A baby girl, orphaned in a cholera epidemic, is adopted by a railway engineer and his wife despite the fact that she is an untouchable by caste. As the girl, Sujata, grows up, what was a playful relationship between her and the family's daughter, Rama, brings on both political and personal problems for both.
Director Bimal Roy's 1953 Two Acres of Land dealt with rural poverty, inspired by de Sica's neo-realistic Bicycle Thief. “In Sujata, Roy again dealt with a social problem...this time it was...an evil which has been with Indian society for centuries - untouchability. Twenty-three years before Sujata, another highly successful film had been made on the same subject, Achhut Kanya (see November 5), and to compare the two is to understand how the nature of the ‘social problem' film had changed during the period.... By the late '50s, urban India was much less orthodox than it was in the '30s. It had become much more of a melting pot, and therefore liberal in its attitude to caste. The whole tone of Sujata is far less strident and more lyrical than that of most ‘social problem' films till then.
“The device of blood transfusion, by which it is established that untouchable blood is in no way different from high-caste blood (Sujata's blood saves her foster-mother after an accident), became an instant cliche of Indian films....” --“Film India: Looking Back,” Museum of Modern Art