SEN SISTERS IN TALE OF WIFE-SWAPPING!

The sisters Sen, Raima and Riya, though on the periphery of Bollywood for long, have just broken through Tollywood to work together for the first time. The film is Rituparno Ghosh’s Nauka Dubi which is based on an adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore’s novel by the same name. It is a lavish period film with the rather delicate subject of wife-swapping as its theme. Interestingly, the Sen girls don’t play sisters in this film but are the wives in tumultuous marriages to actors Priyanshu Chatterjee and Jishu Sengupta. Rituparno Ghosh, who earlier directed Raima with Aishwarya Bachchan in an adaptation of Tagore’s Chokher Bali, is delighted with his casting coup for Nauka Dubi. “For long I waited to find the right vehicle for Raima and Riya. This film gives them ample scope to perform as actors and also to accentuate their individual beauty that has so far not been properly put in films,” said the renowned Bengali director. Raima, who did a few side roles for Bollywood and Tollywood and then vowed to steer clear of them, said, “Ritu da has always cast me in smaller parts. Though I enjoyed doing Antar Mahal, Chokher Bali and Khela recently, I was dying to do a central role with him.” Sister Riya added, “We were sure we wanted to be cast in the right film. I remember Ritu da had once come home in Kolkata to sign Raima for a role. When he saw me he promised he would sign me one day.” Incidentally, Tagore’s Nauka Dubi has been done twice before, once in 1946 as a bi-lingual featuring Abhi Bhattacharya and Dilip Kumar and again in 1960 as Ghunghat.