Officials at Visva Bharati University, which has received a proposal from actress Priyanka Chopra‘s production house for a Marathi-Bengali biopic revisiting the relationship between Nobel laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore and his English teacher Annapurna Turkhud, are yet to take a call on the project.
“We have received a proposal. It is actually a letter of intent and once they send more details then a committee will look into it to take a final call,” Swapan Kumar Datta, acting vice chancellor Visva Bharati, told IANS.
He said the subject has to be treated sensitively.
Annapurna Turkhud, also known as Anna or Annabai, was the daughter of Atmaram Pandurang Turkhud, a Mumbai-based (then Bombay) doctor. Tagore had stayed with the family prior to his first voyage to Britain in 1878 and had lessons in spoken English from Anna.
He gave her the nickname Nalini, which Anna used later on used as a pseudonym for her writing. She inspired some of Tagore’s early poetic expressions. Tagore never forgot about Anna and used to reminisce about her in his old age.
The proposed film to be directed by filmmaker Ujjwal Chatterjee will portray the platonic relationship between the two.
