General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Aurat

Aurat (औरत; "Woman") is a 1940 Hindi-language drama film directed by Mehboob Khan, telling the story of Radha, a peasant mother who struggles against poverty and a rapacious village moneylender after her husband abandons the family. Produced under the National Studios banner and released on 1 January 1940, it is best known today as the original version of Mother India (1957), Mehboob Khan's own remake and one of the most celebrated films in Indian cinema history.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	1 January 1940, India; Hindi-language black-and-white drama¹^•³
Director and writers	Mehboob Khan; screenplay by Babubhai A. Mehta, dialogue by Wajahat Mirza⁴
Lead cast	Sardar Akhtar as Radha, Surendra as Ramu, Yakub (Lala Yaqoob) as Birju, Arun as Shamu, Kanhaiyalal Chaturvedi as Sukhilala³
Music	Anil Biswas; twelve songs in the film⁵
Runtime	154 minutes (2h 34m)³
Literary source	Inspired by Pearl S. Buck's novel The Mother (1934) and the film version of The Good Earth⁶
Remake	Remade by Mehboob Khan himself as Mother India (1957)²

Spoilers

Plot

Radha (Sardar Akhtar) is an indomitable peasant woman toiling to feed her sons and to pay off Sukhilala (Kanhaiyalal), the village's rapacious moneylender.³ When she learns she is pregnant again, her husband Shamu (Arun), burdened by impoverishment, leaves the village, abandoning her to battle starvation and Sukhilala's lecherous advances on her own.³^•²

The two eldest sons die, leaving Radha with two surviving sons of contrasting temperament: the diligent Ramu (Surendra) and her favorite, the temperamental Birju (Yakub). Birju goes astray and becomes a bandit chieftain, causing the family to be ostracized by the village. He murders Sukhilala and attempts to abduct his childhood sweetheart, Tulsi (Brij Rani), and in the climax Radha kills her own son.²

A key scene, analyzed in detail by scholarship on the film, is a montage in which a natural disaster brings peasant revolt, divine intervention, the cycles of nature, and Radha's sexual vulnerability into collision; the film resolves it through divine intervention, with lightning striking Sukhilala down as he assaults Radha.⁶

Production

Mehboob Khan (born Ramzan Khan, 9 September 1907, in Bilimora, Gujarat) made Aurat during his studio-bound period, before he founded his own production house after 1942.⁷^•⁸ According to the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema entry, the film was started at Sagar but completed at the National studio, and it was produced under the National Studios banner.²^•¹ Khan worked with a regular technical crew: cinematographer Faredoon A. Irani, who also shot Mother India, and editor Shamsudin Kadri.⁴^•⁹

The film's origin lies in American literature about rural Asia. In 1938 Mehboob Khan watched Sydney Franklin's film version of Pearl Buck's The Good Earth in Delhi and was inspired to make his own film depicting the rural world as the nation, centered on the figure of the peasant woman. The source text that inspired Aurat is identified in scholarship as Buck's novel The Mother (1934) together with The Good Earth, with the screenplay Indianized by Babubhai Mehta to the extent that scholars note it hardly resembles the original.⁶^•¹⁰

Music

Anil Biswas composed the score and also acted in and sang one sequence, "Kahe karta der barati." Eleven other songs were sung by Sardar Akhtar, Jyoti, Surendra, and Vatsala Kumthekar.⁵ The film's music was a grand success, and later critics comparing the two versions favored Biswas's score in Aurat over Naushad's heavier orchestration in Mother India; the magazine Movie in 1984 preferred Biswas's music and favored Aurat at every point, including Sardar Akhtar over Nargis and Yakub over Sunil Dutt as Birju.⁵^•¹¹

Aurat and Mother India

Seventeen years after Aurat, Mehboob Khan remade the film in color as Mother India (1957), expanding the domestic drama to what one account calls mythical dimensions, with Nargis in the role of Radha.¹² Kanhaiyalal Chaturvedi reprised his role as the moneylender Sukhilala in the remake.⁸ Mother India became a phenomenon on a scale unprecedented in Bombay cinema, ran for fifty weeks in Bombay, and became the first Indian film nominated for an Oscar in the foreign-film category.¹³

The two films differ in telling ways. Aurat ends with Radha remembering her life through an assemblage of past scenes that she observes like a film, whereas Mother India frames her as a mother whose sacrifices are honored by the new post-colonial nation.⁶ The remake gives far more screen time to Birju as a child, building the mother-son relationship that motivates Radha's later leniency toward him.¹⁴ Scholars describe the 1940 film as lacking the psychoanalytic dimension and socialist-realist overtones of the remake, with Sardar Akhtar's performance endowing it with an earthiness rooted in North Indian agrarian feudalism that Mother India replaced with nationalist allegory.² The film critic B.D. Garga studied the two films together, and in the context of music.⁵

Reception and legacy

The film was a grand success and is considered one of the classics of the 1930s and 1940s era of Hindi cinema; critics have acclaimed Aurat as "the mother of Mother India" on account of its music.⁵ Its narrative template of a mother and her two conflicting sons influenced dozens of later Hindi films, and the film is placed among works of the period in which depicting Indian women became central to Hindi cinema.⁸^•¹⁵

Aurat remains far less famous than its remake; it was, until recently, difficult to find a copy of.¹⁶ The film has been digitized and preserved in the National Film Archive of India's digitized and restored films list.¹⁷ It is currently available for streaming on ShemarooMe free with ads.¹⁸ On IMDb it holds a rating of 7.0/10 from 54 votes.³

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 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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