Bandini

Bandini (translation: Imprisoned) is a 1963 Hindi drama film directed and produced by Bimal Roy.It stars Nutan, Ashok Kumar and Dharmendra. The film tells the story of a woman prisoner serving life imprisonment for murder, Kalyani, the all suffering, selfless, sacrificing and strong, yet weak Indian woman. She must make a choice between two very different men, Devendra (Dharmendra), the loving prison doctor, and Bikash (Ashok Kumar), a man from her past. The film is based on the Bengali novel Tamasi by Jarasandha (Charu Chandra Chakrabarti), a former jail superintendent who spent much of his career as a jailor in Northern Bengal, and wrote many fictional versions of his experiences. Bandini was the tenth highest grosser of the year and was declared a 'Semi Hit' by Box Office India. It received critical acclaim and swept that year's Filmfare Awards, winning six awards in all, including the top awards of Best Film and Best Director, as well as Best Actress, and is still considered a landmark movie of the 1960s, especially being the last feature film of the director Bimal Roy. Plot The film is set in a prison in around 1934 in pre-Independence India, where Kalyani is serving life imprisonment prison for committing a murder, and we learn the circumstances of her crime in a series of flashbacks as she divulges it to the jailor. The film is set in Bengal in the 1930s, during the British Raj, where Kalyani is the daughter of the postmaster of the village, who falls in love with a freedom fighter, Bikash, who later leaves her in the village promising to come back but never does. Society treats them harshly. Broken by her father's misery and that of her own, Kalyani moves to the city, while the song "O Jaanewale Ho Sake To Laut Ke Aana" plays. In the city, she works as a caretaker of an obnoxious and mentally unstable woman, who turns out to be the wife of Bikash. Kalyani learns that her father came to the city looking for her and died in an accident. This prompts her to poison her lover's wife, identifying her as the cause of her miseries in a moment of insane rage.