Stealing bread: How Deewaar reimagined an episode from Les Miserables

Police sub-inspector Ravi Verma (Shashi Kapoor) is walking down the streets of Bombay (Mumbai), lost in his own thoughts, when he suddenly hears cries of “Chor! Chor! (Thief! Thief!)” With the bull-dog instinct of a policeman, he chases the suspect. He calls out to the runner several times to stop, but when the latter does not, Ravi shoots him with his service revolver. The thief is injured in his leg and falls down. As Ravi catches up with him, he finds that the thief is only a teenager. And, he has stolen loaves of bread.

 

Filled with contrition, Ravi goes to the home of the suspect, carrying boxes of food. The suspect’s family lives in a rundown house, in a slum. When his mother hears that it is Ravi who shot her son, she curses and abuses him. “Why do you only shoot poor people?” she cries. But the teenage thief’s father (A K Hangal) is more reasonable. “My son perhaps could not bear seeing us hungry,” he explains to Ravi. “But you did your duty.” Then, he adds the punchline: “There are a lot of hungry people in this country. Does it mean all of them will start stealing?”

 

 

This is a pivotal sub-plot in the 1975 blockbuster Deewaar, radically turning the film’s narrative. It is inspired, obviously, by Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862). In Hugo’s novel, written after the French Revolution and with the full consciousness of Marie Antoinette’s alleged bread-and-cake disaster, a poor man stealing bread is not an individual crime but an indictment of an unequal society. Deewaar turns Hugo’s ethical concerns on their head, justifying the state’s murderous violence in the face of any transgression. In doing so, it dilutes the film’s radical potential.

 

The angry brother

 

Right before this sub-plot, Ravi’s superior, Deputy Commissioner of Police Narang (Manmohan Krishna), assigns him a case to track down and arrest a gang of smugglers. Led by one Mulk Raj Daavar (Iftekar), the gang’s key member is Ravi’s older brother, Vijay Verma (Amitabh Bachchan). When Ravi learns of this, he is reluctant to take up the case. He knows of the sacrifices made by Vijay to give him a good education. But on hearing these words of wisdom from the teenage thief’s father, who is also a retired schoolteacher, Ravi is convinced that he must take up the case.

 

Written by the screenwriting duo Salim-Javed (Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar) and directed by Yash Chopra, Deewaar was an instant hit, both with the audiences and the critics. Film scholar Ranjani Mazumdar, in her landmark book Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (2007), writes: “The angry persona of Amitabh Bachchan became the archetypal imagination deployed to render a state of urban despair. Deewaar’s success and power lies in its skilful deployment of melodrama to heighten the conflict between the two brothers.” This film’s Vijay was the second successful iteration of the “Angry Young Man” persona by Salim-Javed and Bachchan, after their 1973 blockbuster Zanjeer.

 

Film critics and scholars have identified the socio-political condition of the 1960s and 1970s as the key factor for the growth and popularity of the Angry Young Man. Media scholar Saayan Chattopadhyay writes in a 2013 paper: “The political events taking place progressively after independence made the citizens of the newly independent nation-state disillusioned and the rhetoric of an ideal Indian nation-state seemed concocted.” Drawing upon other scholars, Chattopadhyay shows that a cocktail of growing inequality, especially in India’s urban centres, the popularity of Kung Fu films such as Enter the Dragon (1973), and the colonial and post-colonial discourse around Indian masculinity led to the popularity of the on-screen Angry Young Man.

 

At the same time, the conflict between the brothers also had precedents in Indian literature, mythology and cinema. Mazumdar compares Ravi and Vijay to Arjuna and Karan from the Mahabharata. Abandoned at birth and wronged throughout his life, Karan — like Vijay — has every reason to be angry with the world. But abandoning the righteous path of dharma seals his fate, and he is defeated and killed by his brother, Arjuna, in the battle of Kurukshetra. Ravi and Vijay’s mother, Sumitra (Nirupa Roy), harks back to Arjuna and Karan’s mother, Kunti. Torn by the love of her sons, Kunti chooses Arjuna in the Mahabharata because he is on the side of dharma. Sumitra chooses Ravi over Vijay.

 

Sumitra is not only a Kunti figure, she is also a metonym for India, the motherland. If Hindi cinema is the mythology of modern India, as film scholars like Rachel Dwyer have shown, then the story of Deewaar is one of its founding myths. As Salim Khan said in a recent documentary, older films like Mother India (1957) and Ganga Jumna (1961) also had similar plots. In both these films, the mother figure represents the motherland, and the sons find themselves on opposing sides of the law. The one in conflict with the law is, eventually, disciplined and executed, re-establishing the status quo of the nation.

 

However, Deewaar is different from its predecessors in two significant ways. First, it transposes this familiar story, which played out in a village in the older films, to Bombay (Mumbai). By doing so, it transforms the site of the nation from the village of Gandhian, utopic imagination, to a more contemporary urban setting. The second, as we have seen, provides an expression of the mood of dissent in the 1960s and 1970s in response to rising inequality in Indian society and corruption in government. This mood found an outlet in student protests in Bihar and Gujarat, strikes by railway workers, the far-left Naxalite movement, and the formation of a grand coalition of opposition political parties by Jayaprakash Narayan, who called for Sampoorna Kranti, or a total revolution.

 

Historian Bipin Chandra described this period in his book, In the Name of Democracy: J P Movement and the Emergency (2003), as “a turbulent period marked by a series of agitations — bandhs and gheraos, strikes and shutdowns, closures of colleges and universities.” It eventually led former prime minister Indira Gandhi to declare the Emergency on 25 June 1975 — five months after Deewaar was released on 24 January of the same year. During the Emergency, which would last till 21 March 1977, Mrs Gandhi’s government imprisoned opposition leaders, muzzled the press, and ruled by decree. In 2025, as we mark the 50th anniversary of the start of the Emergency, the Film Heritage Foundation has been screening Deewaar in Mumbai.

 

The family as a nation

 

Film scholar Priya Joshi in her essay, “Cinema as a family romance” (2015), argues that in Deewaar and two other films starring Bachchan in leading roles — Trishul (Yash Chopra, 1978) and Shakti (Ramesh Sippy, 1980) — the nation’s central conflicts are transposed into the biological family, rendering both “unstable, even combustible”. Not coincidentally, all three are written by Salim-Javed. In the climax of Deewaar, Ravi shoots and kills Vijay as the latter tries to escape from the police. Joshi and other scholars have shown that Ravi’s fratricidal act derives legitimacy from their mother, who is also, as we have seen, the motherland. In a scene before the climax, as Ravi is about to go out to arrest Vijay, Sumitra hands him his service revolver and says: “God willing, your hand will not shake when you fire.”

 

It is the same service revolver Ravi used to shoot the teenage thief in the scene with which I started this essay. His chase and firing upon the thief is an ironic precursor to his climactic chase and killing of his own brother. The subplot involving the teenage thief and his schoolteacher father attempts to provide a more objectively ethical justification for Ravi’s action. It shows that Vijay’s crimes are not merely transgressions against the law, they are moral follies that need to be punished. The wizened schoolteacher, however, provides no panacea for hunger and inequality.

 

Economist Ranjit Sau, in his 1977 essay, “Indian Political Economy, 1967–77: Marriage of Wheat and Whiskey”, described the stark inequality in India in the late-1960s poignantly: “India… was a grand feast at a marriage ceremony somewhere in a posh suburb of Calcutta [Kolkata] or Bombay. In the glare of florescent lights, amidst the soothing fragrance of precious flowers you are all flush with the spirit of merriment. Stretch your sight a little, you will see at the far end where light fades into darkness a huddle of rag-tag beggars bent on leftovers.” Half a century later, the situation is probably worse.

 

As a recent study by the World Inequality Lab shows, India’s richest 1 percent has 22 percent of the country’s annual income and has access to 40.1 percent of the national wealth. This has been described by some commentators as Billionaire Raj, a result of corporate-government nexus and crony capitalism. It is comparable to the final decades of the British Raj (1930–47), when the top 1 percent of the country held about 20–21 percent of the country’s national income.

 

Not surprisingly, rewatching Deewaar now is still an enriching experience. The film is not only an archive of the past. It tells us not only about the socio-political condition that led to the disaster of the Emergency in 1975, but also provides us with precautions and possibilities for our own unjust times.

 

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  Uttaran Das Gupta is an independent writer and journalist