Gaban

Thought provoking Hindi film “Gaban” (1966), directed by Hrishikesh Mukherjee and starring Sunil Dutt, Sadhana among others.

Its based on a story written by the noted Hindi litterateur Munshi Premchand and is set in the pre independence era British India of 1928.

Ramanath (Sunil Dutt) is a no gooder having no job and given to wantonly lying at the flick of his hand. His father gets him married to Jalpa (Sadhana) for which the father gets some jewelry on instalment basis. Unable to return the jewelry, Ramanath steals his wife’s jewelry and gets caught.

He finds a job in the municipal department and starts accepting bribes from people. The old debt with the jeweller still stands and to return that he steals from the government revenue. Caught he flees Allahabad to Calcutta and gets embroiled in a freedom struggle.

He is made as a government witness to implicate some freedom fighters in a bomb case. He initially agrees under the duress of his fraud scheme being kept open back in Allahabad. When he comes to know that he is clean in that fraud case, he backs out, but the cops threaten him with another case of theft of jewelry.

Sunil Dutt goes through the entire range of emotions in the movie and he alongwith Sadhana have done a good role. There are other character actors like Leela Mishra, Kanhaiyalal (who has done a positive role for a change), Anwar Hussain, Agha, all old timers who have all done good roles in their respective characters.

Very powerful story by Munshi Premchand and to buttress that, the dialogues by Akhtar-ul-Iman is also good. Hrishikesh Mukherjee has done a brilliant job with the script and has done ample justice to the story. IMDB 6/10