The bekaar in the big city: on Bimal Roy’s Naukri

Parts of Bimal Roy’s 1954 film Naukri reminded me of two great scenes from films made in the silent era’s last days: the opening sequence of King Vidor’s The Crowd, with people and vehicles thronging the streets of New York and the rapt camera gliding up the side of a skyscraper, then moving in to reveal countless worker ants at their desks (see video below); and the equally kinetic shot in F W Murnau’s Sunrise where two town-dwellers, the Man and the Wife, get their first view of the approaching city through the windows of their tram. The couple, sullen, distrustful and occupying separate spaces in the vehicle (understandable enough given that one of them has recently plotted to murder the other!), must now huddle together as they dodge traffic and find walking space on the footpaths: this new place is so overwhelming that it unites them.




As Naukri’s title credits end, the camera cranes up to gawk at a tall building, presumably with offices and employment opportunities in it – an apt image for a film about the big city as a place of opportunity and terror. In fact, the protagonist Ratan (Kishore Kumar) will make two long journeys over the course of the story: first from his village to Calcutta, and later to the much more distant Bombay, where he will have to contend with people speaking to him in unfamiliar tongues (Marathi, Parsi). His horizons broaden, but he also becomes more isolated (though the film has a deus ex machina in reserve for him).

Naukri contains many things we now think of as clichés of a cinematic past (whether they were clichés in 1954 is another question): the beloved sister suffering from TB, the widowed mother, the sanguine young man convinced that he will soon get a good job (he is BA Pass with distinction, after all) and overturn his family’s fortunes, the arrival of a letter bearing exam results, the arduous journey that begins with tearful farewells and a bullock-cart ride to the railway station. But these were understandable concerns of the “social” cinema of the post-Independence decade, when so many films were about young people from modest backgrounds entering a new world and taking the tide at its flood, or becoming corrupted or cynical.

Ratan’s fantasy (expressed in the film’s first song “Chhota sa Ghar Hoga”) of having a small house under the clouds, with his sister sitting on a silver chair and his mother on a golden throne, turns out to be nearly as unworkable as little Sujata’s dream – in one of Roy’s best films – of visiting a magical kingdom. Arriving in Calcutta, he is disappointed because the job he thought was his has gone to someone else. Things are far from dire at this point – more chances will presumably come along soon, and meanwhile he is boarding in a small hotel with a genial group of other young men – and yet, for all his optimism, we are warned: past the twilight hour, the “Bekaari block” he is living in resembles a perdition where men who have been unemployed for months play cards, bicker, gossip, vent frustrations late into the night. One of them, clearly a terrible singer, does his riyaaz, and though the scene can be viewed in comic terms it has a dark side – the man is like a ghoul shrieking into the void.

I was intrigued by the way Naukri moved between documentary-like neo-realism and the more dramatic tropes of mainstream storytelling: this is very much a scripted, incident-driven story (with some nice use of songs - I especially like this one, with the young Iftekhar singing "Main collector na banu aur na banunga officer...apna babu hi bana lo mukhe, bekaar hoon main"), but there is also plenty of location shooting, including shots of Kishore Kumar clinging to crowded buses and negotiating the madness of south Bombay during rush hour – scenes that have a slice-of-life quality to them. For all these points of interest though, this is a patchy film. It's easy to engage with at a basic level: that is more or less assured by Kumar’s likeable presence in nearly every scene, and the fluid storytelling abilities of Roy and his talented crew (Nabendu Ghosh, Salil Choudhury, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Asit Sen among them). But I was often unsure what mood it was reaching for. 

Ratan is determinedly cheery to begin with (his philosophy of life is that he must keep smiling and hoping, because if he looks at his predicament too closely he might sink into permanent despair) – so much so that when a genuine tragedy occurs relatively early in the film, it is glossed over, to jarring effect. He recovers too quickly, gets back to his jovial ways and begins a romance with a girl (Sheila Ramani) in the “saamne waali khidki”. (A parallel is established between the young man’s search for “naukri” and “ladki”– it is clear that he needs a job if he is ever to become a householder, or even a responsible boyfriend.) But then, in film’s the final section, since a dramatic climax has to somehow be reached, misfortune atop misfortune piles up to the point where there seems no option other than a suicide attempt at the railway tracks.

This creates structural unevenness, and a related problem is that it requires the story to keep manufacturing hurdles for Ratan, which is sometimes done in ham-handed ways. At one point he writes a letter to his girlfriend, telling her he has to go to Bombay for a job, and foolishly attaches his appointment letter with it, without making a copy or even bothering to memorise or note down the company name and address. Of course, the letter falls into the hands of the girl’s irate father, who feeds it to the kitchen stove after giving it barely a glance. The intention here is to make us feel concerned about Ratan’s fate, but instead one feels like smacking him and saying “You idiot, what were you thinking?” (Given his pride about having passed with distinction, I was reminded of the Peter Medawar quote about the spread of secondary and tertiary education creating a population of people “who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought”.) The situation also leads to an incongruous bit of slapstick comedy where Ratan has to work out what the long and convoluted name of the company is.

The stories that Bimal Roy used for his more reformist cinema lent themselves to a certain degree of didacticism anyway, but here a facile tone in some of the early scenes makes way for an excessively solemn one towards the end, and that mix didn’t really work for me. Other Roy films in a similar socially conscious vein – Sujata and Parakh, notably – do a better job of establishing a pitch and sticking with it. Naukri is still an engaging movie, but by the time we arrive at the solemn voiceover at the end, beseeching the viewer (apparently) to provide jobs to deserving young men, one can’t help feeling that Ratan’s misfortunes stem more from his own incompetence than from societal unfairness. I have read approving comments about Kishore Kumar playing a "serious role for once" in this film, compared to the "buffoons" he played elsewhere – but I think some of those intentionally comic characters would have handled certain situations more efficiently than poor Ratan does.

[Here's an earlier post about another film that combines documentary-like footage with dramatic storytelling, Jules Dassin's The Naked City]