The Mirzas are a Muslim family living in a large ancestral house and running a shoe manufacturing business in the city of Agra in the United Provinces of northern India (now the state of Uttar Pradesh).
In 2005, Indiatimes Movies ranked the movie amongst the Top 25 Must See Bollywood Films. It was India's official entry to the Academy Award's Best Foreign Film category, nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, won a National Film Award and three Filmfare Awards. The movie also launched the career of actor Farooq Shaikh, and also marked the end of Balraj Sahni's film career, who died before its release. It is often credited with pioneering a new wave of art cinema movement in Hindi Cinema, and alongside a film from another debutant film director, Shyam Benegal, Ankur (1973), are considered landmarks of Hindi Parallel Cinema, which had already started flourishing in other parts of India in Bengal, notably by Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak as well as in Kerala. It remains one of the few serious films dealing with the post-Partition plight of Muslims in India. The film details the slow disintegration of his family, and is one of the most poignant films made on India's partition. In the grim months after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948, film's protagonist and patriarch of the family Salim Mirza, deals with the dilemma of whether to move to Pakistan, as many of his relatives, or stay back. Set in Agra, Uttar Pradesh, the film deals with the plight of a North Indian Muslim businessman and his family, in the period after the 1947 partition of India. The film score was given by the classical musician Ustad Bahadur Khan, with lyrics by Kaifi Azmi, it also featured a qawwali composed and performed by Aziz Ahmed Khan Warsi and his Warsi Brothers troupe. It was written by Kaifi Azmi and Shama Zaidi, based on an unpublished short story by noted Urdu writer Ismat Chughtai. Garm Hava (translation: Hot Winds or Scorching Winds) is a 1973 Indian drama film directed by M.