Guru Dutt cuts to the chase early on in Pyaasa. He opens the film, about a brilliant but unsuccessful poet, with a verse “Ye hanste hue phool” (These smiling flowers), in which Mohammed Rafi as the inner voice of poet Vijay (Dutt himself) claims that he has very little to share with the world other than a few tears and sighs. It is followed shortly by a polemical scene on the nature of poetry in which a publisher criticises Vijay for using his precious words to launch a crusade against hunger and unemployment rather than talking about beauty, love and romance. While Vijay considers him too hollow to be able to understand his thoughts and feelings, forget those of his revolutionary idols, Josh [Malihabadi] and Faiz [Ahmed Faiz], the publisher considers Vijay’s dossier worth nothing more than tossing it into the dustbin.

It sets the stage for Dutt to engage potently with some of his deep-rooted concerns in what’s arguably the most influential work of his short but significant career as a filmmaker. These issues continue to stare back at us even now, much more starkly at that, 68 years after Pyaasa’s release.

Dutt’s commentary—through the words of his writer Abrar Alvi and Sahir Ludhianvi’s lyrics—on the community’s inimical approach to the arts and the artiste segues in with the critique of societal ills. The state of the nation gets addressed through the state of the poet. His personal frustrations run parallel with the political grievances. For Vijay, and Dutt in turn, personal is political and political is personal. So, “art for art’s sake” doesn’t hold meaning for Vijay, nor was it a dictum for Dutt. His films had to make sense of the times they were set in. The hunger and unemployment that Vijay is scorned for writing about run like a thread through Dutt’s work. From the idle Madan (Dev Anand) who takes to gambling in Baazi (1951) to the ace cartoonist Preetam (Dutt)—a brilliant artist, like Vijay—whose shoes have worn out in search of a job in Mr and Mrs '55 (1955). Through the character of a doctor in this romantic comedy, Dutt talks about how the twin illnesses of hunger and unemployment are forcing the young to seek out sookha kuaan (dry well) or gehraa taalaab (deep pond) (implying death by suicide).

When asked about whether he does any work, Vijay replies that he works towards searching for work. Unemployment has turned him so weary that he too talks about suicide—abandoning the world due to sheer helplessness in a song that voices his interminable struggles: “Tang aa chuke hain kashmakash-e-zindagi se hum”. Preetam and Vijay foreshadow the personal and professional despair, disillusionment and decline of another artiste, albeit a privileged one—filmmaker Suresh Sinha in Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959). Dutt’s cinema is seminal for being a perfect meeting ground for both the craft and content. In Pyaasa, the song and dance, the play of light and shade, the camera, the tracking shots, the closeups, the eye contact between the characters, their gazes at each other—each deserves an essay of its own. But most so its depiction of the reality of the newly independent India. It is about cinema trying to document, and understand its times, raising profound questions, not providing instant, readymade solutions.

In Pyaasa, Vijay, and Dutt in turn, are questioning the idea of Nehruvian India, its unfulfilled promises of equality, dignity and freedom. Ideally, it’s a question that should be consistently thrown at any and every leader at any and every point in the nation’s life. But how many filmmakers have managed to do that over the years or have been allowed to do that? Those who did, have often found themselves censured, censored and ostracised. The fate of most provocative artists has been like Vijay’s, abandoned and ignored in his struggles, his works sold as scrap or dismissed as “nausikhiye ki bakwaas”. Crucified like Christ, with the iconic image conjured in the classic song. "Ye duniya agar mil bhi jaaye to kya hai (What good would it be to win this world)?"

In a world that only worships success and money, solidarity then is not to be found in the company of fair-weather friends, the girlfriend who selfishly picked wealth over his love or the exploitative family. True comradeship is with those confined to the margins like him, who share his fate and angst and truly understand him and his work—a sex worker Gulabo (Waheeda Rehman) and a street masseur Abdul Sattar (Johnny Walker). But it’s no country for passionate poets. As Vijay himself states, it worships the dead but tramples on the living, rips off humanity from human beings, makes foes out of friends and turns brothers into strangers. Eventually, they have to wilfully relinquish this world and walk away to build another world of their own where they’d get the deserved equality, justice and dignity.