Myth into cinema

Zahir Raihan’s Behula, released in 1966, turned sixty years old on August 19. Sixty years is ordinarily an eternity for film—long enough for works to harden into artifacts, cited dutifully in film-journal retrospectives rather than actually watched. Yet Behula obstinately refuses to settle into dust. It arrived at a delicate historical juncture, when the fledgling cinematic apparatus of East Pakistan was desperately seeking an aesthetic, a voice, and a domestic soul to call its own.

The local film industry in Dhaka was a fragile construct, barely a decade old, tracing its institutional genesis to Mukh O Mukhosh in 1956. Pulled taut between two aggressive cultural gravitational fields—the Urdu-language commercial engines of West Pakistan and the urbane Bengali cinema of Calcutta—the budding studio system in East Bengal borrowed its narrative impulses from whichever melodramatic storehouse proved most accessible. 

But an infinitely older inheritance sat right at hand: the oral epics, riverine songs, and village lore through which Bengal had narrated its existential realities for centuries. Behula turned deliberately toward that vernacular wellspring, unlocking an imaginative force far larger than its creators could have anticipated.

Directed and scripted by Raihan, with dialogue penned by Amjad Hossain, the film drew its core dramatic spine from the Behula-Lakhindar cycle of the Manasamangal, one of the seminal folk canons of East Bengal. Starring Suchanda as the heroine, Razzak as Lakhindar, and Sumita Devi as the serpentine goddess Manasa, the production faced a peculiar structural challenge. 

Virtually every audience member walking into the picture house knew the plot by heart. Lakhindar dies of snakebite on his wedding night; his young bride refuses to submit to divine decree; she embarks on a perilous voyage along unpredictable waterways to demand his life back from hostile deities.

Because the narrative conclusion was common knowledge long before the projector flickered to life, Raihan’s central directorial problem was not plot exposition, but affective resonance: how to make a spectator feel deeply what they already knew cold. A folk tale is inherently fluid, shifting lazily through oral tellings, regional variants, and grandmotherly embellishment. 

Cinema, by contrast, demands immediate physical reality. A river must carry actual silt and currents; a sealed brass wedding chamber must project real claustrophobia; grief requires physical features upon which to settle; a desperate journey demands dust, physical exhaustion, and the palpable menace of nightfall. Raihan was not merely recording a fable; he was translating myth into spatial and temporal realities.

It is precisely in this act of translation that Behula finds its enduring vitality. The fable ceases to be a remote recitation and transforms into an immediate, lived agony. Household, river, ritual, mourning, and pilgrimage collapse into a single, continuous ache. Much of this dramatic mass rests squarely on Suchanda’s shoulders. 

The classical narrative assigns Behula an impossible task—resurrecting the dead—yet Raihan strips the character of pious performance. She is not executing a pageant of dutiful wifely submissiveness for the approval of gods or neighbors. She has suffered an unbearable loss, and something within her simply rejects the finality of death. She marches away from her marital home into an indifferent universe, carrying grief strapped to her back alongside an unyielding, irrational stubbornness.

This stubborn refusal transforms her from an archetype into a living human being. It is also where Behula quietly transcends the traditional mythological genre. The true struggle is not female virtue against divine spite, nor human against reptile. It is an individual standing in revolt against an established order that demands passive acceptance of tragedy. 

Her defiance stems not from abstract heroism, but from grief that refuses to behave according to cultural protocol. Raihan recognized that folklore did not need modernizing through external polish; the present was already humming quietly inside it.

In 1966, this trust in indigenous material possessed profound cultural weight. Following the commercial success of Rupban a year earlier, Behula proved that native folklore could anchor a modern, distinctively Bengali cinematic identity. Bengal did not need to import grand foreign epics. It possessed its own rivers, merchants, deities, and curses—narratives that had survived generations precisely because ordinary people kept telling them. Raihan realized that cinema was simply the newest, loudest voice in that ancient chain of storytelling.

The film launched Razzak into stardom, initiating a defining screen partnership with Suchanda, but its true legacy was structural. It proved that a Bengali film could achieve massive popular appeal without surrendering its cultural heritage. Look at Raihan’s subsequent filmography—Anwara, Jibon Theke Neya, and his devastating war documentary Stop Genocide—and a clear thematic continuity emerges. 

Though his focus shifted from myth to social hypocrisy and political oppression, Raihan remained obsessed with individuals trapped within crushing systems.

Sixty years on, Behula still hits its mark. The technical age of the black-and-white print is obvious, yet technical datedness is not thematic obsolescence. Raihan took an ethereal myth, gave it a human face, a winding river, and a framing lens—proving that when folklore stepped inside the cinematic frame, it ceased to be merely remembered history and became a living, breathing art form.

—

Mahmud Newaz Joy is a Dhaka-based freelance feature writer & political analyst