 "The 'more perilous adventure' of the poor marked out in a movie")
India lifted 415 million people from poverty between 2005 and 2021, claimed the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2022 released by the United Nations Development Programme and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative earlier this week. This has been rightly hailed as a remarkable achievement; the report also claims that India is on its way to obtaining Sustainable Development Goal target 1.2—“to reduce at least by half the proportion of men, women, and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions by 2030.” A closer look at the numbers, however, reveals that there are still significant challenges. The report claims that India continues to have by far the largest number of poor people in the world at 228.9 million. Further, it does not take into consideration the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on poverty estimates. A World Bank report from last year claimed that about 80 per cent of the people around the world who slipped into poverty because of the economic effect of the pandemic between 2020 and 2021 were from India. As economists Krishna Ram and Shivani Yadav have shown an additional 150-199 million were impoverished by the pandemic in 2021-22.
Poverty has been a significant concern for the Indian government since Independence. While the country now claims to have the fifth-highest gross domestic product (GDP) at $3.75 trillion, its society is also riddled with endemic inequality. An Oxfam report from earlier this year showed that 5 per cent of the richest Indians owned 60 per cent of the country’s wealth, while the poorest 50 per cent owned only 3 per cent of it. “The rich have done well for themselves, while the number of hungry Indians has increased from 19 crores to 35 crores,” said the report. Economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, who jointly won the 2019 Nobel Prize in economics (along with Michael Kremer), for “their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”, write in their award-winning popular book Poor Economics (2011): “life for the poor is simply not like life for everyone else: it is a much more perilous adventure, denied many of the cushions and advantages that are routinely provided to the more affluent.”
A glimpse of this “perilous adventure” was provided by the 1974 Hindi film Roti Kapda Aur Makaan (Bread, Clothes, and Houses). Written, directed, and produced by Manoj Kumar, the film is a powerful—albeit melodramatic—depiction of poverty and its effects. The film’s title refers to Indira Gandhi’s popular election slogan from 1967, which was also used effectively across the border by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan. It tells the story of an upright young engineer Bharat (Manoj Kumar), the eldest son of a family of five, who struggles to find a job. By the mid-1970s, the unemployed young graduate had become a cliché of sorts in Hindi and Bengali cinema. You could see them all over the silver screen, from Mrinal Sen’s Interview (1971) to Satyajit Ray’s Pratidwandi (1970) and Jana Aranya (1976), to Tapan Sinha’s Apanjan (1968), which was adapted into Hindi as Mere Apne (1971) by Gulzar. Unemployed young men served as the sole or one of the protagonists in Namak Haram (Hrishikesh Mukherjee, 1973), Deewaar (Yash Chopra, 1975), and in a more comic vein in Mukherjee’s Gol Maal (1979).
There were specific reasons why unemployment became an important leitmotif in Indian cinema in the 1970s. As economist Pravin Visaria wrote in 1970, total unemployment in India had ballooned to 9–10 million people by the economic recession of 1966. While most of them were concentrated in rural areas, there was a growing number of educated unemployed young people in the urban areas. “The educated… did report a higher incidence of unemployment than the non-matriculate literates or illiterates presumably because the latter are willing to accept lower pay and/or manual work,” claimed Visaria, adding that inability to secure stable employment for a long period had serious psychological effects and also made the urban youth politically dissident — as seen in the rising far-left Naxalbari movement.
The film is keenly aware of this situation. In one scene, Bharat tells his father: “Earlier students knew that once they got a degree, they will get a job. Now, there is no such guarantee. So, they are restless, undisciplined.” Bharat is in some ways an angry young man that Amitabh Bachchan—who plays his younger brother Vijay—would come to embody in his films such as Zanjeer (1973), Deewar (1975), Kala Patthar (1976), and Trishul (1978), among others. But his anger is not directed against the state or the government; instead, it focuses on individuals, such as black-marketer Nekiram (Madan Puri) and his associates. The film suggests that hoarding of crops and supplies, rather than bad governance, has led to all the crises in the country—unemployment, paucity of food grains, lack of housing, and access to health care.
Frustrated by his attempts to find a job, abandoned by his girlfriend Sheetal (Zeenat Aman) who chooses the more affluent Mohan Babu, traumatised by the death of his father (Krishan Dhawan), Bharat momentarily joins the ranks of Nekiram. But an Independence Day speech by Mrs Gandhi, railing against hoarding of essential commodities, brings about a change of heart in him. Along with his brothers Vijay, who is an army officer, and Deepak (Dheeraj Kumar), a police inspector, Bharat foils a conspiracy by Nekiram’s gang to sabotage a railway bridge and prevent the supply of essential commodities.
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The narrative of the film is structured like a morality play, where the characters are more types than individuals. In the climactic sequence, Nekiram lists out the members of Bharat’s team: “The honest labourer, the honest businessman, the honest soldier, and the honest police.” Bharat himself embodies the ideal Indian (male) citizen—honest, brave, and law-abiding. Manoj Kumar developed this character in films such as Upkar (1967), which he made purportedly at the request of former prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri. Kumar would play this character in films such as Purab aur Paschim (1970), Kranti (1981), and Clerk (1989). In some ways, all these films are statist, surrendering to the authority of the government or the nation, exorcising all radical possibilities of the individual or the community.
Film scholar Priya Joshi, in her study of the triptych of Deewaar, Trishul, and Shakti (1982), writes that these films, while “restoring the nation’s myth of opportunity and justice… also exposes its collapse and uncovers a form of violence so grotesque that it is displaced onto the family.” I believe Roti Kapda aur Makaan does something similar—on one hand, it reasserts the power of the state and the nation, and on the other its subtext appeals to, borrowing a term from Ashis Nandy, the “secret politics of our desires”. Released a year before Mrs Gandhi declared the Emergency, it became the biggest hit of 1974 not because it fell in line with the official narrative but because it tapped into popular emotions sparked by rising inequality and a grotesque lack of opportunity.
Uttaran Das Gupta is a New Delhi-based writer and journalist. He teaches journalism at O P Jindal Global University, Sonipat
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