Subodh Ghosh - Adaptations

Adaptations

While Subodh Ghosh was immensely popular with Bengali readers, he was to a large extent unknown as a writer to the outside world. Films gave him a break through to the vast Hindi-speaking world. His stories have been used for Hindi films as much as for Bengali films.

Following on his critically successful 1944 debut Udayer Pathey, Bimal Roy shot Anjangarh in 1948, based on Subodh Ghosh’s political drama Fossil, about collusion of aristocracy and business interests against the common man. Mrinal Sen’s 1971 film Ek Adhuri Kahani, based on story, Gotrantar, which tells the story of a sugar mill and its agricultural neighbourhood where the workers are deprived of bare necessities and the farmers cheated. Tapan Sinha picked up Subodh Ghosh’s Jatugriha for a film on the same name in 1964.

Subodh Ghosh shot into limelight as the author whose work inspired classic films such as Ritwik Ghatak’s Ajantrik (1958) and Bimal Roy’s Sujata (1959). While Sujata was the story of romance between a Brahmin young man (Sunil Dutt)and an outcaste woman (Nutan), Ajantrik was the story of a taxi driver in love with his out dated vehicle. Subodh Ghosh won the Filmfare Best Story Award for Sujata. Both the films were made in the late fifties. Later, Subodh Ghosh won the Filmfare Best Story Award a second time, albeit posthumously, for Gulzar’s Ijaazat, which was based on Jatugriho. Basu Chatterjee's made a Hindi film Chitchor (1976), starring Amol Palekar on his story, Chittachakor. The drama titled "Waiting Room" by noted Bangladeshi filmmaker Mostafa Sarwar Faruki is also based on this story. Even a recent Sooraj R. Barjatya potboiler Hum Aapke Hain Kaun picked up the story idea from Subodh Ghosh. Such was the vast expanse of his writing.