stunning. You’d never know that Murthy’s groundbreaking lighting was created on an empty soundstage using a beam from an exhaust fan, sunlight bounced off several mirrors, and nothing else.

What deepens the scene is what was happening in Dutt’s life off-camera. He was married to Geeta Dutt (née Ghosh), who sings the song above, but was having an affair with his co-star Rehman. In effect, his wife sang a heartbreaking song not only about the doomed love between her husband and his mistress, but that in her own marriage. Though Dutt exercised extreme control over his work life, he was not a good husband (he wouldn’t let his wife sing for any films but the ones his studio made), and struggled with alcoholism and depression his entire life. His methods were unconventional—Dutt urged his comic relief Johnny Walker to improvise on every film they worked on together, something unheard of in Hindi cinema at the time—and unlike most modern Hindi directors, who steal ideas wholesale from American and European cinema, Dutt took kernels of ideas and made them his own. Rehman mentioned that Dutt had seen A Star Is Born, but the idea of a self-destructive genius transcends all cultures. Pyaasa is Dutt’s other masterpiece about the indignities afforded to artists who try to raise the level of collective consciousness, but it’s Kaagaz Ke Phool that never got the love it deserved, while Pyaasa was beloved upon release. Both are mandatory viewing.

For a film now considered a landmark in cinema history, Kaagaz Ke Phool was a resounding flop. The audience could not empathize with a man who threw away all his opportunities because he could not have love, who at least had shelter and food even if he did not have creative freedom. Dutt was devastated by the failure, and never officially directed a film again. Half of Kaagaz Ke Phool is a reflection of his life up to that point, and tragically, the second half foretold his end and that of a film industry dominated by directors and writers, rather than producers and stars. Though the film is told entirely in flashback, it ends with an elderly Suresh, sitting in the director’s chair in a darkened studio, lifeless. Dutt was found dead in his home in 1964, at the age of 39.

Bimal Roy’s filmography, especially Do Bigha Zamin (Two Bighas Of Land) (1953) and Devdas (1955)

The impact of Italian Neorealism on filmmakers from South Asia cannot be overstated. Directors like Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Tapan Sinha, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Guru Dutt, Chetan Anand, and Mrinal Sen were profoundly affected and inspired by the works of Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica. Together these directors created India’s Parallel Cinema movement. These directors did not wish for their films to simply entertain; each of their movies has a definitive perspective on humanity, and urges its audience to take a greater interest in the betterment of the society in which they live.

Bimal Roy, too, was part of this movement. A major figure in Bengali theater, Roy moved to Mumbai once the Bengali film industry began to wane. Members of his creative team would go on to become directors in their own right, including Hrishikesh Mukherjee (whose films will dominate this series’ look at the ’70s) and Asit Sen. Though Roy’s films were slightly more commercial, he still insisted on marrying a progressive social voice with the conventions of popular Hindi cinema. He dominated awards, and remains one of the few Indians to win a prize at Cannes. A film that would degenerate into a tear-jerking melodrama in the hands of a lesser director was intelligently guided by Roy, who never sacrificed depth, and provided necessary doses of reality for an audience who might be content to ignore it.

A bigha is a curious thing. A unit of measurement with no standardized definition, a bigha of land in the city is completely different from a bigha of land in the country. Roy may have married trademarks of Hindi cinema with socialist themes, but Do Bigha Zamin doesn’t sugarcoat anything. There are no frivolous songs. The comic relief comes at the hands of abandoned children, scraping a living on the streets by shining shoes. 

Shambhu (Balraj Sahni), a farmer, works on land owned by Harnam Singh (Murad), a local zamindar (landlord). Though he is just as impoverished and overworked as his fellow tenant farmers, Shambhu is different from them in two respects: one, he is mocked in private for being the only man clearly in love with his wife Parvati (Nirupa Roy), even after 10 years of marriage, and two, he owns two bighas of the land on which he farms—land his landlord wants to buy from him so he can build a jute mill. Though the farmer outright refuses, Singh isn’t worried; Shambhu is in debt to him, and with some clever fudging from his accountant, he increases the amount owed to him far more than he knows Shambhu can pay. In order to preserve the honor and livelihood of his family (a pregnant wife, a young son, and an elderly father), Shambhu vows to raise the money, and travels to Kolkata to find work. He is surprised, and angry, to find his son Kanhaiya (Ratan Kumar) as a stowaway on the train, and so begins the father-son journey of sustaining life in a shockingly harsh world.

The pair don’t have much luck. Their belongings are stolen, they are hungry, they fall ill. Even the kindnesses of strangers come with barbed comments about the carelessness of a father bringing a small child to such a hostile place. The only work Shambhu can find is to pull rickshaws. He is literally a human machine, heaving a cart to take children to school, adults to work. But no matter what he does, he can’t save up enough—what he earns is barely enough to keep him and his son clothed and fed. Parvati struggles too, able to only send letters, which Kanhaiya reads aloud to his illiterate father. Unable to watch his father driving his body into the ground for the sake of two bighas, Kanhaiya starts to work too. There’s a stellar scene in which his only friend, Laloo, the shoe-shine boy played brilliantly by child actor Jagdeep (who would grow up to become a famous character actor), collects “income tax” from the other shoe-shine boys to help Kanhaiya, whose shoe-shine equipment has been destroyed while fleeing a police raid. The child characters possess more empathy and socialist values than any adult around them. But the money Laloo helps collect isn’t enough, and Kanhaiya, like Raj in Awaara and Madan in Baazi, turns to crime.

The most upsetting sequence of the film is a chase: a young woman jumps into a rickshaw, playfully running away from her lover, who hops into Shambhu’s. As the woman is sped away, the man promises Shambhu an enormous sum—six whole rupees—if he can catch her. The bourgeois passengers giggle and yell out as their impoverished rickshaw pullers run faster and faster, getting further and further away from anything resembling a sound financial future. A horse-drawn carriage passes this chase; its driver cracks a whip, and the young man in Shambhu’s rickshaw mimes the same action. In order to preserve his family and his name, Shambhu and everyone like him cease to become human, their souls disappearing into the rapid pounding of their bare feet on hot roads.

Sahni came from a patrician family, and had only taken roles in which he played wealthy, educated men. Upon accepting the role of Shambhu, he traveled to Kolkata and worked as a rickshaw puller for three months, befriending members of the rickshaw pullers’ union. Many shared Shambhu’s plight, especially a puller Sahni met who had spent 15 years trying to save two bighas of land. He later said: “Then I, as it were, imbibed the soul of this middle-aged rickshaw-puller within me, and stopped thinking about the art of acting. I think the real secret of the unexpected success of my role lay in this. A basic rule of acting had come my way suddenly, not from any book but from life itself.” Sahni’s searing emotional intensity—his heartache, his small joys, his rage—is never in doubt. It’s a performance that will forever stand the test of time.

There is a richness of detail in Do Bigha Zamin, shot entirely on location, that is both specific and universal; true in 1953, in the 1990s when my family took rickshaws, and now. Industrialization in India stepped up greatly in the post-1947 era, and while modernization accompanied it, so did a mass emigration of farmers, driven off their land, to the city, seeking with ever-heightening desperation, something, anything, to alleviate their financial burden. As moving as Shambhu’s plight is, he encounters almost no one who cares—not the justice system, whom he begs for more time to settle his debts; not his landlord; not the petty owners of short-term rentals in the Kolkata slums. If anything, his landlord’s greed is mirrored by the greed of city-dwellers; there are far too many people fighting over far too few resources. This remains true of India today.

Devdas combines a lot of ideas into Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s slim 1917 novella: an examination of social mores in turn-of-the-century rural Bengal, an assessment of different types of femininity, an exploration of persistent addiction, a portrait of an emotionally stunted man and the two women who were way too good for him. Above all else, it is a depiction of abuse. The kind of control exerted over girls and women leads them to accept abuse from men they love; substance abuse; the kind of bigotry exerted by those of a higher caste over those who are slightly lower. The story’s unhappiness is rooted in the way its central characters were raised, not just in the way they meet their ends.

Bimal Roy’s 1955 adaptation hews closely to the text. In a small Bengali village, Devdas, a teenager, is close to his younger classmate Paro, the former’s family being slightly more well-off/of a slightly higher caste than hers. The two are childhood sweethearts, but Devdas has a mean streak, manipulating Paro, hitting her, forcing her to apologize to him. She takes it all on the chin. His arrogance is well-known, and one day, after one too many pranks at school, his father packs him off to live with relatives in Kolkata. The pair reunite as adults (Dilip Kumar as Devdas and Suchitra Sen as Paro) and rekindle their romance. But it’s not to be, for Devdas’ elitist parents reject Paro. She throws caution to the wind and visits him in the dark of night, asking him to marry her regardless of their parents’ disapproval. Devdas admires the risk she’s taken in possibly sullying her own name by visiting him, but makes no other commitment. Angered by his parents’ continued refusal, he marches out, returning to the city, but crucially doesn’t stop for Paro. Her betrothal is set to a wealthy landowner. Upon Devdas’ return to the village, he cannot believe she is furious with him, and hits her forehead with a rock, scarring her. 

Paro marries a wealthy widower, while Devdas returns to Kolkata and, like many people in the midst of a breakup, starts to drink. He doesn’t stop. It is the only thing he can think of to do, drowning himself in a bottle as Chandramukhi (Vyjayanthimala), a courtesan, dances before him in a brothel. She is smitten with him, as the only man who paid her without asking for anything in return, but Devdas cannot be bothered with anything resembling affection. His impulsivity has brought him to a point of no return; he has failed Paro, his family, himself. There is nothing left to do but drink.

Kumar’s brooding brow, Sen’s demure devotion, and Vyjayanthimala’s trembling sincerity are the stuff of Hindi cinema legend. Known for his method acting, Kumar speaks volumes without uttering a single syllable. Devdas’ shame cripples him, and this shame pours off Kumar’s body with an intensity sometimes difficult to watch. There’s also no denying that he’s a bastard, maligning and negging two very different women who love him anyway. Sen is believable as the Hindu archetype of the forever-dutiful woman, devoted to her one true love despite being married to another. Vyjayanthimala finds fascinating new shades in a familiar character type: she’s a courtesan but not overly glamorized; she’s capable of loving openly, not just transactional/performative behavior; and her dancing prowess is on full display, conveying many desires with a simple swivel of the hips. She and Kumar are part of one of the most famous dialogue exchanges in Hindi cinema:

Chandramukhi: “You won’t be able to tolerate this much alcohol.”

Devdas: “What bastard drinks to tolerate alcohol? I drink so I may simply continue to breathe.”

Unlike some of his contemporaries, Roy didn’t always feel the need to draw attention to his techniques. Nabendu Ghosh’s screenplay and Rajinder Singh Bedi’s dialogue provide a wealth of emotion and action, and the performances Roy got from his actors are so indelible that the film builds itself. Still, the crane shots, shadow work, and references to nature as a way to indicate time passing all contribute to a fairly naturalist treatment of the story. Various versions of the text have come and gone, including one rife with histrionics and needlessly high drama by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, but it’s Roy’s that remains fresh, moving, and terrifying even today.

Jagte Raho (Keep Awake) (1956)

By far the funniest film on this list, Jagte Raho is also the most biting. Woe betide any shabbily dressed man, wandering the streets of an unnamed city at night, as the booming voices of night watchmen ring out, “Jagte raho!” If you seem disheveled and don’t have a home, then you don’t belong. You’ll be chased into an apartment building, where a marriage of After Hours, The Power Broker, and “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street” unfolds over the course of a single night.

An unnamed man (Raj Kapoor), recently arrived in the big city from the village (Kapoor here swaps his trademark shabby Chaplin trousers for a dhoti), is seeking a drink of water. He stops to share his food with a dog, but when both try and drink from a hydrant, they’re run off the streets. The man, who barely speaks during the film, tries to hide in a large apartment building, but finds that these seemingly decent city-dwellers are committing far greater sins behind closed doors than any suspected breaking and entering. And more importantly, they are determined to find him, thrash him, and surrender him to the police. 

For a story this simple, Jagte Raho is deeply socially complex. Though massive urban dwellings, housing dozens and dozens of families, were rare in big Indian cities in the 1950s, they are, today, the only kind of apartment building most folks can hope to live in unless they possess vast wealth. But 70 years ago, it wasn’t rare to find the rich and the working classes living in the same building.

Fear rapidly takes hold in the minds of people who would otherwise be asleep, causing them to revel in a cycle of panic, blame, and aggression that seemingly has no end. For all the tenants’ bluster about protecting the sanctity of their homes, and eliminating outside invaders, they are slaves to their own hypocrisy. Every kind of person can be found living in Jagte Raho: the priest who provides spiritual guidance in the form of sport betting tips; the man attempting to steal wedding jewelry from his own wife to cover his gambling debts, while signage in their flat reads “The wife is a form of the goddess Lakshmi”; an unhappy wife refusing to dance seductively for the friends of her drunkard husband; a pharmacist selling fake medication; men running illegal gambling dens; and people rushing their lovers out the back door before their spouse gets home.

The film’s most savage commentary is saved for the wealthy. When the building’s mob first agitates to find the intruder, the rich join in, demanding answers, yelling at someone to call the police. They even convince the lower classes of residents to form a little platoon, organizing men armed with sticks or cricket bats, to march through the entire building while they watch safely from the sidelines. But when the newly galvanized working-class militia plans to check inside every home, the rich men panic—how could they show their face in society ever again, if their private sins were made public?

Given how little he speaks in the film, Kapoor relies completely on his pantomime skills, his eyes trembling, his Chaplinesque sincerity trying to win over someone who’s spotted him. It’s the perfect counterpoint to the shouting and screaming. In the hubbub, he remains the sanest of the bunch, running from door to door in the quest for water, while everyone else is out to guard their own wrongdoing.

Jagte Raho is not a perfect film. It ends on a patriotic note that undercuts everything that came before it. Kapoor wasn’t as far to the left as others on this list, and preferred to temper his socialist critiques with a sincere devotion to the promise of a newly independent India. But this saccharine note, which plays suddenly and loudly at the end of the film, feels unnecessary. The filmmakers have made their point well, and could have respected the audience to draw their own conclusions about the ominous nature of trust and decency in an urban environment. Still, Jagte Raho’s message is blessedly timeless: live honorably so you need not fear a knock from the night watchman, and judge not lest ye be judged.