'Ek Akasher Niche': How The Primetime Serial Became Bengali Television's Defining Chapter

The 1990s were the decade of the television. Post economic liberalisation, the one thing that became a fixture in every Indian household was the television set, which opened up the far-reaching arms of TV programming that ranged from music shows and news to reality television — and, of course, soap operas and serials. At the behest of technological advancements, what movies were to the ’60s and the ’70s — or even the 2000s — serials were to the ’90s, when a diverse range of subjects and genres were being explored by artistes who went on to become some of the biggest names in mainstream Hindi cinema in the decades that followed.

Bengal was no different. The camera there was steadfastly focused on stories of the middle classes much like their Hindi counterparts in serials like Shanti, Dekh Bhai Dekh, Hum Paanch and Saans. However, at the turn of the millennium, in the month of July of the year 2000, the paradigms shifted forever with the arrival of Ek Akasher Niche, a primetime serial that would go on to become the greatest launchpad for some of the most sought-after names in Bengali entertainment.

“It all started with one of my directors, Anindo Banerjee (who later directed said serial too), telling me that a producer from Bombay named Ravi Ojha wanted to make a mega serial in Bengali called Ek Akasher Niche (Under One Sky). I was told he had previously worked with the likes of Robi Ghosh,” recalls Saswata Chatterjee, one of the top-billed actors from Bengal whose chilling performance as the serial killer Bob Biswas in Kahaani (2012) has cemented his name in the annals of pop culture. He was recently seen in a key role in Anurag Basu’s Metro... In Dino (2025) opposite Neena Gupta, besides starring in Netflix’s Khakee: The Bengal Chapter and Kalki 2898 AD last year. Chatterjee, however, says that he felt like he had “arrived” as an actor with Ek Akasher Niche and with his realisation of its grandeur, which changed the way Bengali entertainment carried on for years to come.

Airing on Alpha Bangla (now Zee Bangla) Ek Akasher Niche introduced the Dasguptas — a joint family living in a sprawling post-Partition-era home in North Calcutta. The matriarch — first played by Sumitra Mukherjee, and then by Soma Dey — with her six children, their spouses, and her grandchildren, navigated the banal and the extraordinary vagaries of an urban middle-class life. Chatterjee, who played the youngest son Akash, a doctor, remembers that despite having started out as the central figure of the show — which ran for five years and over 1,100 episodes — every other character was given their due and complete arcs. “They weren’t caricatures of real people, something you see happening far too much these days. We had the luxury of time,” says Chatterjee about an era of Bengali television when a single scene was shot over several days. In fact, before Ojha stepped in, Pradeep Sharma, husband of actor Padmini Kolhapure, was the show’s producer. The grandness of scale and the pace of production — where a three-minute-long scene was often shot and reshot for over 16 hours until everyone was satisfied, for what was supposed to be “just a television show” — daunted Sharma, leading him to step away from the project and leave the reins entirely to Ojha.

The producer’s mentorship is now the stuff of urban legends, where the current legion of household names from Bengal — which includes the likes of Parambrata Chattopadhyay, Swastika Mukherjee, Rajatava Dutta, Aparajita Adhya, Kamalika Banerjee, Shantilal Mukherjee and Abir Chatterjee — all of whom starred in Ek Akasher Niche, credit Ojha for the confidence they have earned in their skills. But what also revolutionised and exalted the status of Bengali television — through this show — into an erudite form of cinema that refused to play a secondary role to the big screen, were the technological innovations that bolstered its making. Ojha introduced the one-scene-one-take method, which called for the invention of a hand-held crane that would follow the characters as they moved in and out of a scene — like filming a play. It is now the standard equipment used for shooting mega serials across languages in India. When Chatterjee later directed the last seven to nine months of the show, all these learnings came in handy. In fact, his time on Ek Akasher Niche earned him a spot in Mrinal Sen’s last film, Amar Bhuvan (2002). “Bijoya Ray [Satyajit Ray’s wife] would often discuss scenes from the serial with me, as she was a loyal fan. She would tell me what she liked and didn’t like in a particular episode,” Chatterjee says with a laugh.

For actor Swastika Mukherjee — who was last seen on the big screen in Dibakar Banerjee’s Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2 (2024), after a critically acclaimed portrayal of the enigmatic singer Urmila Manjushree in Qala (2022) — getting a call in the third year of the show to play a lead character felt like the ultimate validation an artiste could receive. “When I got the call for Ek Akasher Niche, I was as excited as I would be today if I was offered a project by Red Chillies [Entertainment],” she says.

Swastika, who until then had been on other serials and a couple of telefilms shot for cable television, talks about the show’s endurance as it continues to garner millions of views for its episodes on YouTube. She attributes it to how rooted it was, focused on telling stories that an average viewer could relate to. “We weren’t doing any flashy make-up or hair, or costume styling. Most of us were wearing things from our own wardrobes, so each of us brought something unique to the characters we were playing, and looked distinct,” she says.

Despite belonging to a family of actors — her father is the acting stalwart, the late Santu Mukherjee — Swastika was never trained formally in the craft. Ek Akasher Niche filled that gap, like an institution that prepared her for the years to come. “The focus, back in the day, for an artiste was to be on shows like Ek Akasher Niche, Sahityer Shera Shomoy, or a telefilm, because they tested the mettle of your craft. It wasn’t to buy the most expensive car,” she says. The joy of rubbing shoulders with the best in the business, who wore their brilliance lightly, fostered an atmosphere of bonhomie that went beyond work hours. “When we came on set, everyone was talking about what to have for lunch that day. The cooks knew each of our preferences and would make food for us accordingly,” Swastika recalls.

It’s where she also met actor Rajatava Dutta, whose prolific filmography features notable projects like Vishal Bhardwaj’s Kaminey (2009), Meri Pyaari Bindu (2017) and most recently Raj and DK’s show Guns & Gulaabs (2023). Dutta requests that the conversation with him be conducted in Bengali, his mother tongue, so he can do justice to expressing the depths of his emotions associated with the serial. “I don’t think I can do that so comfortably in English,” he says, “because Ek Akasher Niche means too much to me.”

His character of Atul, the middle son of the family, was initially written as a miscreant — villainous even — until one day, after a shot, Ojha whispered into his ear that he should try to give Atul a comedic twist. “Until then, I’d thought I had no potential in comedy,” Dutta says. “But his encouragement has taken me places like no other. And this was the case with so many of our technicians too. For example, under his aegis our cinematographer Adinath Das, who later became the dean of SRFTI (Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute in Kolkata), trained camera caretakers to become artistes in their own right. A glowing example is of Tuban (Debasis Dey), one of the best cinematographers in Bengali television now, who also works with Eskay Movies (a major film distributor in the east of India) as their primary equipment partner,” Dutta says.

The precedent set on the sets of Ek Akasher Niche also brought dignity to television as a medium at par with cinema, even in terms of pay, where actors and crew members could afford to dedicate several years of their lives to a single project without having to worry about staying financially afloat.

It’s what changed Anindo Banerjee’s career trajectory. He started out as a production manager on the show, who oversaw the budgets, which suddenly started to become bigger than what Bengali serials operated on. “I remember right at the outset asking Ravi how much we should budget for the director of photography, and he said ₹40,000 per month. I was flabbergasted because even directors wouldn’t get paid that much back then,” Banerjee says. “When I pointed this out to him, he just said ‘Tu likh na’ (just write it down). Which is when I said that even I would charge around ₹15,000 per month, as opposed to the ₹5,000 or ₹7,000 that we were normally paid. With his very casual ‘tu likh na’, Ravi changed the landscape of Bengali television forever.” Not only was the channel convinced to make heavy investments to mount the serial, it also triggered a spate of mega serials that were produced like films. Suddenly, attention was being paid to the smaller details, like lighting scenes according to the movement of the sun, which depended on what time of day was being shown on screen.

Eventually, a couple of months down the line, Banerjee was entrusted with the job of directing the serial after Ojha once casually asked him for his opinion on a scene. “This serial was a game-changer in the literal sense of the term for all of us, on so many levels. Not only for the people involved, but also the themes the project dealt with,” Banerjee points out. Besides capturing the seemingly ordinary lives of a middle-class Bengali family, Ek Akasher Niche also opened dialogues on mental health when one of its lead characters, played by actress Chaiti Ghoshal, was shown as suffering from schizophrenia. “In fact, a mental health organisation in Bengal called Schizophrenia Society acknowledged the accuracy and sensitivity with which the show portrayed the condition at a time when awareness on mental health did not even exist,” he says.

Now, 25 years since its premiere, Ek Akasher Niche continues to be the most cited reference for superlative artistry in Bengali entertainment. While the template and nature of storytelling in Bengali television has taken a sharp turn towards the melodramatic — having followed hard on the heels of Ekta Kapoor’s ‘K-serial’ phenomenon in the early 2000s — its impact is unanimously acknowledged as era-defining in Bengal. The serial’s spirit lingered on in the late Rituparno Ghosh’s only outing on television, his magnum opus Gaaner Oparey (2010-11) on Star Jalsha, which put actor and former Member of Parliament Mimi Chakraborty on the map. From granting the people inhabiting these fictional worlds grace and honesty, to bringing credibility to the medium of television, the essence of Ek Akasher Niche lives on in the legacies of the artistes who carry its memories as learnings to every set they walk into to this day.

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