Daughters of This Century

Daughters of This Century is a 1995 Indian Hindi anthology film directed by Tapan Sinha. The film is composed of six segments. The fourth is based on the Bengali novel Ei Daho (1961) by Gour Kishore Ghosh, and each of the rest is based on a Bengali short story — Jibita o Mrita (1904) by Rabindranath Tagore, Abhagir Swarga (1918) by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Satgharia (1976) by Prafulla Roy, Kaanch (1984) by Dibyendu Palit and the last one by Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay. Each segment runs for 30 minutes. The film delves into the plight of Indian women in the 20th century. It stars Shabana Azmi, Jaya Bachchan, Madhuri Dixit, Pallavi Joshi, Deepa Sahi, Nandita Das, Sulabha Deshpande, Gyanesh Mukherjee, Debashree Roy, Mamata Shankar, Pankaj Kapoor, Milind Gunaji, Kaushik Sen and Jeet.

Despite an ensemble cast, the film was a critical and commercial failure. Most of the critics stated that Sinha failed to weave a strong screenplay. The performance of the cast was well-appreciated. It was screened at 28th International Film Festival of India held in Thiruvananthapuram, in 1997. At the Cairo International Film Festival in 2001, the film was screened without the last segment featuring Madhuri Dixit, because of time-constraint, and was nominated for Golden Pyramid Award.