It was a time when young people read poetry, went for leisurely boat rides in the Ganga and drank cool glasses of sherbet on summer evenings, when the scorching loo had died down. This poignant saga plays out in the Allahabad of the 1940s, with its spacious bungalows, flower-filled gardens and the serenity of the Sangam. He tries to find emotional solace with Sudha’s cousin, the sympathetic Binti, but ends up ruining that relationship too. Unable to bear the fact that she is married to another man, he irrationally turns against her, though his cruelty fills him with terrible guilt. He plunges into an affair with the alluring Pammi in an attempt to get over Sudha but remains tortured by his memories of her. Sudha is his true love but he persuades her to marry the Brahmin boy her father has found for her, because that is the socially correct thing to do. The novel is told from Chander’s point of view and the other characters flit in and out of his life as he grapples with his complex, conflicted feelings. I wanted my readers to be as moved by the book as I had been.’

At the same time, I was constantly aware that the book shouldn’t sound stilted or awkward.

I didn’t use “modern” words like “hassled”, I used no slang, I kept all the imagery intact. ‘I tried to remain as faithful as I could to the tone and texture of the novel. Chander and Sudha’s story is so emotionally powerful that you literally feel every stage of their relationship, from their days of innocent, playful banter to their heart-wrenching separation and their fatal downward spiral into self-destruction and tragedy. I began to understand the novel’s astonishing popularity over more than six decades. Then, on a whim, I picked it up again and this time I fell in love with it. I had read the book many years ago and liked it enormously. But when he wrote Gunahon Ka Devta, he probably had no idea it would cause a sensation with its passionate story and its delicate but daring probing of taboo topics like sex, desire and love.

He went on to forge an illustrious career as a novelist, playwright, poet and literary magazine editor. Written by the brilliant Dharamvir Bharati, it is the story of Chander, an intense, idealistic student of Allahabad University, who falls in love with his professor and mentor’s lively young daughter, Sudha.īharati, himself a student of the same university, was just 23 when he published the novel. Gunahon Ka Devta was published in 1949 and is widely regarded as one of Hindi literature’s biggest bestsellers.

Gunahon ka devta novel