July 9 is Guru Dutt’s hundredth birth anniversary.While the Bombay film industry during the Independence struggle mirrored the ideals of the struggle and of social reform movements, after Independence, a number of films began to engage with a social order that condemned people to live lives in penury. They allow us to reflect on how postcolonial India, despite the fact that the visionary leader Jawaharlal Nehru had come to power, was unable to shrug off chains of social and economic unfreedom. New chains of rank materialism, and concern with social power, status and materialism had been forged to capture human minds and souls. Classics focused on the way these chains flagellated human and social psyches, and the way they bred isolation and alienation. The growing sense of anomie, alienation and moral dilemmas was captured by two blockbuster movies made in 1951. The first was Awara produced and directed by Raj Kapoor and scripted by K.A. Abbas. The second 1951 film Baazi was directed by a director who became a legend in his time, and for times thereafter; Guru Dutt. It starred Dutt’s friend, the debonair Dev Anand who had set up his own production house Navketan Films, which produced the film. The music director was S.D Burman, a hugely talented Sahir Ludhianvi wrote the lyrics and Balraj Sahni co-authored the script. Baazi drawing upon a 1946 Hollywood film Gilda asked the same moral question as Awara did. Is a man culpable for a crime if he cannot afford medical care for his family, in this case Dev Anand’s sister? Perhaps yes, perhaps no. There are few moral absolutes in the real world, unlike the world of pure ethics. Deviations from accepted ways of life have to be located in their context before we rush to judge and penalise the perpetrator of the crime.Baazi was the first urban crime thriller in the history of the Bombay film. It possessed all the characteristics of the classic noir, or the dark film. Noir’s internationalism, write Jennifer Fay and Justus Nieland, is linked to the broader condition of global disquiet with the mobile and dislocated social and cultural relations of modernity itself, “of rootless and wandering desire; of chance, accident, and class instability; of local traditions and spaces either imperilled or energised by global flows of culture and capital; and of home life across the world that has become unsettled, uncanny, or newly foreign.” Modernity de-stabilises and leads to moral and political ambiguity. In another sense, noir represents the dark edges of a complex personality, a personality that has no fixed ethical standards, a personality that is alienated.It is precisely alienation that Guru Dutt tapped marvellously in his (1957) Pyaasa. In the film loneliness is a psychological condition, bred by the attributes of modernity. An individualistic society is so determined to pursue material wealth, that it becomes indifferent to the pain of their own. In his cinema Dutt reflects and represents his own loneliness and feeling of loss despite a productive and acclaimed career. He is considered as one of the greatest world actors and directors but his own life was marred by frustration and unrequited love to the point that he, it is generally held, committed suicide. He captured this feeling in his acclaimed Kaagaz Ke Phool. The film deals with success and loss of success, with love and longing, with the loss of love and unsatisfied longing, with creativity and the passing of creativity, with fame and the fickleness of fame.A poster of Pyaasa.Pyaasa is, arguably, his best film. Originally called Kashmakash, the script was written in 1947/48, and was revised with the help of Abrar Alvi. The recrafted film was released in February 1957. The character of the leading man, Guru Dutt, a disillusioned and impoverished poet is established in the first scene when he hums as he lies on a grassy park: ‘Mein doon bhi to kya doon tumhen ai shaukh nazaaron/Le de ke mere paas kuch ansoon hain kuch aahen’. What I can give you O beauties of nature, except tears and sighs, that is all I have. In the film Dutt as a young college student, was in love with Mala Sinha who went on to marry a rich publisher played by Rahman. There are other aspects to life besides love, such as material security, she tells Guru Dutt, when they confront each other in a lift after she is married. Confronted by a double betrayal that of his beloved, and that of his brothers who deny him shelter, our poet Vijay descends into melancholy. He sleeps on benches in the open, and reflects on the perfidies of the human condition where all that matters is wealth. He is a gifted poet but publishers reject his reflective, morose, and realist poetry. One of them sells the paper on which he had written poems to the recycler.Pyaasa was made barely 10 years after Independence. Guru Dutt wrote the history of the post-colonial moment dramatically, poetically, and movingly. We immediately identify with a film that castigates greed and the lust for power in human relations. And then there was the brilliant film itself. The author of Guru Dutt: A Tragedy in Three Acts, Arun Khopkar writes that Pyaasa haunted him, its images returned unexpectedly to mind, the beetle that was ground under a heel, Gulabo trampled by a mob that has turned hysterical at the sight of a poet whom they had thought had died, Meena’s blurred image in the glass pane of the lift, and Vijay in rags casting an attenuated shadow. To these unforgettable images we can add the split images of Vijay, played by Guru Dutt, and Meena, played by Mala Sinha, on the multiple glass panes of the elevator.Watching Pyaasa we realize that barely ten years after independence the camaraderie cultivated by organisations such as the PWA and IPTA that had brought people together during the freedom struggle, has dissipated. Indians had become obsessed with material security and power even at the cost of integrity and obligations to fellow citizens and family. Millions lived in dilapidated surroundings, overcrowded tenements, urban detritus, and smelly open drains, all of which are guaranteed to generate neurosis. And when this happens to a gifted, sensitive poet, Vijay, he feels claustrophobic, his vision becomes dark and despairing, his poetic imagination is clouded with desolation. He is more at home in the open terrace of a decrepit house where sex workers pursue their calling, or in open parks that offer him benches to sleep on. He is so alone that the woman who loved and spurned him acquires a disproportionate role in his memories and life. The only people who understand the artist in Pyaasa are the sex worker Gulabo and the masseur Abdul Sattar. These people, scorned, humiliated and banished to the margins of society empathise with his despair. Having experienced disrespect and exploitation they understand the ache of the poet, they share his loneliness, his disillusionment and frustration. Perhaps Guru Dutt was trying to tell us that it is only at the margins of society that we find compassion for other human beings. The rest of society is too busy exploiting the labour of others, flourishing its wealth, and exhibiting vulgar and repulsive greed for more.A screengrab from Pyaasa.But Vijay, the gifted poet, spurned by his beloved, and wracked with self-pity is still not consumed solely by his own pain and sorrow. He is no Devdas, an unhappy man who made everyone else unhappy because he luxuriated in his own pain. Vijay’s poetic imagination gives him the capacity to look beyond his personal pain and sorrow, empathise with others and launch a major critique of a selfish, manipulative society and its hypocritical mores.Wandering down the streets of the red-light area where he has been taken by friends, he can, in the words of the magnificent poet Sahir Ludhianvi and the melodious voice of Mohammed Rafi sing ‘yeh mele, yeh badnam ghar dilkashi ke, yet mithe huye kaaravan zindagi ke, kaha hai kaha hai muhafiz khudi ke? Jine naaz hai hind par voh kahan hai?’ These celebrations, these disreputable houses of sexual pleasure, these looted caravans of life, where are the guardians of India’s morality? Where are those who are proud of this country? The song makes our souls shrivel. We identify with sorrow, desolation and disenchantment. Whatever happened to dreams of a better life in a postcolonial India? Soaring inequalities had made life more agonizing in a country where once millions were ready to languish in jail, and give their lives for independence.‘Kahan hai, kahan hai muhafiz khudi ke’, one of the most magnificent critiques of our insensitive ruling classes who sanction the exploitation of women, and lives led much below what is due to human beings, is given words by the gifted Sahir, and enacted by our poet whose grief at social deception extends beyond him to give voice to the pain of others; of those women who are compelled by circumstances to sell their bodies to fathers as well as sons. Till today the words “Jinhe naaz hai Hind par woh kahan hai” resonates in our lives.Ironically Vijay achieves fame only when he is mistakenly reported dead. Gulabo summons up the courage to visit the publisher who is married to Vijay’s ex-girlfriend, and requests him to publish the poems. When published, they are a roaring success. Everyone rushes to cash into the success of the volume, not only the publisher but also Vijay’s friend and his brothers who had disowned him. At a memorial meeting on Vijay’s first death anniversary, those who had shunned him earlier now weep shallow tears. Vijay appears at the door of the balcony with his arms stretched out on both sides of the entrance and asks poetically ‘yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaye to kya hai? ‘Yeh basti hai murda parastho ki basti, yahan to jeevan se hai maut sasti’. This is a world that worships the dead, even if we get the world so what? Khopkar writes that the finest scene in the film is Vijay returning after his ‘death’ and presenting himself as the resurrected Christ at the function to memorialise him. The function organised by the publisher is glamorous. Yet the poet is, like Christ, aesthetically simple, impoverished, suffering and profoundly compassionate. This development in the anniversary celebrations makes us think; can we be happy in a world deeply corrupted by desire for material goods, power, thrones and palaces? Can an individual find fulfilment in a society where all that counts is the rituals of power? The grief and anger that Vijay pours out in the song is not against the audience. “It is the sublime moral indignation of Christ, driving the usurers out of the House of God…The framing and the lighting have the kind of beauty that arouses in us a deeply religious response,” writes Khopkar.A screengrab from Pyaasa.One of the high points in the directorial achievement in the film according to Khopkar, is when the crowd who had assembled to celebrate a work of great sensitivity, goes berserk at the sight of the poet they had thought dead. Aggression is unleashed, the crowd tramples and gets trampled. “Suddenly the camera picks up every cruel detail in that hall without once shutting its eyes. Distorted bodies, trampling feet, clawing hands, terrified faces, brutal faces, cunning faces, exhausted bodies and arrogant, well-fed bodies-all flash on and off in a memorable, rhythmic image,” Khopkar writes.And the poet who has an opportunity to embrace fame decides to turn his back on the chains that binds celebrities. He decides to reject the riches that awaited him. He rejects the shallow and brash conventions of the modern world, and walks into the sunset with Gulabo, another citizen of India who lives on the margins shunned by society. Vijay the scorned, the laughed at, the humiliated, and the outcast from the charmed circle of success, has achieved undreamt of success. But he disdains a world obsessed with thrones, crowns and palaces. He, in the classical tradition of the public intellectual, stands outside society to enunciate a critique of a greedy, grasping materialistic world. The film is a devastating comment on an India which had fought for independence, but which had witnessed the forging of new chains after those of colonialism were unlocked and led to political freedom.Anyone who can take on society in this poetic manner is worthy of our admiration and love. Also deserving of our admiration is Gulabo, the sex worker, played to perfection by Waheeda Rahman. She does not desist from openly exhibiting her desire for Vijay in the scene where they listen to a Meera Bhajan enacted by a wandering minstrel and sung by the enormously talented Geeta Dutt; ‘Aaj sajan mohe ang lagalo’. Today love clasp me to your heart. In the end she also shrugs off her chains and walks with her love into the horizon defined by the setting sun. Turning your back on fame is freedom. You reject at least this chain that locks you into pride, arrogance, and insensitivity. Such is Indian society. It compels sensitive people to either embrace moral ambiguity or opt out of the system.Neera Chandhoke was professor of political science at Delhi University.