General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20264 min read

Aadmi (आदमी)

Aadmi (आदमी; English release title Life's for Living: Aadmi) is a 1939 Hindi social drama directed by V. Shantaram at the Prabhat Film Company in Pune, made simultaneously in Marathi as Manoos (माणूस). It tells the love tragedy of a policeman and a prostitute, and it was named the Best Indian Film for 1939–40 by the Film Journalists Association of India.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / studio	V. Shantaram, Prabhat Film Company, Pune³
Languages	Hindi (Aadmi) and Marathi (Manoos), produced simultaneously²
Release	1 January 1939 (India, wide theatrical release)⁴
Runtime	2 hours 44 minutes (164 minutes), black and white⁵
Lead cast	Shahu Modak as the policeman Moti; Shanta Hublikar as Kesar; with Sundarabai, Ram Marathe, Ganpatrao Tambat and Raja Paranjpe⁴^•⁵
Key creatives	Story A. Bhaskarrao; screenplay and dialogue Anant Kanekar; music Master Krishnarao; cinematography V. Avadhoot²^•⁴
Recognition	Best Indian Film for 1939–40, Film Journalists Association of India¹

Spoilers

Story

The film is a love tragedy. Moti (Shahu Modak), a simple-minded policeman, saves Kesar (Shanta Hublikar), a prostitute, during a police raid on a brothel, and the two fall in love. He tries to give her social acceptance by marrying her, but her reputation and her own sense of guilt defeat his attempts at rehabilitation. Moti's respectable middle-class mother (Sundarabai) represents the life Kesar would like to have. Kesar is arrested for murdering her evil uncle and refuses Moti's offer to release her from prison.⁴^•¹

The ending carries a deliberate contrast. As Kesar goes to prison she leaves a life-affirming message for the despairing Moti, telling him not to give up the world for her love, and the film closes on a falsely positive tone set to the rhythm of marching policemen.⁶^•¹

Production and style

The story came from A. Bhaskarrao's short story "The Police Constable", with screenplay and dialogue by Anant Kanekar, who also wrote the lyrics; Master Krishnarao composed the music and V. Avadhoot was the director of photography.² The film was shot entirely on sets, including street corners, alleys and corridors, and consists mainly of night scenes in heavy shadows. The film scholar Omar Ahmed, a writer and curator on Indian cinema, describes the opening raid on the brothel as cloaked in expressionism, with canted shots (camera tilted sideways, creating a disorienting angle), chiaroscuro and deep shadows, and notes that Shantaram visited red light districts in Mumbai to recreate the milieu authentically.¹^•⁷

A reflexive streak runs through the film. In one sequence the lovers escape to a rural setting and stumble onto a film shoot, where they mock the hyperbolic romanticism being performed for the camera; the film historian writing at Indiancine.ma identifies this as a spoof on the Bombay Talkies style, echoing Ashok Kumar and Devika Rani in Achhut Kanya (1936).⁷^•¹ In another sequence, Moti's mother consults a statue of the goddess Ambe before consenting to the marriage, and Moti secretly blows the flower so that it falls to the right, a moment Ahmed reads as ridiculing the superstitious ritual.⁷

The multilingual song

Ab kis liye kal ki baat ("Why worry about tomorrow"), the film's classic number, which Hublikar sings as a seduction song, was written in five languages, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Gujarati, and Punjabi, alongside its Marathi/Hindi refrain, and it nods to well-known stereotypes of the film industries in those regions. The Sahapedia account of Prabhat Studio describes Kesar singing one paragraph for each of her customers, a Gujarati, a Parsi, a Muslim, a Punjabi, a Tamilian and a Bengali, in their own language.¹^•⁸

Place in Shantaram's career and reception

Aadmi belongs to Shantaram's trilogy of thought-provoking bilinguals in Marathi and Hindi, Kunku/Duniya Na Mane (1937), Manoos/Aadmi (1939) and Shejari/Padosi (1941), which a Scroll.in history of Prabhat Studios counts among the studio's greatest achievements.⁹ A Yojana retrospective on Marathi cinema frames Manoos ("Aadmi" in Hindi) as an answer to Devdas made by New Theatres: where Devdas showed a pessimist hero who becomes an alcoholic when his beloved deserts him, the English title of Manoos, "Life Is For Living", signals the opposite stance.¹⁰

The film dealt with the morality and social acceptance of sex work, following a policeman who tries to rehabilitate a sex worker by marrying her, in a society reluctant to forgive her past.¹¹ Writing decades later, the critic Deepa Gahlot in Mid-Day called it, for its time, a bold and progressive story.¹² According to the Indiavideo archive, the Marathi version was widely appreciated internationally, and Charlie Chaplin praised Shantaram after watching it.¹¹ Indiancine.ma records suggestions that the plot was borrowed from Robert Sherwood's Waterloo Bridge (James Whale, 1931).¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Indian films (individual works) › Hindi films before 1970

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?