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Kabuliwala

1956 116’ b&w Bengali d/sc Tapan Sinha pc Charuchitra st Rabindranath Tagore c Subodh Ray m Ravi Shankar lp Chhabi Biswas, Tinku Thakur, Radhamohan Bhattacharya, Manju Dey

Sinha’s version of the Tagore short story (pub. 1918) about an Afghan tribesman, Rehmat (Biswas), who sells spices in Calcutta and befriends a little girl (Thakur, sister of Sharmila Tagore in her only film role, in an uninhibited performance) who reminds him of the daughter he left behind. Having killed a man who tried to cheat him, the Kabuliwala is jailed for many years and on his release he finds that the little girl has grown up, prompting the realisation that his own daughter has probably forgotten him. Radhamohan Bhattacharya (cf. Udayer Pathey, 1944) played the girl’s father and Manju Dey her mother, both evoking a sentimentalised history of Calcutta’s bhadralok. The story was remade in Hindi by Hemen Gupta (1961) starring Balraj Sahni in a Bimal Roy production.

Film