Jaya Ahsan: The Actress Bridging Dhaka and Kolkata Cinema

Jaya Ahsan did not ease into Bangladeshi cinema — she arrived at the centre of it. Her debut lead role, as freedom fighter Bilkis Banu in Nasiruddin Yousuff’s Guerrilla (2011), based on the Liberation War novel Nishiddho Loban, was part of a film that swept that year’s National Film Awards, taking ten honours including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actress — still a record for the most awards won by a single feature in one year.

She has since become the rare performer equally at home in Dhaka and Kolkata cinema, building a career that spans both Bangladeshi and Indian Bengali-language film industries. Her second film, the action-thriller Chorabali (2012), in which she played an investigative journalist, brought her a second National Film Award for Best Actress. She has gone on to win the award a total of six times, for Guerrilla, Chorabali, Zero Degree (2015), Debi (2018), Alatchakra (2021), and The Beauty Circus (2022) — an unmatched record among her peers.

Across the border, Ahsan’s work in Indian Bengali cinema has been just as decorated. Her performance in Kaushik Ganguly’s Bishorjan (2017), opposite Abir Chatterjee, made her the first Bangladeshi actor to win a Filmfare Award, alongside a Zee Cine Award and a BFJA Award for the same role. She followed it with the courtroom drama Ek Je Chhilo Raja (2018), based on the historic Bhawal case, and has continued to alternate between Dhaka-based and Kolkata-based productions.

More than two decades into her career, Ahsan has come to represent something specific in South Asian cinema: proof that an actor working primarily in Bangla-language film, without crossing into Hindi cinema, can still command recognition across two national film industries and their respective award circuits.