General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Uski Roti (उसकी रोटी)

Uski Roti (उसकी रोटी; also released as A Day's Bread) is a 1969 Hindi-language black-and-white feature film directed by Mani Kaul, an adaptation of a short story by the Hindi writer Mohan Rakesh and Kaul's first feature film. It follows Balo, a village woman in northern India who walks two miles each day to a desolate bus stop to hand her husband, the bus driver Suchcha Singh, his lunch, and it is regarded as one of the founding works of Indian Parallel Cinema.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / debut	Mani Kaul's first feature, made after he studied at the Film Institute of India in Pune¹^•³
Source	Short story of the same name by Mohan Rakesh; screenplay credited to Kaul and Rakesh²^•¹
Year and format	India, 1969, 35 mm, black and white, Hindi¹
Runtime	110 minutes per the International Film Festival Rotterdam catalog; the NFDC catalog lists 102 minutes¹^•⁴
Principal cast	Gurdeep Singh, Garima, Richa Vyas, Lakhanapal, Savita Bajaj¹
Key crew	Cinematography K. K. Mahajan; editing Hemant Bose; producer Rochak Pandit¹
Awards	Filmfare Critics Award for Best Movie (1970 per Moviebuff and IFFR; 1971 per the NFDC catalog); National Award 1971 for Best Cinematography⁵^•⁴
Historical place	One of three 1969 films, with Bhuvan Shome and Sara Akash, that inaugurated Parallel Cinema⁶

Spoilers

Story

Balo's whole life is bound by tradition. Her husband Suchcha Singh drives a bus that passes a few miles from the village every day, but he visits her only on Tuesdays; the other days he spends drinking and playing cards with colleagues. Balo walks two miles every day to a desolate bus stop to hand him his lunch. One day she is late because her 14-year-old sister was assaulted by one of the village boys, and Suchcha Singh, furious at his wife's behavior, refuses the meal.¹ The NFDC synopsis adds that Balo hurries to the stop trying to save her younger sister Jinda from being seduced by the village rake, and that after the husband rejects both the meal and her explanation, she decides to wait until he returns at night.⁴

The Los Angeles Times review describes Sucha as a peacock-proud male chauvinist who, arriving late one day, refuses not only the midday meal but also the evening meal, and notes that Kaul's elliptical style, which moves back and forth in time, leaves open even the possibility that Sucha himself is the sister's seducer rather than a local farmer who has repeatedly come on to her.⁷ Much of the dialogue deals with Jinda's dismay at Balo's oppressed status and her own longing to escape a similar fate.⁷

Form and style

Kaul wanted to discover, in his own words, "what was truly cinematic in the filming of a play," and he used a minimum of gestures to enact a rigidly notated script. The film integrates its characters into the landscape, evoking an internalized yet distanced realism reminiscent of Robert Bresson, whom Kaul cited as an important influence.⁵^•⁷

A two-lens scheme. The two registers of Balo's physical and mental environment are represented by two camera lenses: a 28 mm wide-angle deep-focus lens and a 135 mm telephoto lens that leaves only a minute section of the frame in focus. This schema was gradually reversed through the film, which one account calls Indian cinema's most controlled achievement in image composition. The film's use of spatial volume refers to the large canvases of the modernist painter Amrita Sher-Gil, and the soundtrack isolates individual sounds to match the equally fragmented visual details.⁵

The film's starkness has been measured precisely in a close study of its cinematic syntax by Cecilia Cossio: of 361 shots, 226 show only one person at a time and only 64 carry more than five short sentences of dialogue; the first human voice is heard seven minutes after the film begins, and what is heard then is a single word from a speaker whose face is not seen. The study argues that this deliberate starkness, visual and aural, is exactly how the film conveys loneliness, waiting, and a dumb, uncomprehending animal-like fear.⁸ Kaul himself described the film as "a projection of the woman's fantasies," and festival notes credit his attention to gestures and repetition with lending the film its exceptional power.¹

Place in Parallel Cinema

In 1969, three films were released that signaled the start of Hindi-language Parallel Cinema: Basu Chatterjee's kitchen-sink drama Sara Akash, Mrinal Sen's playful Bhuvan Shome, and Kaul's spare, experimental Uski Roti. They had little in common except that they sat far outside the mainstream and felt like the start of something new; the film-making soon acquired the label Parallel Cinema.⁶ All three were based on the works of prominent Hindi writers, a major break from traditional Hindi films that drew on formulaic potboilers, and all three were shot by the cinematographer K. K. Mahajan, who gave each a distinct look.⁹

Parallel cinema grew up next to, and frequently as a counterpoint to, India's dominant commercial film industries, and it often drew on government backing from bodies including the Film Finance Corporation, which later became the National Film Development Corporation, as well as the Film and Television Institute of India.¹⁰ Uski Roti itself was financed by the FFC.⁵ Within the triptych the films took divergent approaches: Uski Roti manipulates temporal and spatial extents, Sara Akash channels middle-class youth anxieties, and Bhuvan Shome functions like an absurdist parable; among European influences, Uski Roti recalls the austere work of Robert Bresson.¹¹

Reception and distribution

The film divided Indian audiences sharply. It was violently attacked in the popular press for dispensing with familiar cinematic norms and equally strongly defended by India's aesthetically sensitive intelligentsia.⁵ A 1972 Filmfare retrospective wrote that of all the avant-garde films of the previous two years, Uski Roti was perhaps the only one that could claim to be really experimental, while noting that the film was still awaiting public exhibition in India because of a highly commercialized distribution system.¹² Reactions ranged from critics who hailed Kaul as an avant-garde film-maker to scathing reviews, film-school deconstructions, and circulating jokes; one parliamentarian said in public that the film was so boring she would not forget it all her life.¹³

The film and its director drew acclaim from reviewers and festivals alike, winning the Filmfare Critics Award, being shown at the Venice Film Festival, earning Kaul a seat on the Berlin Festival's jury, and bringing the National Award to its cinematographer, K. K. Mahajan.¹² The Guardian critic Derek Malcolm named Uski Roti one of the key films of the new Indian cinema of the time.³ A 2005 Los Angeles Times review, written even without subtitles in view, called the film unmistakably a masterwork, suffused with evocative natural sound and the austere, rigorously understated immediacy of Bresson.⁷

Later availability

The film's rights are held by the National Film Development Corporation of India, which lists it in its feature-film catalog with English subtitles and a U certificate.¹^•⁴ A new digital restoration by NFDC was announced for festival exhibition.¹⁴

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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