Kahaani at 10: When Sujoy Ghosh-Vidya Balan made a thriller with a pregnant woman work, despite the naysayers

Vidya Balan was the woman with a Midas touch when Sujoy Ghosh got in touch with her for the 2012 film Kahaani. Here was an actor who was single-handedly changing how female actors were perceived on the big screen, and striking gold with every performance she delivered. No One Killed Jessica, Ishiqya, The Dirty Picture, Paa – Vidya was on a streak. But Sujoy wasn’t as lucky at the time. The Jhankaar Beats director was going through a lean phase after Home Delivery and Aladin so getting Vidya to say yes was a hard task.
“I wrote it for Vidya,” shared Sujoy in the making of the 2012 film. His protagon was a pregnant woman who is walking the streets of Kolkata as she looks for her missing husband. The thriller had a simple premise but the way this story was told was anything but simple. The audience sees the events unfold through Vidya Bagchi’s eyes, and is investigating with her as she walks in the lanes of the city with Rana (played Parambrata Chatterjee).
Vidya Balan plays Vidya Bagchi in Kahaani.
“Sujoy came to me with a script I didn’t want to do but he told me he would keep coming to me till I said yes. I thought he wouldn’t come back but he did, again and again,” Vidya told India Today. For him, “the whole idea was to work with Vidya Balan,” he told PTI. We are living in a time when the success of Gangubai Kathiawadi comes with the ‘woman-centric film’ tag attached to it so when Vidya was having a ball at the cinemas ten years ago, she was seen as a rule-breaker. Yet, every time one of her films made it big, the conversation of a ‘woman-centric film’ re-emerged.
Sujoy accepted the “nice challenge” of “creating a thriller with a pregnant woman in lead” and was working with his “gut feeling,” he told PTI. He was well aware that there was no guarantee that this film would work. “When you look on paper, Kahaani is everything that a film should not be,” he said. The film’s treatment and its performances were its strength so having performers like Balan, Chatterjee, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Saswata Chatterjee was a key element in trying to make everything work.
“My heart was set on it though people discouraged me and a lot of things happened. You get discouraged at every turn in your life but once your heart is set on something it is very hard to do anything else and that’s what happened to me,” said Sujoy. “Everything went very well but it could have gone the other way too,” he added. The film was shot on a shoestring budget because there was a massive lack of faith in the project.
Bob Biswas’ appearance in Kahaani started the chatter about a spin-off film in back in 2012.
Talking about the lean finances of the film, Vidya told Deccan Chronicle that no one could get their head around the fact that the film was about a pregnant woman. “They were like, ‘Why would audiences want to see a pregnant woman in theatres?’,” she said.
Kahaani was a massive hit, but not just that. The film eventually gave birth to a franchise. A few years later Kahaani 2 released and while it could not replicate the success of Kahaani, the film was appreciated some. In 2021, with the release of Bob Biswas and its cliff-hanger ending, the franchise is in full bloom.
Is there scope for Kahaani 3? Or probably another spinoff featuring Kali Da from Bob Biswas. Well, if Sujoy is writing and directing, the audience will be keen to see what he presents next.