Sujata

An orphaned girl is adopted by a family of high caste and grows up knowing nothing of where she came from; her family does not tell her. She comes in fact from a community placed at the very bottom of the caste order and counted untouchable. Years later, when she falls in love with a man of high caste, that past comes out and the matter stops being one between two people and becomes the business of the families and of everyone around them. The film does not present the division of caste as a natural order; it plainly takes a side against it and shows how the girl is blamed without having done anything. Nutan and Sunil Dutt appear in Bimal Roy’s hundred and sixty one minute Indian film, completed in 1959.