Sujoy Ghosh, the Kahaani director who wrote King for another director

Sujoy Ghosh

Photo: Bollywood Hungama / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 21, 1966 Kolkata, West Bengal, India
Occupation	Film director
Known for	Kahaani, Badla, Jaane Jaan
Awards	National Film · Filmfare

A pregnant woman arrives in Kolkata from London in the middle of Durga Puja and starts asking for a husband nobody in the city seems to remember. Sujoy Ghosh could not find producers for that premise. They told him the heroine was too pregnant, the Bengali supporting actors too unknown in Mumbai and Kolkata the wrong city for a Hindi thriller. He made Kahaani anyway, shot much of it guerrilla-style in crowded streets, and closed it on a reveal that Hindi thrillers have been chasing ever since. The twist became his signature. It also became the thing he is judged by.

His largest audience is about to reach him through someone else’s camera. Ghosh was first announced as director of King, Shah Rukh Khan’s action thriller for Red Chillies Entertainment. Siddharth Anand took the chair instead. Ghosh kept the story credit and shares the screenplay, which makes the most expensive film ever to carry his name the one he will not direct.

Ghosh was born in Kolkata in 1966 and studied at St. James’ School before moving to London at thirteen. He went on to the University of Manchester, where he took an engineering degree and an MBA, and his first career was in news rather than film: he ran a media division at Reuters, a job he resigned in 1999 without a single screen credit to his name.

The debut, Jhankaar Beats, arrived in 2003 as a comedy about friends obsessed with R. D. Burman, the Bengali composer whose songs shaped Hindi film music in the seventies. One Bengali’s tribute to another, it turned into a sleeper hit. The next two films nearly ended the experiment. Home Delivery in 2005 and Aladin in 2009, a fantasy with Amitabh Bachchan and Riteish Deshmukh, both underperformed, and the second failure left him knocking on doors for Kahaani. Yash Raj Films offered to produce it if he signed a three-film deal. He said no.

Made for about ₹80 million, Kahaani opened in March 2012 and earned more than ₹1 billion worldwide within fifty days. Vidya Balan carried it as Vidya Bagchi, with Parambrata Chatterjee and Nawazuddin Siddiqui as the officers orbiting her. The screenplay Ghosh co-wrote with Advaita Kala earned him the National Film Award for Best Original Screenplay, and Filmfare named him Best Director. The film nods repeatedly to Satyajit Ray and treats Kolkata as a suspect rather than a postcard.

Kolkata kept pulling him back. He played the detective Byomkesh Bakshi in Satyanweshi, the last film Rituparno Ghosh directed, released in 2013 after its director’s death. In 2015 he made Ahalya, a Bengali short with Radhika Apte and Soumitra Chatterjee that turns the myth of the sage’s wife changed into stone into a small, nasty thriller. Two years later he adapted a Satyajit Ray story about a robot servant in the short Anukul.

Badla, in 2019, reunited him with Amitabh Bachchan, this time as a lawyer interviewing a businesswoman played by Taapsee Pannu who insists she has been framed for her lover’s murder. It grossed more than ₹1.38 billion on a budget of about ₹370 million. The same year Netflix released Typewriter, his series about a haunted house in Goa and a gang of would-be ghost hunters. Then came his largest audience. Jaane Jaan, released on Netflix in September 2023 with Kareena Kapoor in her streaming debut opposite Jaideep Ahlawat and Vijay Varma, set the platform’s record for the biggest opening weekend by an Indian film and passed twenty million views in the second half of that year.

The pattern underneath is less original than the reputation. Badla is a remake of the Spanish thriller Contratiempo, known in English as The Invisible Guest. Jaane Jaan adapts Keigo Higashino’s novel The Devotion of Suspect X, already filmed in Japan and in South Korea. Ghosh’s real gift is transplanting a mechanism into an Indian setting and casting it precisely, and critics have said so from both sides. Gulf News found the twists of Jaane Jaan predictable while praising its actors, and Film Companion called Bob Biswas, the Kahaani spin-off he wrote and produced, a delicious idea squandered by its curiously lame script. A film built on its last turn lives or dies by whether the audience gets there first.

Trouble has followed him off screen too. In November 2017 he resigned as chairman of the Indian Panorama jury at the International Film Festival of India, in Goa, after the information and broadcasting ministry dropped two films the jury had selected, the Malayalam S Durga and the Marathi Nude. “My stepping down is my statement,” he said, and two other jurors followed him out. Separately, a writer who filed a complaint in Hazaribagh, in Jharkhand, accused him of copying a script for Kahaani 2, his 2016 sequel with Vidya Balan and Arjun Rampal. The criminal case ran for eight years, through a magistrate’s summons and the Jharkhand High Court, until the Supreme Court quashed it on 20 March 2026. Ghosh’s defence rested on a draft he had registered with the Screenwriters Association in December 2013.

The family business has grown around him. His daughter, Diya Annapurna Ghosh, made her feature debut directing Bob Biswas for ZEE5 in 2021, with Abhishek Bachchan in the role of the soft-spoken contract killer that Saswata Chatterjee created in Kahaani. Ghosh’s own most recent work as a director was Sex with Ex, his segment of the Netflix anthology Lust Stories 2, with Vijay Varma and Tillotama Shome.

King opens in cinemas on 24 December 2026, with Shah Rukh Khan, Suhana Khan in her first theatrical role, Deepika Padukone, Abhishek Bachchan and Jaideep Ahlawat in the cast, and a story credited to Ghosh. Trade reports say he is also developing a third Kahaani as a new mystery in the same world, though no cast or date has been announced. If it reaches the screen, he will be back behind the camera on the franchise that made his name.

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Tags: Shah Rukh Khan, Sujoy Ghosh, Jaane Jaan, Badla, Kahaani, Kareena Kapoor

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