A young, idealistic director arrives in a village to make a picture set during the Great Bengal Famine. It’s a film that he hopes will reveal the problems and privations still current in rural India.
After being accused wrongly of theft, a slightly addled servant runs away to the city, carrying as his only real possession an axe, which he claims to have killed a tiger with. He takes up life among India's throngs of city-dwelling homeless, and for a little while almost has a decent time of it. He has a girlfriend, and one good friend, and gets by through begging and doing odd jobs.
Set in 1920's during the British Raj, the film is about the breakdown of socio-economic structures, impact of industrialization and non-cooperation movement in rural Bengal.
