Fear of traditional authority and sense of abject helplessness keep the villagers from protesting against their condition.
His young son exclaims,‘Father, you will go to the city' You will see the wide roads, the big buildings, the coloured lights!.
While Bhamar fights for his survival in the village, his daughter Phoola finds herself drawn towards a young man in the employ of Janardhan.
When Bhamar discovers that the allegations are true, that it really was his daughter who was meeting a man in the village in secret, he is shattered.
Left with no other alternative, Bhamar decides to leave the village and take up the job of a contract labourer.
In Neeraba Jhada, Manmohan Mahapatra shifts his interests to an entirely rural environment, depicting a universe of deprivation within the closed atmosphere of a single small village in Orissa.
Bhamar and Haria are the archetypal peasants of India trapped by their ignorance and poverty into a cycle of exploitation which continues to push them towards a dehumanized existence.
Generations of submission t the obsolete feudal laws of the land has still not managed to annihilate the human spirit.
Within their own confined worlds, they will continue t battle against the forces that daily attempt to snatch away their last possession, their human dignity.
its resonance will sweep away the dusts of a decaying system and make place for a new generation whose dreams will be their reality.
This is as uncompromising a film imaginable about a people mired in virtual slavery, upheld by ignorance, superstition and tradition, yet it also is a tribute to humanity's strength to endure and even to hope.