‘Muzaffar Ali`s Gaman is a poem in visuals. Its tragic lyricism, its muted eloquence, its deeply perceptive, its sensitively conceived and truthfully captured slice of reality around us, the beauty and the heart break of the human situation in town and country, makes it a sheer delight, a veritable  tour de force.’’

 -     Faiz Ahmad Faiz 

At the 7th International Film Festival, New Delhi, Gaman received the special award of the jury, a Silver Peacock. At the 29th National Film Festival it was awarded for Best Music and Best Female Playback Singer with the citation 'the most sensitive film on the problem of migration from rural areas to urban centers'. Gaman also received the Filmfare Award for Best Director. It represented India at the Mannheim Film Week, Germany.

 ‘In India the demand for escapist entertainment is so great and the opportunities for serious film makers so few that it’s some kind of a miracle that a powerful, uncompromising film like "Gaman" (at the Four Star theatre through Thursday) even got made. At once, a work of visual poetry and of social protest in the style of post-war Italian realism, "Gaman" ("Going") tells of the desperate plight of millions of Indians in their daily ritual for survival.’(Img 3)

-     Kevin Thomas, Times Staff Writer, Los Angeles Times, December 6, 1980.

Gaman is a poem of the dispossessed of this country; of those who are forced by circumstances beyond their control to leave their families and their homes thereby destroying the social and cultural fabric of their environment themselves.  It is a story of a young, unemployed youth of Kotwara, a village in Uttar Pradesh, Ghulam Hassan played by Farouque Shaikh, (Img 4) who has little education, less land and no opportunity in his own village and has, therefore, to migrate to Mumbai leaving behind his old mother a young wife, Khairun played by Smita Patil. With his departure, life for these women comes to a standstill: the present is unbearable, the future uncertain. The only events of any significance are the periodical arrivals of letters and money orders from Mumbai. Their lives are transformed into long, unending periods of waiting. In the Indian village, a woman or a household without a man loses all identity. (Img 5)

Farouque Shaikh becomes a taxi driver like another friend from his village with whom he goes to stay. He sees Mumbai as a callous city and adapts himself to the need of place. He sees the pressure on the local people as an onslaught of these incessant waves of migration to the metropolis. The local person finds it hard to adjust to the changes and either cracks up in the process, or if he is young enough, plans further migration to the Gulf.

‘The film was based on my own perception of a social reality around me, namely, Mumbai city, where I was living and working and Kotwara in the state of Uttar Pradesh to which I belonged and felt deeply about. The film was both a personal diary and a critical appraisal of the social, economic and cultural milieu of both these places.’Gaman evolves with true to life happenings and the protagonist becoming more and more aware of the social contractions and human helplessness in the situations, till the protagonist finds himself totally trapped in the urban maze, not being able to return even for his own mother’s illness back in the village…

The film was designed as a stark colourless reality, with colour used very judiciously in only three sequences. Colour is a symbol of consumption in society and not as a statement of individual creation. The characters are not consumers in society, but consumed by society. The village is immersed in a faded aura of a past, with black and brown as a colour of permanence and security (Img 6). In the metropolis yellow of the taxi is the predominant hue along with the khaki of the drivers. The only colour is red which is used as a colour of the taxi driver’s dream of his wife as a bride. The symbolism is the erosion of cultural norms in the face of changing socio-economic values in a society. As a painter the entire screenplay was sketched out and detailed to create the moving images.  Poetry made an important statement on the situation and the inner feelings of the characters. The music too was a presentation of the heartbreak of the cultural ethos.

The film was essentially a modern poetic expression of an irreversible social phenomenon of the devastation of a fabled culture. The film has the poetry of Shahryar and Makdoom Mohiuddin and the music of Jaidev, the voice to Chhaya Ganguli along with the haunting helpless image of Smita Patil (Img7) integrated with the people village of Kotwara. The Bhairavi spelling the tragedy of the village is in the voice of Hira Devi Mishra. The film stars a sensitive and vulnerable Farouque Shaikh and a callous and ebullient Jalal Agha. The dialogues were of Hriday Lani and the cinematography was done by Nadeem Khan. Nana Patekar was a gift of Gaman to the film industry.