Kohraa

• Director Biren Nag made only two films, both starring Waheeda Rehman and Biswajeet and both produced by playback legend Hemant Kumar: the Gothic mystery thriller Bees Saal Baad (1962) and Kohraa (1964). He died in 1964, soon after Kohraa's release, making it his final film.
• It is an uncredited adaptation of du Maurier's 1938 novel Rebecca, and Nag laced in Psycho (1960) — including a skeleton reveal echoing Mrs. Bates' corpse and a shower sequence — just three years after Hitchcock's film.
• Nag broke the source's central device: the novel's narrator is famously never named, but here the heroine is given the name Rajeshwari, pulling her out from under the dead wife's shadow.
• Unlike Hitchcock's psychologically ambiguous 1940 Rebecca, Nag made the dead wife a literal ghost, staging her as an actual on-screen apparition who flicks lights and lures Rajeshwari onto the roof.
• Lalita Pawar reworked the Mrs. Danvers role as Dai Maa, a pious figure draped in white and clutching prayer beads, and earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination at the 12th Filmfare Awards for it.
• Hemant Kumar both produced the film (for Geetanjali Pictures) and composed its score, working with lyricist Kaifi Azmi; the film won the Filmfare Award for Best Art Direction (B&W) for G.L. Yadhav and T.K. Desai.

The film inverts Rebecca's ending into a moral ledger. Where du Maurier and Hitchcock leave the dead wife's death murky and the narrator forever haunted, Kohraa has Dai Maa confess to poisoning the first Mrs. Singh over her 'debauchery' — recasting the ghost story as a punishment fable where female transgression gets a literal death sentence and the obedient new wife simply gets to go home.

Making the first wife a literal apparition (not a memory the way Hitchcock kept her) reframes Dai Maa as a temple guardian rather than a grieving servant. Her all-white dress and prayer beads code the haunted palace as a shrine she's defending, suggesting the real horror isn't the dead woman — it's a household that treats a murdered wife as a saint to be venerated and a living one as an intruder.

Rajeshwari being named at all is the whole interpretive key: by giving the erased woman an identity, Nag turns a story about a wife dissolving into her predecessor's legacy into one about a woman refusing the erasure — the apparition and Dai Maa together personify the pressure to disappear, and her survival is the film arguing she won't.

Biren Nag drags Daphne du Maurier's Manderley into the mist of Pratapgarh, where Rajeshwari marries the brooding Raja Amit Singh and moves into a palace still ruled by his dead first wife, Poonam. The white-clad housekeeper Dai Maa polices every room like a shrine, and the late wife refuses to stay dead — appearing as an actual apparition rather than a mere memory. As Rajeshwari claws past her own erasure, the truth of how Poonam died turns the whole haunting into a verdict, not a mystery.