In 1930 Bimal Roy, who would become a renowned director of Indian cinema, was forced to leave his comfortable life in rural Bangladesh for Calcutta (present-day Kolkata) following the death of his father. Soon the twenty-one-year-old Roy found himself amongst faceless masses in a crowded city, an upheaval that would leave an indelible impression on him. In Calcutta, Roy started as an assistant cameraman and by the late 1940s, he had established himself as a successful director in Bengali cinema. The film industry there, however, was in decline, and in 1950 Roy moved once again to Bombay (present-day Mumbai).This was the time of post-independence India (India had gained its independence from Britain in 1947). The new government had rolled out ambitious plans to industrialise the nation and reform the feudal agrarian system. But the legislation designed to improve the lot of peasants and farmers proved slow to bring about real change; feudalism in the end was merely replaced by an equally powerful industrialist class.The social inequality of the times provided great inspiration for Roy. In Do Bigha Zamin (1953) which translates to ‘Two Bighas of Land’ (a bigha being a unit of land measurement), Roy explores the then familiar problems of unregulated debt, high interest rates, and land-grabbing. Shambu is a farmer who is defrauded by rich debtors and threatened with the loss of his small piece of agricultural land unless he pays off an exploitative debt. Shambhu moves to the city with his son where they are robbed and suffer in menial jobs all the while being swept into a Sisyphean cycle of trying to earn enough to pay the debtors, but then being forced to spend all their money on their family’s survival. In a memorable scene, Shambhu has just completed a journey when the next customer orders him to follow a rickshaw bearing his fleeing girlfriend (1:28:21). As Shambhu runs barefoot in the scorching sun, his passenger urges him to run ever faster and with herculean effort Shambhu keeps pace with a horse-drawn cart. The man then begins to gesticulate and verbally coax Shambhu in a manner evocative of a coachman whipping his horse — an idea further strengthened by the juxtaposition of horse and man on screen (1:28:45). The music intensifies as Shambhu desperately tries to catch the rickshaw ahead, but just as he does a wheel comes loose, the world turns upside down and we cut away (1:29:16).The scene serves as a metaphor for the tragedy of urban poverty. In less than sixty seconds, Roy succinctly encapsulates Shambhu’s desperation, a desperation which compels him to risk his life for a meagre amount of money.The idea for Do Bigha Zamin can be traced back to an evening at the 1952 International Film Festival in Bombay, when Roy became enthralled with Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), a film considered to be one of the finest examples of Italian Neorealism. On his way home from the festival, whilst on the train with his team, Roy voiced his desire to create something similar. Filmmakers of the Italian Neorealism movement broke away from idealism and happy endings, and focused instead on the harsh realities of survival, tackling poverty and other social problems in the aftermath of the Second World War. Do Bigha Zamin has several parallels with Bicycle Thieves, most notably the theme of a father-son quest to escape poverty, and addresses pressing social issues specific to 1950s India.Neorealist films typically featured non-professional actors to create an aura of authenticity; they were also often shot on location, normally urban settings, rather than in a studio, and directors would take advantage of the natural light that such settings could provide to further emphasise the sense of the real. Critics have understood these features as core elements of the mise-en-scène of neorealist film, a term which translates from French approximately as ‘staging’, and which is used in film criticism to refer to the visual elements which, when considered as a whole, can create meaning and identity for a film.Roy chose to shoot the rickshaw race scene on location, on a busy street in Calcutta. Balraj Sahni, who plays Shambhu, prepared for the role by losing weight and actually living with the city’s poor rickshaw-pullers, in order to convincingly depict a man seasoned in physical labour. Natural light, as opposed to artificial (studio) lighting or post-production editing, conveys that it is a hot, sunny day, and contributes to a realistic depiction of Shambhu’s suffering. Elsewhere in the film Roy depicts shoeshine boys in tattered clothing, bare essential living in slum dwellings, and brusque treatment of Shambu and his son by city dwellers as they seek food and shelter; there are also sweeping, unbroken shots of the urban landscape reminiscent of Bicycle Thieves. Through adopting elements of neorealist mise-en-scène, Roy could create a visual context which made for an evocative statement of a poor man’s struggle for survival in 1950s India. Do Bigha Zamin was internationally acclaimed, winning several awards including the Prix International at Cannes in 1954. The renowned film critic Khalid Mohamed was said to have been deeply moved by the brutal rickshaw scene.1 Shyam Benegal, one of India’s finest contemporary filmmakers, remarked that the film ‘hit me between my eyes’ and praised the realistic quality of the actors’ performances.2 By drawing on his personal experiences of poverty and displacement, Roy was able to create realism that spoke to Indian audiences at a historical moment of transition and upheaval.