Filming «Devdas» in the Indian Subcontinent

If we move to cinema before 1947 from the original novel, we find a number of other films where the motif of the weak man who cannot fulfil the expectations of a woman finds manifestation – like V Shantaram’s Aadmi (1939) and Mehboob Khan’s Aurat (1940). As in Devdas, where Paro is strong, these films too feature strong women (the converse of the weak man) who are let down. Other avatars of the strong woman can be found in the female vigilante figure in Homi Wadia’s Hunterwali (1935) featuring Fearless Nadia and Damle and Fattelal’s Sant Tukaram (1936). In the latter film, male weakness takes the shape of the saint’s otherworldliness in that it needs a strong wife to compensate for.

The second insight goes beyond the fact that the whole subcontinent shares the same past right down to the departure of the British. It owes to cinema becoming such a key repository of the Devdas legend to the extent that it has been remade in different versions and much after the subcontinent became independent. If Devdas was a text produced originally under colonialism, why should it flourish so long in film versions? Why is the indecisive man such a perennial draw to audiences? I will not second-guess the book at this point but offer my own speculation.

If one considers the novel alone, Saratchandra, who wrote it when still young, was not enamored of it, and in a letter to his friend and publisher Pramathanath Bhattacharya, Chattopadhyay expressed shame over the work, asking him not to promote it, saying it was “written in a drunken state.” There is a suggestion that he considered it even of doubtful morality, considering that there is another woman, a courtesan Chandramukhi, in whose kotha the protagonist tries to drown his melancholy after Paro marries an elderly widower, a rich zamindar with three children. But cinema has an aspect different from literary fiction in that there is a casting of stars in the lead roles. In a romance, for instance, there is a pairing off of stars so that, from the very first moment of their first meeting on-screen, the audience is aware that they are intended for each other regardless of whether the characters themselves are allowed to know it. This sense of the hero and heroine being meant for each other mimics the workings of karmic destiny. The two are intended to be happy together, and obstructions, if any, can come only from external agencies like societal or family disapproval or separation by disturbances. There cannot usually be psychological differences and/or incompatibility as in a Hollywood film.

In film versions of Devdas, the widower marries Paro to be a mother to his children; there is usually no indication that he even has conjugal rights. In an early Shantaram film, Duniya Na Mane (1937), a young woman (played by a star, Shanta Apte) is tricked into marrying an old man and refuses him conjugality which is only right – not because he is a husband by trickery (as is made out in the film) but because he (played by Keshavrao Date) will not make a suitable on-screen partner for Shanta Apte. When we come to the relationship between Devdas and the courtesan Chandramukhi, here again there is never an indication that this is a sexual liaison, although Saratchanda’s embarrassment with the novel’s “immorality” suggests that it was not taboo. I would also suggest that alcohol, which features so prominently in the story, is a surrogate for illicit sex since both are prohibited by the Manusmriti, the principal legal text of orthodox Hinduism. Chandramukhi is also played by a leading star in each of the films, which means that there could have been a pairing off between Devdas and her since she comes to love him. What we, therefore, see is a false pairing off where there is the possibility of two different unions through the casting of stars (as also in Raj Kapoor’s Sangam, 1964), and the film teases us with the possibility of another union rather than the one eventually chosen.