Realist drama about a small landowner, Shambhu (Sahni) which opens with a song celebrating the rains that put an end to two seasons of drought, Hariyala sawan dhol bajata aaya. Shambhu and his son Kanhaiya (R. Kumar) have to go and work in Calcutta to repay their debt to the merciless local Zamindar (Sapru) in order to retain their ancestral two acres of land. The sentimentally portrayed peasants bid farewell to the departing Shambhu and his won with the song Bhai re, ganga aur jamuna ki dharti kahe pukar ke. In Calcutta, Shambhu becomes a rickshaw-puller, facing numerous hardships that lead to his near-fatal accident, the death of his wife (N. Roy) who joins him in the city and, inevitably, the loss of his hand to speculators who build a factory on it. Although promoted as the epitome of Indian neo-realism, the film is even more melodramatic than e.g. De Sica's work (sometimes claimed to have influenced Roy's work). The script and the humanist acting styles include hard but kind landlady in the Calcutta slum and the happy-go-lucky shoeshine boy (Jagdeep) who takes Kanhaiya under his wing, all enhanced by IPTA overtones in Choudhury's music. The film's neo-realist reputation is almost solely based on Balraj Sahni's extraordinary performance in his best-known film role.
[Source : ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF INDIAN CINEMA/ Ashish Rajadhyaksha & Paul Willemen, II ed. British Film Institute & Oxford University Press, 1999.]