Do Bigha Zameen-Nation as It Is Imagined

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I Acknowledge that copying someone else’s assignment or essay, or part of it, is wrong, and declare that this is my own work. ” Do Bigha Zamin- Nation as it is imagined. Word count : 523 Art 101 16th August 2013 Do Bigha Zamin is one of those very early 1950’s movies which laid the foundations of Indian Neorealism and the “Indian New Wave”. 1The film talks about a peasant Shambhu, his wife Paro and their son. The family owns 2 bigha land which is under the threat of being overtaken by a landlord because of their failure to return their debts.

The movie starts with the farmer’s parched land and ends with the scene showing the separation of Shambhu and his family from the land through a fence. The scene according to me has a very metaphorical meaning showing the audience that while a parched land can be made into a green field again, a lost land has no significance to the farmer. The importance of land to the farmer is also elucidated by the dialogues Shambhu says like: “Zameen toh kisaan ki maa hai, huzoor maa ko kaise bech doon? The reply to this dialogue by the landowner saying, “Mill bananey se Zameen ‘maa’ se ‘baap’ ban jayegi”, tells us that patriarchy was very dominant in that period and that industry was booming under the Nehruvian Era. The film portrays the village as a place where sustenance is difficult and the city as a place for salvation. However, Bimal Roy did not forget to represent the brutality of the city and its callousness.

The film imagines a country which is morally strong which believes in the superiority of the inner domain more than the outer materialistic domain. As Partha Chatterjee pointed out that it was the spiritual domain that the Indian reformers were looking forward, to bring about change. Instances like taking the two girls to school without getting paid for it, and hitting Kanhaiya with a stick because of him stealing money shows that no matter how poor the condition is, one can never compromise on his/her values.

The domain of family and the role of women also underwent considerable change in this period as the ‘new woman’ had to be modern and at the same time display signs of national tradition. 2The film showed two important women i. e. Paro who appeared as a woman having no desires of her own, very traditional and completely submissive to her husband and the landlord lady who was shown to be a dominating lady yet having a soft corner in her heart stressing on the fact that women were portrayed as emotional beings with very rich traditional values.

Not surprisingly, the roles of all these characters have changed drastically in the modern day cinema. As Benedict Anderson pointed out “the creation of cultural artefacts towards the end of the eighteenth century was the spontaneous distillation of the complex ‘crossing’ of discrete historical forces”. 3 Meanings have changed over time and so has the themes of our modern day cinema. Cinemas nowadays hardly talk about morality being the central theme or the plight of the peasants in India.

Women centric films like Kahani, Fashion, No One killed Jessica have started to take centre stage showing women having desires and ambitions of their own. Historical, political and ideological changes have given a new meaning to our Modern Indian Cinema. Works Cited: * Srinivasan, Srikanth. “Do Bigha Zamin: Seeds of the Indian New Wave. Wikipedia. 4 August 2008. Web. * Chatterjee, Partha. Omnibus. India: Oxford University Press, 2002. Print. * Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 2002. Print