माना अपनी जेब से फ़क़ीर हैं, फिर भी यारों दिल से हम अमीर हैं!

Maana apni jeb se faqeer hain, phir bhi yaaron dil ke hum ameer hain!

Sure, my pockets are empty, but friends, my heart wants not!


So sings Raj (Raj Kapoor) in the film Anari ("The Simpleton", 1959). Like many films from the 1950s, quite a few of them featuring Raj Kapoor, this one too pitches the iconic little guy with the big heart against the greedy and devious world of corporations, corrupt middlemen and bourgeois snobbery. These movies have clearly socialist themes where traditional social and religious hierarchies are subverted in their measure of morality and ethics and age-old stereotypes of class and caste are upturned. Oddly enough, these same cinematic acts of subversion in the 1950s turned into classic Bollywood tropes just a decade later.
The poor here are cast as being uniformly naive and with the purest of intentions. If they are found to be involved in something unsavory, you can be sure that they have fallen to such depths out of desperation and the machinations of the rich and powerful. The rich in these movies are all almost always devious, malicious and greedy, with the exception of one or two characters who redeem their kind by attempting to bridge the yawing social divide between the main protagonists. Predictably, many are rich girl-poor boy romances where the besotted pair's idyllic dreams are thwarted by the realities of a merciless and bigoted world.
As I mentioned before, these films often starred Raj Kapoor as the little guy and many of them were produced and directed by him as well. Films like Awaara ("The Vagabond", 1951) and Shree 420 ("Mr. Thief", 1955) became international cult classics and continue to be watched enthusiastically not only in India but in the former Soviet Union and in much of the Middle East. Aside from the Raj Kapoor blockbusters, there were other big-budget productions like Naya Daur ("The New Era", 1957) which has strong themes of development and the power of the working class (the song Saathi Haath Badhaana--"Lend a helping hand, friend"--frames this theme perfectly). More poignant movies like Do Bigha Zamin ("Two Plots of Land", 1953) and Oscar nominated Mother India (1957) also presented tales of social and economic inequity.
Interestingly enough, most of these movies never portray the state and its tentacles in a negative light. Here, the state and its laws are always there to help the poor man out and are firmly shown to be on the side of the downtrodden. It's the capitalists, industrialists and the bourgeois gliterati who are the worms in the idyllic social apple conjured on the silver screen. The film Shree 420, for instance, features the eternally popular song "Mera joota hai japaani" where the hero, Raju (Raj Kapoor) sings, "My shoes are Japanese, my trousers are English, the red hat on my head is Russian, but still my heart is Indian" all the while trotting around in a fashion after Charlie Chaplin. This movie closes with the hero and the heroine (Nargis) walking into the sunrise and towards a socialist co-operative housing development!

Tadka Dal
Money corrupts, while poverty has a purifying effect on the soul. (Not so subtle subtext: Trust in the socialist state.)

Source
Made in the wake of Indian independence these movies reflect the socialist values of those who spearheaded the independence movement, thus combing strong strains of both Nehruvian state socialism and the Gandhian emphasis on the power of the unlettered Indian masses. Social and economic egalitarianism were important aspects of the Indian constitution and was clearly what Indian intellectuals hoped would be an essential characteristic of the fledgling nation. The artists who were the creative force behind these movies were of this ilk. This trend of presenting the classes as morally and ethically dichotomous ended around the early 1990s at a time when a change in administration and government policy opened the gates of the Indian marketplace to foreign investment and ushered the Indian citizen into a newly globalizing world. The glammed-up movies of the 1990s brought to focus the glut of products and the sheen of upward-mobility to which a larger segment of India's primarily poor population now aspired. These movies featured the lives of the fabulously wealthy who, in spite of the trials and tribulations that come with such wealth, led ethical and moral lives. The film Maine Pyar Kiya ("I Have Loved",1989) was perhaps one of the last that framed the rich-poor divide in terms of good and evil. In contrast, the 1994 mega-hit Hum Aapke Hain Kaun...! ("Who Am I to You!") has no villains, just a love story between a guy and a gal from two jaw-droppingly rich families. They encounter a few bumps on the way thanks to avoidable misunderstandings, but all in all it's a wild romp through upper-class wardrobes and bourgeois morality.