Most significant is the contrast between Shambhu's love for his wife and his fields on the one hand, and his placement of both of them secondary to dharma. He consults the grandfather and his male friends before selling his household possessions to raise money to pay off the thakur's loan, but the first that his wife Paro (Parvathi) learns of this plan is when she confronts him as he's gathering up her kitchen implements to sell; he doesn't even think to involve her in the decision. Later in Kolkata, Shambhu is offered the chance to save his fields by accepting his son's stolen money — in a sense a tit-for-tat replacement of the money that has been stolen from him and his family — but he refuses, valuing dharma above even his land.

This doublethink around the inconsistencies between unconditional love and unconditional honour is of course rampant in Indian culture and mythos: only because of this peculiar (some might say twisted) sense of honour could Ram send Sita into the agni pariksha, then later banish her across the Ganga, and all the while never stop loving her.

In an abstract sense, Paro is identical to the fields. She is the ultimate aspect of Shakti, the earth mother. The film opens with a portrayal of Shambhu's love of his land and his love of his wife as two faces of the same coin: his neighbours in the fields remark that after ten years of marriage, Shambhu and Paro still have so much to say to each other. The couple hold each other amid the ploughed fields, and when the drought-ending rain comes at last, he pulls her outside, as the water saturates and unifies him and her and the land; Paro's drenched saree embodies the fertility of Shambhu's field. The absence of a grandmother in the family (the grandfather is a widower, and Shambhu stays with Paro in his house as Shiva and Parvathi dwell in the house of Parvathi's father Himavan) only heightens the maternal role of his land and his wife. When Shambhu decides to go to Kolkata to find work, Paro questions his love and begs him not to leave; she and he haven't been separated since the day that they were married, just as he has never been separated from his land.

If Paro / Parvathi is (an avatar of) the goddess of the same name, then is Shambhu / Shiva (an avatar of) the Shiva whose consort Parvathi is; is Shambhu, then, the destroyer of his own fields and home? In at least one sense, yes — for he possessed but rejected the chance to save his fields, valuing dharma above all else. The name Shambhu, though, refers not as much to Shiva's destroyer aspect as to his restorative aspect, and here seems the key to the film and its values.

It's clear that Shambhu loves his land — it's just that he loves dharma more. At the film's opening, his rejection of the thakur's purchase offer is immediate: "My land is mother earth — I cannot sell my mother." Reiterating this rejection, when the money that Shambhu has collected from the sale of his and Paro's household possessions isn't enough to pay off the loan, Paro suggests, rhetorically, that he could sell her — a proposition that Shambhu categorically rejects. Because Parvathi is an earth goddess, to sell her would equate to selling the land. Shambhu will not cast himself as Yudhishthira and Paro as Draupadi, wagering her in an attempt to reclaim his kingdom (his land) from the Kauravas (the thakur), who have acquired a claim to it by unfair means. Shambhu knows the story, he recognises the parallel, and he will not go down that road — he won't even allow his wife to work to help pay the loan, because that compromise in itself would constitute selling her. But doesn't this very refusal to allow her to take her own decision devalue Paro, doesn't it cast her as not a person but a property, a thing that is susceptible to buying and selling? Again, Shambhu demonstrates that he respects dharma above all else, even above respect for his wife.

This holding, this dharma, is manifest in Shambhu's choices in Kolkata: he punishes his son for stealing the money that would, if they kept it, allow them to save their land. When the father whose children's commute to school constitutes Shambhu's main regular income loses his job, Shambhu refuses paying customers in order to continue carrying the children to school. He helps his feverish neighbour, and the favour is returned later, in Shambhu's own hour of need after he's injured in a rickshaw accident. Even a man as virtuous as Shambhu, though, is pushed nearly to his limit by this gritty and selfish city: when he's approached to carry an unknown accident victim (who later turns out to be his own wife) to hospital, his first reaction is to warn that he'll charge five rupees extra if the rickshaw becomes stained with blood; it takes him a moment before he relents and says, "Pay me what you can." In the wake of this one moment of uncertainty, though, Shambhu takes no time at all to decide to spend his savings to pay for Paro's life-saving treatment, thus condemning his land.

As they were in the rain scene near the beginning of the film, Paro's and the land's fertilities remain linked in the end: with the condemnation of the land comes the loss of Paro's foetus, which is implied obliquely with a reference to "internal bleeding." If the land is paved over and rendered sterile, Paro's womb must suffer the same.

At the close of the film, Shambhu gazes as a factory rises on his land, which has been auctioned as a result of his failure to pay off the loan. His father says that his family has everything; the whole earth is their house and the sky is their roof. Those outside the family discount this observation as febrile madness — but is it? Shambhu has saved what's important to him: his son is honest, his wife is alive, and he has done what's right.

Like most Indian films, this one operates on two levels. There is the superficial story — which in later decades would, in order to keep audiences happy, have to have involved some intercession in which the loan would have been paid off, the thakur would have been either converted or vanquished, everybody would have got married and there would have been a lot of singing and dancing. (Thank goodness that once upon a time Indian cinema didn't have to cater to this formula!) But there is also the mythic story, in which characters who stick to their values transcend their circumstances. Shambhu and his family lose in the superficial story but win in the mythic story, whereas the thakur is the materialistic winner but the spiritual loser — and all these souls will reap the consequences of the karma that they produce.