The original novella was set in colonial Bengal and revolved around a young weak-kneed aristocrat who, unable to face up to parental opposition and marry his childhood sweetheart, escapes to Calcutta where he proceeds to drink himself to death in the chaste company of a loving prostitute.

Why has this Hamlet-like figure captivated us for close to a century? One scholarly theme locates Devdas’s ambivalence in the divide between the village and the city, between tradition and modernity. A similar argument positions the hero against the coloniser. The colonial babu gentrified, adopting British manners, on the one hand while being exposed to propaganda about the “unmanly and degenerate Hindu male” on the other. Devdas’s refusal to act and consummate his relationship with either woman (and thereby prove the charge of degeneracy) has been read as symbolising both the coloniser’s power as well as resistance against it.  

The second theme, proposed by the film critic Chidananda Dasgupta, suggests our obsession with Devdas is simply escapism: “Perhaps... the dream of surrendering life’s troubles to the solace of drink and the arms of a lover-mother is too attractive an escape to be banished altogether from our secret selves.”  

Whatever the explanation, it is fair to assume — given the runaway success of every new version — that Indians till recently were able to identify with Devdas’s plight as envisaged by a Bangla author writing in the early 1900s. What makes Anurag Kashyap’s stylish, contemporary take so exciting is not just the cinematic experience but the fact that it allows us to conceptualise India in a whole new way. If Devdas is the psychological heart of India, Dev.D may potentially be its future; one in which the dichotomy between tradition and modernity, city and village, coloniser and colonised has been erased. The film’s young hero moves seamlessly between village, city and the vaguely referred-to “UK”. Here there is no probasi angst, the disorientation of the uprooted. Indeed, in the seedy Paharganj bylanes where Dev makes his home are people of every colour. Their mingling has not been achieved overnight: from the transnational marriage between a consular officer and a foreigner, to ’60s-style hippie couples to white-skinned prostitutes, Kashyap shows a range of Indo-foreign encounters and suggests, in a prescient comment on the current worldwide recession, that the West needs India too. 

... contd.