Dharti Ke Lal (धरती के लाल) 1946

Published on March 4, 2013 in Cinema

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Banner	IPTA Pictures
Director	K.A.Abbas
Writer	K.A.Abbas
Producer
Orginal music	Ravi Shankar
Cinematography
Film Editing
Art Director
Camera Operator
Assistant Cameramen
Playback Singers	Shanti, Mumtaz

Character	Actor / Actress
	Rashid Ahmed
	Tripti Bhaduri
	Hameed Butt
	Usha Dutta
	Anwar Mirza
	Sombhu Mitra
	Pratap Ojha
	Balraj Sahni
	Damayati Sahni
	Zohra Segal

Abbass directorial debut launched a major trend of realist cinema. The film is set during WW2 and the 1943 Bengal famine (a traumatic event often used as source material by left cultural movements) and a growing nation-building ideology. Made during the war, the novice cast and crew were accorded a special licence for a war-effort contribution. The only film actually produced by the IPTA (although it later informally supporter several other films), the film is based partly on Sombhu Mitras landmark production of Bhattacharyas play Nabanna for the IPTA. It narrates the story of a family of sharecroppers in Bengal: the patriarch Samaddar, his elder son Nirnjan and his wife Binodini, and the younger son Ramu with his wife Radhika. Despite a good harvest and rising grain prices during the war, Samaddar loses his property to a crooked grain-dealing zamindar. Ramu his wife and their newborn baby go to Calcutta followed soon after by the rest of the famly along with thousands similarly dispossessed peasants. The film intercuts Ramus frantic search for work with his wifes descent into prostitution. Before dying, the patriarch enjoins his family to return to their native soil where the farmers get together and, in a stridently celebratory socialist-realist ending opt for Soviet-style collective farming. Ramu is excluded from their world. The films highly stylised and symbol-laden realism proved extremely influential. It appears to have found a way of narrativisin the 1943 famine which set the patter for many films moving from depictions of deprivation in the country to suffering in the city, e.g Nemai Ghoshs Chinnamul (1950) and Bimal Roys Do Bigha Zameen (1953). It also intiated a new type of melodrama able to marry actulity to pschoanalytic and political anxieties and desires, as in Abbass scripts for Raj Kapoor.