Abhay Deol on Dev D: ‘Devdas was chauvinist, misogynist, arrogant, yet romanticized’ – bollywood

Actor Abhay Deol on Saturday posted a long note on the making of Dev D. It was a retelling of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s classic Bengali novel Devdas and was directed by Anurag Kashyap.

Taking to Instagram, Abhay said how the idea of making Dev D had stayed with him for a year. He said, “Dev.D released in 2009. I spent a year narrating the idea to several people before I got Anurag on board to direct it.” 

He noted how when he made the narrations, people found it to be like an art film. “I remember people’s reaction upon hearing my narration, it was always, ‘it’s too much of an art-film’. Lucky for me Anurag got it.”

Abhay then went into his reading of the character and how he was keen on giving it a dose of reality, as Abhay saw it. He wrote: “I had read the book and I could see that the character was a chauvinist, a misogynist, entitled, and arrogant. Yet he had been romanticized for decades!”

He also said how the need of the hour was to change how women were seen in the classic. “The women on the other hand were strong and had integrity, but there was still that expectation for them to love their man no matter what. I wanted to change that. I wanted to empower them, shed the image of the “good, devoted, woman”. It was time to make them independent, not defined by the man they love, or by men in general. To do that I had them call out Dev’s faults and put him in his place.”

In his vision, Devdas gets shot by the police. “In my version Dev gets shot by the police (he becomes a drug dealer) outside Paro’s house and dies just like in the book.”

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Abhay thinks that Chanda (Chandramukhi in the book and played by Kalki Koechlin in the film) is the strongest character in the film. “Chanda does not fall in love with him, and neither is she ashamed of being an East European high class escort (again, in my version). She’s the strongest character of the 3, and isn’t afraid of being judged. She does empathize with Dev, seeing how broken he is, and I went with the ‘prostitute with the heart of gold’ theme from the book.”

Abhay also mentioned how his vision was really dark and that it was Anurag’s idea to have a happy ending and have Dev and Chanda fall in love. “Anurag felt a happy ending would make the film more accepted by the audience, and his twist was to have Dev & Chanda fall in love. My vision was too dark! I went with the flow, and even brought my buddies @twilightplayers to feature in it. The rest is history. #makingwhatbollywouldnt #dev.d”

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