In Dev.D, the latest remake of Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s classic, Devdas, to hit the screen, the audience, at a particular point, sees the hero’s face through the bottom of a washbowl with the water turning red. The sight triggers a flashback of scenes from Indian cinema: blood on a handkerchief, tubercular spasms and racking coughs. In Dev.D, the red swirls in the water but momentarily. The nonchalance contrasts sharply with the stereotypical cinematic treatment of approaching death.  

In an earlier incident, Dev’s childhood sweetheart Paro gears up to send her absent lover a risqué photograph of herself. The process involves unpleasant encounters with the young men who handle scanners and processing equipment but, despite her obvious and extreme discomfort, she stubbornly insists on sending the picture to its destination. In her sexual frankness and use of new technology, Paro resembles the young heroine of Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding and more recently Girish Karnad’s play, The Wedding Album. But Dev.D is a mainstream Bollywood film and the absence of melodrama is a significant event.  

The significance has to do not just with the medium but also the fact that the context is the epic of our times, a tale that has been told and retold and performed in so many languages and by so many varied people that it could be read as a register of our shifting consciousness. The last version, made in 2002 by Sanjay Leela Bhansali drew attention mainly for its opulence — it was reportedly the most expensive Hindi film ever made — and its heightened, near-hysterical tone. It was, perhaps, the last howl before the calm because its successor Dev.D is a radical departure.  

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