Devdas on Screen: A Century of Reinvention
Few works of Indian literature have enjoyed as extraordinary a cinematic afterlife as Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas. From its first silent screen version in 1928, Devdas has inspired more than two dozen direct adaptations across Indian languages and beyond. P.C. Barua’s landmark Bengali (1935), Hindi (1936) and Assamese (1937) versions established the cinematic template, followed by the Telugu and Tamil Devadasu (1953), Bimal Roy’s Hindi classic (1955), a Singaporean Malay adaptation (1955), a Pakistani Urdu version (1965), another Telugu remake (1974), Bengali remakes (1979, 2002 and 2004), Bangladeshi Bengali versions (1982 and 2013), the Malayalam Devadas (1989), Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s lavish Hindi adaptation (2002), Anurag Kashyap’s contemporary reimagining Dev.D (2009), a second Pakistani Urdu adaptation (2010), the Bhojpuri Hamaar Devdas (2011), the modern Bengali adaptation Devi (2017), the web series Dev DD (2017–21), Sudhir Mishra’s political reinterpretation Daa...
