15 years of Baishe Srabon: A look into the real murders that inspired the film

15 years after its release on September 30, 2011, Srijit Mukherji's cult thriller Baishe Srabon still grips Bengali audiences. Behind its plot twists lies a still-unsolved horror: the Stoneman, who crushed the skulls of homeless people sleeping on Kolkata's pavements in 1989-90 and was never identified. On the film's anniversary, we look at the murders that haunted the city.

On the morning of 4 June 1989, the duty officer at Hare Street Police Station received a call about a body found at the southwest corner of B.B.D Bagh, a stone's throw from Lalbazar, the Kolkata Police headquarters. The victim was Aleya Bibi, a homeless woman of 30, who was three months pregnant. She had no wound except the one that killed her. A stone weighing roughly 9 kg lay beside her body.

Six weeks later, on the night of July 19, two more bodies surfaced. One was a man in his forties near Park Street Metro, the other, a teenager near the Sealdah railway station subway, and both were struck with large stones. A serial killer was loose in the city.

All the victims were homeless pavement dwellers, attacked in their sleep, and the weapon was always a massive stone or concrete slab, often over 10 kgs. There were no witnesses and no apparent motive. Newspapers dubbed the killer, the Stoneman, and by September 11, 1989, he had committed seven murders in about a 100 days.

Kolkata Police went all out. They searched crime scenes, interviewed street dwellers and detained suspects, yet found no fingerprints and no forensic evidence.

The killings clustered around the Howrah Bridge, which led some to speculate that he came into the city by train. The police assumed a tall, well-built man, since the weapon was dropped from above, but no eyewitness description ever existed.

After a two-month pause, the tenth murder came on January 29, 1990, and the eleventh on 20 February. For the first time, the killer left behind footprints. Three of the left foot and nine of the right, indicated a man of medium build, not very tall or broad, with an exceptionally long big toe on his right foot.

Police pressed harder, but time ran out. Only five days after the 11th murder, the 12th took place near the Sealdah subway, the scene of two earlier killings. The victim was a boy of 15 or 16, a beggar on the station premises.

Then it stopped. After nine months, a dozen murders and almost no leads, the killings ceased as suddenly as they had begun. To this day, the Stoneman was never identified.

Ghosts of past cases

The Stoneman belongs to a grim lineage of killers who stalked the sleeping poor.

Jack the Ripper (London, 1888). The template for every unidentified serial killer is the Whitechapel murderer, who killed women in 1888 and was never identified. It was a fascination Mukherji himself has named as inspiration for the Baishe Srabon. The murdered women were mostly sex workers, and like the Stoneman's victims, lived on society's margins, in a crowded, impoverished district. And like the Stoneman, the killer was never identified, despite an enormous police effort and a press frenzy that made the case an international sensation.

Raman Raghav (Mumbai, 1965-68). In August 1968, pavement dwellers and homeless people on the outskirts of Mumbai were bludgeoned to death in their sleep, all at night with a hard blunt object. Police had earlier suspected Raghav but released him for lack of solid evidence. Rumours spread that the killer had superhuman powers. After his arrest he confessed to 41 murders, was sentenced to death, and had his sentence changed to life imprisonment after a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. He earned the nickname ‘India's Jack the Ripper’, and his story inspired the 2016 film Raman Raghav 2.0. 

The Mumbai Stoneman (1985-88). Twelve murders were committed in the Sion and King's Circle areas over well over two years, with victims' heads crushed by a single stone weighing as much as 30 kg. The similarities in method with Kolkata’s Stoneman led many to suspect the same person. Others suspected copycats, and some even suspected a cult carrying out human sacrifices. Whether the Mumbai and Calcutta killings were linked has never been confirmed.

Joshi-Abhyankar (Pune, 1976-77). Ten murders were committed by four commercial art students, who were hanged for their crimes in 1983. It was a gang crime with an answer, but the Baishe Srabon refers to it, along with the Mumbai and Kolkata cases, when it introduces its protagonist Prabir, the veteran cop’s past. 

The lasting legacy of Baishe Srabon

Baishe Srabon brought the thriller genre back to Bengali cinema after a long time, and it grew into a cult favourite. It received highly positive reviews on release, was one of the highest-grossing Bengali films of 2011. It had a 105-day run at the box office, making it the biggest blockbuster of the year. It is now among IMDb's top 250 highest-rated Indian films, the only contemporary Bengali film to make to the list among Satyajit Ray's classics. It also began Mukherji's ‘Cop Universe’ franchise, a shared universe of media focusing on police officers who solve serial-killer cases, continued through Dwitiyo Purush (2020) and Dawshom Awbotaar (2023).

Baishe Srabon follows a killer stalking Kolkata, and the echoes of the Stoneman run through it. The film's killer leaves a chit with an extract of a Bengali poem beside each victim, and the first victim is a madman whose head is smashed in with a stone. The film goes further and writes the real case into its own world. In the story, a colleague tells the young cop Abhijit that the investigating teams on the infamous 1985 Mumbai and 1989 Kolkata serial-killing cases both featured Probir.

The Stoneman has inspired other screen stories too. A Hindi film, The Stoneman Murders, based on these incidents, was released on 13 February 2009, and a Bengali web series of the same name, inspired by true events, streamed on hoichoi from September 2019.

Fifteen years on, Baishe Srabon endures as a classic of Bengali cinema and remains one, still watched, still discussed and still the benchmark for thrillers.

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