Flashback: Footpath – The Poor are People Too! 
By Deepa Gahlot, January 30, 2007 - 08:01 IST
As Madhur Bhandarkar's Traffic Signal gets set for release, one is thrown back to the time when committed filmmakers, with leftist leanings,
brought the sufferings of the poor on to the screen—whether it was Bimal Roy with Do Bigha Zamin, K.A Abbas with Dharti Ke Lal and
Shaher Aur Sapna, or Chetan Anand with Neecha Nagar (India's first entry at the Cannes film festival).
In the list comes Footpath (1953), Zia Sarhady's forgotten gem, which would closest to Traffic Signal in the intent to portray the very
lowest rung of the urban poor.
Sarhady's film was an accurate picture, but with a touch of the poetic that marked films by these filmmakers, and without the crudeness that
invariably creeps into contemporary films about the urban underbelly – like the famous street bathing scene in Robin Dharmaraj's
Chakra—which was actually done earlier by Meena Kumari in Footpath more aesthetically-- or the unsavoury violence of gangster movies.
Of course, there is nothing poetic about poverty, but many communist filmmakers, poets and artists of the fifties, experienced it firsthand, by living
in chawl- like communes; they did not live in lavish highrises and talk of the starving masses.
By 1953, the euphoria of Independence was over, and the migrants who flocked to Bombay (not Mumbai then) to escape starvation in the villages,
lived on the pavements and crowded chawls. Many of them took to crime. Bhara ho pet toh sansaar jagmagata hai, Sattaye bhookh toh
imaan dagmagata hai, as lyricist Shailendra wrote.
Dilip Kumar played a writer Noshu, who is driven by poverty to take to black marketing in foodgrains and medicines. (Dev Anand played a similar
character in Kala Bazaar and Raj Kapoor in Shri 420, of basically good men, momentarily blinded by easy money). And having turned to crime,
Noshu is faced by a moral dilemma—love or money. This was one of the few negative characters Dilip Kumar played and that could be one of the
reasons the film flopped. Ramesh Thapar played Noshu's idealistic older brother, a schoolmaster who prefers death to compromise, and Achala
Sachdev the sharp-tongued wife. The lovely Meena Kumari is Mala, the woman Noshu loves. Anwar Hussein played the greedy black-marketer.
The tone of the film was relentlessly bleak and unlike today's films, the criminal is not glorified, and neither does he glory in it—his conscience never
loosens its grip on him. When his brother starves to death rather than touch Noshu's ill-gotten money, and Mala turns down his riches too, Noshu
turns in his black marketer cronies, and goes to jail, seeking redemption.
One doesn't expect such a depressing look at the poor, without the sugar-coating of glamour; that's why Raj Kapoor's Shri 420 and
Navketan's films like Baazi and Taxi Driver did well and this one did not—and the heartbroken director left for Pakistan.
Footpath had one unforgettable song – Sham-e-gham ki kasam aaj ghamgeen hain hum-- sung by Talat Mahmood and composed by
Khayyam.
Of course, Madhur Bhandarkar's film, in his own style, will be harsh and maybe titillating, but at least he has not forgotten the poor to make glossy
NRI films.
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3000 cops to run Marathon wearing Traffic Signal shirts
