Bhopal Reddy

When a Dalit wins the elections for mayor in his small village in northeastern India, deadly rioting forces an impoverished couple to escape to Calcutta where they can hopefully find work. Instead, they end up sleeping on the streets until they have a chance at earning a little income -- a man has asked them to take his herd of pigs across a fast-moving river. The current is dangerous, and worse, the wife is pregnant and this would not be an easy task even if she were not. Undaunted and desperate, the couple accept the job and enter the river to face their destiny.

Set during one of India’s main peasant risings, the Telangana insurrection between 1945 and 1951 in the pre-Independence state of Hyderabad, the Bengali director’s first feature tells the story of Chander’s best-known novel, Jab Khet Jaage (1948), from the peasant’s point of view. A young peasant, Ramiah, rebels against the corrupt rule of the nizam, and when his girlfriend has to submit to the potentate’s sexual coercion, Ramiah leaves. He befriends a Marxist activist (the rising was CPI-inspired) and participates in the Independence struggle.