From Devdas to Dev.D: Melodrama, mourning and nostalgia

This article explores the trajectory of Indian cinematic melodrama as the site of cinematic exhibition shifts from the single screen theatre to the multiplex through an analysis of the archetype of the self-annihilating protagonist, Devdas. It examines, in particular, the three cinematic retellings of Sarat Chandra Chatterjee’s novel Devdas (1917) – Devdas (Roy, 1955), Devdas (Bhansali, 2002) and Dev.D (Kashyap, 2009). Arguing that the melodramatic impulse to return to a ‘space of innocence’ makes the modality of melodrama essentially nostalgic, it explores the different kinds of nostalgia at play in the three retellings. The different relationship each instance of nostalgia has to time, it argues, is intrinsically connected to the different valences of loss that inform the different kinds of mourning at work in these films. Finally, the article attempts to answer if melodrama remains a valid lens through which one can continue to view cinema in the age of the multiplex.