Bimal Roy’s ‘Do Bigha Zamin’ and the never-ending race against poverty

The lovers have had a tiff. She leaps into a hand-drawn carriage. He gets into another to follow her. Each of them exhorts their drivers to go faster and faster. The fare goes up and up.

Shambhu, who is carrying the man, is running so hard he outpaces a horse carriage. The shots get shorter. The cutting gets more frenetic. It looks like Shambhu’s heart will give out any minute. The lovers are having too much fun to notice, their laughs like the whips used on beasts and enslaved humans.

The tanga race on the streets of Kolkata is one of cinema’s most unforgettable capsules of despair and apathy. The sequence from Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin (1953) is the centrepiece of a film about the brutality of poverty.

Do Bigha Zamin “hit me between my eyes in many ways”, Shyam Benegal once said. “Bimal Roy made a connection with reality… he placed a sequence in time and space in recognisable ways from life,” Benegal told Roy’s daughter, Rinki Roy Bhattacharya, for the book Bimal Roy – A Man of Silence.

Do Bigha Zamin was recently restored by the Criterion Collection/Janus Films and Film Heritage Foundation and shown at the Venice Film Festival in September. The festival in Italy was an apt...

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