Devdas with a twist: Here’s what to expect from Sudhir Mishra’s ‘DaasDev’

DaasDev would star Richa Chadha as Paro, Rahul Bhat as Dev and Aditi Rao Hydari as Chandni (Mishra's version of Chandramukhi)

By: News Desk |
December 28, 2017 4:32 pm

Veteran filmmaker Sudhir Mishra’s new directorial DaasDev will release on February 16. The movie’s premise is interesting in the sense that it is a reverse story of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas. DaasDev would star Richa Chadha as Paro, Rahul Bhat as Dev and Aditi Rao Hydari as Chandni (Mishra’s version of Chandramukhi).

Sudhir Mishra’s #DaasDev – a modern take on Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s classic novel #Devdas – to release on 16 Feb 2018… Stars Richa Chadha as Paro, Aditi Rao Hydari as Chandni and Rahul Bhat as Dev, the film is set against the backdrop of politics… Check out the pics: pic.twitter.com/RBSK3W9GqC

— taran adarsh (@taran_adarsh) December 28, 2017

DaasDev is a romantic thriller story but with a political twist. Set against the backdrop of Uttar Pradesh, “DaasDev is a film about power as it gets into the way of love,” states the movie press release cited by Scroll.

Talking about the movie in the Director’s note of the press release, Sudhir Mishra said:

I think it’s my right to use any work, everything is my heritage, so I can play with it as long as I admit it. I admit that I took Devdas, I took the three characters Dev, Paro, and Chandramukhi. As I was working, Shakespeare intruded and I allowed him to, what could I do? Ultimately it became a film about power as it gets into the way of love. It became a reverse journey because if Devdas is a journey from a noble person to a ‘das’, this is a journey from ‘das’, a person who is a slave to his addictions and the dynastic ambitions of his family, to Dev.”

Further, Mishra’s Paro would be ‘a modern, spunky, interesting woman who fights with the weapons she has and in the end, confronts Dev’ while Chandni, like Devdas’ Chandramukhi, is a prostitute who shelters Dev and is, obviously, unacceptable to the deeply patriarchal upper-middle class.

Sudhir is known for his critically-acclaimed movies like Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, Yeh Saali Zindagi, Main Zinda Hoon and Dharavi. It is not the first time someone is experimenting with Devdas, in 2009, director Anurag Kashyap gave it a modern twist and made a romantic black drama, Dev D with Abhay Deol, Kalki Koechlin and Mahi Gill.