General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Imaan Dharam

Imaan Dharam (ईमान धर्म; also spelled Immaan Dharam, literally "Honesty and Religion") is a 1977 Hindi-language action drama film directed by Desh Mukherjee and written by the screenwriting duo Salim-Javed, starring Shashi Kapoor, Sanjeev Kumar, and Amitabh Bachchan: Shashi Kapoor and Amitabh Bachchan play con men who earn their living as paid false witnesses outside the Bombay courts, while Sanjeev Kumar plays Kabir Das, whom they meet before he is arrested for a murder he says he did not commit.¹^•²^•¹¹

Key fact	Detail
Release	14 January 1977 (India); some databases list 7 or 13 January¹^•²^•³
Director / writers	Desh Mukherjee (credited as Desh Mukerji); story, screenplay, and dialogue by Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar¹^•⁴
Lead cast	Shashi Kapoor as Mohan Kumar Saxena, Sanjeev Kumar as Kabir Das, Amitabh Bachchan as Ahmed Reza⁵
Supporting cast	Rekha (Durga), Aparna Sen (Shyamlee), Helen (Jenny Francis), Prem Chopra (Ranjeet), Om Shivpuri (Seth Jamuna Das), Shreeram Lagoo (Govinda Anna), Utpal Dutt (Balbir Singh), Amrish Puri (Dharam Dayal), A.K. Hangal (Masterji)⁵
Music	Laxmikant-Pyarelal; lyrics by Anand Bakshi⁴
Technical details	Hindi, 156 minutes, color, mono sound; produced by Premji for Suchitra Films Pvt. Ltd.¹
Reception	IMDb rating 5.5/10 from 252 votes; a box-office failure¹^•⁶

Spoilers

Plot

Ahmed Reza (Amitabh Bachchan) and Mohan Kumar Saxena (Shashi Kapoor) are petty thieves and con men whose trade is perjury: they linger near the Bombay courts and are paid a set sum of rupees to give false depositions as the needs of each case require.²^•⁷ Neither man believes in God, but the film's premise is that they eventually have to accept the power of the divine.⁷

The turn to honesty. After meeting and being influenced by Kabir Das (Sanjeev Kumar), the two decide to go straight, and find that earning an honest living is virtually impossible.² When Kabir Das is arrested and imprisoned for a murder he claims he did not commit, the duo promise to help him and find the real killer, but they end up in trouble themselves.⁷ The villains are Ranjeet (Prem Chopra), Seth Jamuna Das (Om Shivpuri), and Dharam Dayal (Amrish Puri), who kill Kabir's father and frame Kabir; the false testimony that helps convict him turns out to have been given by Ahmed and Mohan themselves, not realizing who he was.⁵^•⁶

The supporting characters carry the film's religious and social themes. Shyamlee (Aparna Sen) is a blind aspiring singer whom the two treat as a sister; her father Masterji (A.K. Hangal) condemns their trade, saying they "lie after placing their hands on holy books."⁵^•¹ Rekha plays Durga, a Tamil laborer on construction sites, in a marked departure from her usual glamorous screen image.⁶ Helen plays Jenny Francis, an alcoholic mother who hires Ahmed to lie to her daughter that he is her father, a straight dramatic role in which she never dances.⁶ Utpal Dutt plays Balbir Singh, an ex-military Sikh who lost a leg and leads a musical number by disabled veterans at a charity meeting.⁵^•⁶

Production

The film brought together some of the most commercially powerful names of 1970s Hindi cinema: Bachchan and Kapoor as co-stars, Salim-Javed as writers, and Laxmikant-Pyarelal as composers, with playback songs sung by Mohammed Rafi, Asha Bhosle, Mahendra Kapoor, Kishore Kumar, Lata Mangeshkar, and Mukesh.⁶^•⁴ Cinematography was by Nariman A. Irani, editing by Das Dhaimade, and the fight sequences were directed by stunt coordinator M.B. Shetty.⁴^•⁵

For Desh Mukherjee, a well-regarded production designer, this was his debut as a director; he went on to make only one more film, twenty years later.⁶ A widely repeated anecdote holds that after the film's box-office failure, the producers Tony-Tito, who had given Mukherjee a car as a signing amount, took the car back, leaving the director stranded in the middle of the road.⁸

The Amar Akbar Anthony connection

The film's most cited piece of history concerns Manmohan Desai. According to the account recorded on IMDb, Salim and Javed narrated the story of Imaan Dharam to Desai, who suggested that producer A.G. Nadiadwala buy it; Nadiadwala paid the writers a large sum. The writers were then offered an even larger price for the script by producer Premji. They returned to Desai, told him the script had a defect and could not be developed further, and asked him to drop the film, but then went behind Nadiadwala's back and developed the story with Desh Mukherjee. When Desai realized what had happened, he decided to start a script with the same idea of all three faiths in one film, to show Salim and Javed how angry he was; this was how Amar Akbar Anthony was born.¹

Reception and assessment

The film failed at the box office, and its IMDb rating stands at 5.5/10 from 252 votes.¹^•⁶ Retrospective reviewers have treated it as a puzzle: a film with that cast and those writers that nonetheless underperformed. Common criticisms are subplots that go nowhere and religious messaging delivered so directly that one reviewer described the ending as the script "smacking them over the head with a holy book," while crediting the film with addressing moral complexity and social justice and with depicting lower working-class life, day laborers and construction workers, something unusual for a mainstream Bollywood film of the period.⁶^•⁹ Reviewers have also noted the film's place in the Bachchan-Kapoor pairing, with one observing that it is one of the few films in which Bachchan's role is not noticeably meatier than Kapoor's despite his greater star standing.²

The film is available for streaming in India on Amazon Prime Video and, free with ads, on Zee5.¹⁰

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 of the 1970s › Released 1976 to 1979

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

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