Kolkata : Few fictional characters in Indian literature can have acquired a second life as extraordinary as Devdas. More than a century after Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s novel was published, residents of a village in West Bengal continue to treat its doomed protagonist almost as though he had once been a real man who walked among them. The village is Hatipota, in Nandai Gram Panchayat of Kalna I block in Purba Bardhaman district, about 15 kilometres from Kalna town. It appears by name in Devdas, and local folklore has long woven the fictional tragedy into the village’s own history. Every year, a seven-day Devdas Smriti Mela is held here. In January 2026, organisers marked the fair’s 26th year. The irony is irresistible: the fictional character has become the centre of the celebration, while his creator sometimes seems almost to stand in his shadow.
This year marks Sarat Chandra’s 150th birth anniversary. Devdas itself was published in 1917, although he had written it much earlier and, according to biographical accounts, was initially reluctant to publish it. Yet the novel he himself had doubts about went on to outlive generations of readers and inspire an extraordinary number of screen adaptations.
Hatipota’s relationship with Devdas rests not on documented history but on memory, belief and oral tradition. The village was once known as Gopeya. The Bhagirathi flows nearby, with Nadia across the river. Local lore says that when people displaced by riverbank erosion settled in Gopeya and a mosque was being built, diggers unearthed the remains of an elephant believed to have belonged to the estate of the local zamindar, Bhuvan Mohan Chowdhury. The discovery, the story goes, eventually gave the village its name — Hatipota, suggesting a buried elephant. The older zamindari world survives in fragments and stories. Villagers identify Bhuvan Mohan Chowdhury with the zamindar whom Parvati marries in the novel, and some believe that Parvati herself was based on a real woman connected with the place. A bust of Sarat Chandra stands at the local primary school, while several village organisations and institutions carry the name of Devdas. The old tree associated in village memory with Devdas’s death has disappeared, but the legend has not.
What is fascinating is the ease with which literature and local memory have fused. The villagers know Devdas not simply as a character but as an intimate presence. For them, the novel appears to confirm what the village has chosen to remember, while the village, in turn, seems to authenticate the novel. There is another curious absence. Parvati remains central to the village legend, but Chandramukhi — the courtesan who loves Devdas with extraordinary selflessness — barely enters this local mythology. Why one woman should survive in collective memory while the other recedes from it is a question worth asking. Does social respectability still determine whom a community chooses to remember?
The journey of Devdas from page to screen made the character even larger. The novel first reached the cinema in the silent era, with Naresh Mitra’s Devdas in 1928. Pramathesh Chandra Barua then made his celebrated Bengali version for New Theatres in 1935, playing Devdas himself, followed by the Hindi version with K. L. Saigal in the title role. Twenty years later, Bimal Roy — who had worked as cinematographer on Barua’s Devdas — directed his own Hindi adaptation in 1955, starring Dilip Kumar as Devdas, Suchitra Sen as Parvati and Vyjayanthimala as Chandramukhi. Barua’s Devdas remains a landmark. It transformed the tragic lover into a screen archetype and demonstrated how literature could acquire an independent cinematic life. Sarat Chandra, a frequent visitor to New Theatres, is widely quoted as having told Barua after watching the film: “It appears that I was born to write Devdas because you were born to recreate it in cinema.”
Over time, Barua himself became inseparable from Devdas in the public imagination. The story also became one of Indian cinema’s most persistent points of return, repeatedly reinterpreted in different languages and different eras. But beneath the romantic legend lies a far less heroic man. Devdas is privileged, indecisive, self-absorbed and finally self-destructive. He moves away from his feudal, upper-caste and upper-class roots in rural Bengal to colonial Calcutta, but the city offers him neither freedom nor transformation. He cannot confront his family when it matters, cannot claim Parvati when she offers herself to him, and cannot accept Chandramukhi’s love without cruelty and contradiction. His final journey back towards Parvati is less a heroic return than the last act of a man who has spent much of his life running away from decisions.
That is perhaps why the two women remain more compelling than the man at the centre of the story. Parvati accepts the consequences of the world into which she is married and creates a life within it. Chandramukhi walks away from the life society has assigned to her and attempts to rebuild herself. Both display a strength of will Devdas repeatedly fails to summon. Sarat Chandra did not create conventional heroes and villains here. He created people trapped inside class, caste, patriarchy, desire and social convention. Devdas has no heroic dimensions in the traditional sense. His weaknesses, narcissism, passion and fatalism are precisely what destroy him. And yet, 109 years after the novel was published, this deeply flawed fictional man is still remembered in Hatipota with a fair lasting seven days.
Perhaps that is the final irony of Devdas. The man who failed at almost everything in life succeeded spectacularly in immortality.
