Shakti is an honest police officer out to avenge the death of his father, Gautam Gorakhnath, and the trials and obstacles he faces while he goes through corruption, love, and usual Hindi film masala.
Advocate Jhun Jhunjhunwala hires Vijay Kumar to act as a husband for a rich, wealthy, and spoiled girl named Radha, to which Vijay agrees to. As time passes, both fall in love together, and decide to get married. Shortly after that Vijay is arrested and imprisoned. When Jhunjhunwala investigates, he find out that Vijay is held for the murder of his wife, Vaishali Verma, who was killed before Vijay met Radha.
Kanhaiya lives with his mother in a small rural town in India, and makes a living singing and dancing at wedding, birthdays, and other important ceremonies in the community along with Bhola, a young man who his mother had offered to house and shelter when he had been lost in a fair. The community's powerful Thakur Raghuvir Singh's daughter, Chanchal, falls in love with Kanhaiya, and asks him to approach her father for her hand in marriage. Bhola and Kanhaiya's mom approach him accordingly, but are insulted, severely beaten and thrown out. As a result of this beating, Kanhaiya's mom passes away, leaving him enraged to avenge her death by the arrogant Thakur. When Thakur finds out that it was his daughter who had proposed marriage, he apologizes to Kanhaiya, but gets his daughter married elsewhere. It is then that Kanhaiya meets with Janki, a young woman, living with her mentor, Dayal, who works for another Thakur, Pratap Singh.
Raja is an aspiring singer and gets a chance to sing in Dubai through Mr. Singhania. He informs his pregnant wife, Seema, and they look forward to a more prosperous life. Before that could happen, Raja finds out that Singhania is going to use him to carry drugs in his suitcase, he objects to this, and is brutally killed in the presence of his wife. His wife flees the assailants, and gives birth to a baby boy near the temple of Bhagwan Shri Shankar and names the boy Shiva. Unmarried and childless Maria Fernandes sees the child and an apparently dead Seema, and takes the child. But Seems is still alive, and is angered at being separated from her son. She swears to avenge Raja's death, and sets about to kill the assailants one by one. She manages to kill one of them, but before she could proceed on with her gruesome task, she is arrested by the police and sentenced to jail for several years.
After her husband, Baburam Yadav, travels to Bombay to try and re-pay his loan to the local money-lender, Lala Sukhilal, his wife, Laxmi, and three children Sheila, Shakti, and Shankar, are on the point of destitution. To make matters worse, they stop receiving any mail from their father for months. When Sukhilal finds out about their plight, he offers to look after Laxmi and be intimate with her, but she refuses, so he decides to take possession of the house and property, and does so with approval of the local Panchayat. Laxmi and her set forth to travel to Bombay to be with Baburam and a ride from a drunken truck driver, Tej Bahadur, who puts the children in the back of the truck and lets Laxmi sit next to him. When it starts raining heavily, Tej stops the truck, brutally beats and rapes Laxmi until she dies. He also heavily cuffs young Shankar into unconsciousness, leaving him with only his cigarette lighter and the license number of his truck.