Rajinder Singh Bedi

Seven Urdu books and ten films - he wrote Devdas, Musafir and Madhumati, and directed Dastak. · 1915–1984

Seven books and ten films, and he is the clearest case in this catalogue of a writer who is remembered for the wrong half.

The books are Urdu short fiction: Laajwanti, Grahan, Kundan, Saat Khel, Dane Va Daam, Chalte Phirte Chehre, and a collected Bedi Ke Afsaane. That is the work he is read for. Laajwanti is a Partition story about a woman who returns from abduction and is taken back by a husband who cannot stop handling her as though she were breakable, and it is one of the small number of stories that period produced which are still argued about.

The films are the other life. He wrote the dialogue for Devdas in 1955, for Musafir in 1957 and for Madhumati in 1958 - three of Bimal Roy's and Hrishikesh Mukherjee's best-known pictures, all three in this catalogue. Then Anupama in 1966, Abhimaan in 1973.

And twice he made his own. Dastak, in 1970, he directed and produced and wrote: a newly married couple move into a cheap flat in Bombay and discover it was a prostitute's, so that men keep knocking at night. It won national awards for both its leads. Phagun followed in 1973.

A man who wrote some of the best dialogue in Hindi cinema, and would have told you he was a short story writer.

Dates and credits from Wikidata.