With Daas Dev, a flipside story on Devdas, slated to release this week, SHAlINI SAKSENA looks at the many avatars of this popular character from Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s novel, down the ages
When novelist Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay wrote Debdas (Bengali) in 1917 and published on June 30 by GCS), he would have never imagined that his romantic novel would inspire filmmakers for decades to make films in all languages, hues and perceptions of his much loved, much berated character.
The first Devdas was made into a film way back in 1928 as a silent movie by director Naresh C Mitra who also acted in it. The lead roles were performed by Phani Burma (Devdas), Tarakbala as Parbati (Paro) and Parulbala as Chandramukhi.
As many as four major Hindi films have been made on Devdas, not to mention numerous versions in regional languages. Almost 90 years later, we have Sudhir Mishra’s Daas Dev with inspiration from the novel but giving the story a flip to set it in the political genre.
“It is a re-imagination. It takes Devdas’ character and turns it around with some bit of Shakespeare added to the proceedings. It is more about how Dev becomes a daas — a man who is noble but a slave to his addiction. It is the journey of a man who is heir to a political legacy and comes in when his family is in trouble. In addition, is the lure of power and how he rids himself of it. Paro, too, has a flip side and doesn’t stay behind closed gates. She is Paro on the warpath because she has been rejected. Chandramukhi (Chandni) is a seductress, a manipulator of funds, a fixer. She manipulates Dev but liberates him since she loves him but doesn’t walk away empty-handed. So women are just important as the men in this one,” Mishra, who has directed and written the screenplay for Daas Dev, tells you.
Saurabh Shukla, the antagonist who plays Dev’s uncle (he is the Shakespearean twist) tells you that 2018’s Dass Dev, while based on Chattopadhyay’s Debdas, has a different story and characterisation. “It is going to be the first of its kind. All other Devdas versions on screen are more close to the original novel but Daas Dev has twisted the story,” Shukla explains. His role in the movie is that of a politician who has swag, is educated and power hungry.
“My character doesn’t come from Chattopadhyay’s Debdas but is conceptualised from Shakespeare’s Hamlet,” Shukla says.
Interestingly, this is not the first time that a twist has been given to Debdas’ character or the movie. In 2009, Dev D, starring Abhay Deol, Mahie (Paro) and Kalki Koechlin (Chandramukhi) Chanda, was written and directed by Anurag Kashyap. This film was in three parts, told from the point of view of three main characters and it did well at the BO.
So have all the other films made on Debdas, including the most popular Hindi version of the novel starring Dilip Kumar as Devdas, Vyjayanthimala as Chandramukhi, Suchitra Sen as Paro and Motilal as Chunni Babu. This film 1955 whose screenplay was written by Nabendu Ghosh, dialogues by Rajinder Singh Bedi and directed by Bimal Roy grossed around Rs 1,06,54,332 and became a benchmark for all the other movies to follow, including those in regional languages like Assamese, Telugu and Malayalam.
It was made five times in Bengali (including two being made in Bangladesh in 1982), four times in Hindi and twice in Urdu for Pakistani films. Then came 2002 and Sanjay leela Bhansali’s Devdas starring Shah Rukh Khan (Devdas), Aishwarya Rai Bachchan (Paro), Madhuri Dixit Nene (Chandramukhi) and Jackie Shroff as Chunni Babu.
Given the fact that almost everyone had seen Bimal Roy’s Devdas, there were comparisons galore but the youth loved it for its larger than life canvas, the splash of colour, the pulsating music and given the fact that it had SRK as Devdas meant that the film made on a budget of Rs 400 million ended up making around Rs 998.7 million. The same year, Shakti Samanta made the Bengali version of Debdas staring Prosenjit Chatterjee as Devdas, Arpita Pal as Parbati, Tapas Paul as Chunnilal and Indrani Halder as Chandramukhi.
Cut to 2018 and Bollywood is now ready to release Daas Dev. Mishra tells you his version is love story embedded in a political thriller. “You give people a strong romantic story with a political base. It is an interesting base — it acknowledges all the work in the past and is therefore Daas Dev, and not Devdas. We have acknowledged the past and flipped it. You can call it a reverse journey, a positive journey,” he says.
Seconds Shukla. “like Mishra said: ‘Devdas was a story of a man who is like a God or Dev but because of his guilt and addiction, he became a daas (slave) of it’. Daas Dev is the story of a man who’s addicted not only to alcohol but also to power and how he breaks free. That is why it is reversed to be Daas Dev.