With English subtitles.

Direction: Buddhadeb Dasgupta
Story, Screenplay: Satyajit Ray
Cast: Mithun Chakraborty, Anusua Majumdar, Dipankar Dey
National Award: Best Bengali Film, Best Actor

Bengal, in the late 1950s. Sibnath Mukherjee, a freedom fighter, goes back ‘ home ’ after spending several years in jail followed by a stay in a mental asylum. Unable to accept the partition and its consecutive changes, he finds an old comrade willing to use his patriotic credentials for his own political ambition, a family living in abject poverty, a world of ‘caterpillars’, which looks like another jail.
   
      The film begins with Sibnath’s train journey home, crossing the landscapes of his motherland now divided. It ends with the same journey back: the journey of a man in chains, on his way to his last exile. Using a poetical and poignant language, Buddhadeb Dasgupta explores the rise of opportunism in the post-independence era, the decline of social values, the death of innocence, of purity and dreams. A world where a rural magician (speaking Urdu in this Bengali based culture) pretends to control people through magic and turn them into mindless animals, as politicians do through power. Before our eyes, Sibnath is losing sight of his last dreams, for which, as a freedom fighter, he spent more than ten years in jail and in an asylum. When asked what he thinks of post-independence India, he lifts his leg and farts loudly.