Samaj Ko Badal Dalo (1947)

Bhatt’s unusually strident marital melodrama made with the informal help of the IPTA (choreographers Santi Bardhan, Sachin Shankar, Narendra Sharma et al.), mounting an IPTA-style attack on social conventions in the context of the Independence movement’s promises of liberation. Heroine Manorama (Mridula), daughter of a clerk, cannot marry hero Kishore (Aroon) because her father can’t afford the dowry. Manorama marries the evil widower Jayant (Yakub) who tortures her. Kishore marries the rich Champa (Lila Pawar), but then magnanimously allows her to remarry the man she really loves, Naresh. Kishore’s goodness eventually clashes with Jayant’s villainy and in a frenzied sequence he kills both Jayant and Manorama. He is pronounced insane and arrested.