Gangacharan Chakraborty (Soumitra Chatterjee) settles in a new village as the resident Brahmin teacher-doctor-priest with his wife (Babita). As the Brahmin who inhabits the highest caste rank in the Hindu feudal order and mediates ritual worship between man and the gods, Gangacharan is treated with high regards by fellow villagers and often receives gifts of fresh produce, fish, jaggery, grains, fruits, clothes etcetera. The film unfolds in a slow pace, revealing the austerity of the caste system, the politics of touch, the subservience of the backward caste who are conditioned to treat the Brahmin with blind faith and the knowing deception of the Brahmin himself who takes glaringly apparent advantage of his position. However, the cataclysmic famine of 1943 upends the order of things. Dinabandhu Bhattacharya, photographed in the right, begging for rice gains, brings about the watershed moment in the film when Gangacharan gets to know that a crisis of grain is catching up with the countryside.