What is "sunghursh"

Sunghursh is a 1968 Indian Hindi film directed and produced by Harnam Singh Rawail. It is based on a short story Layli Asmaner Ayna in Bengali language by Jnanpith Award-winning writer Mahasweta Devi, which presents a fictionalised account of vendetta within a thuggee cult in the holy Indian town of Varanasi. The film stars Dilip Kumar, Vyjayanthimala, Sanjeev Kumar, Balraj Sahni, Jayant, Deven Verma, Durga Khote and Iftekhar.

The music is by Naushad and lyrics for the songs are by Shakeel Badayuni. Naushad and Badayuni had worked together on multiple films previously and were "the most sought after" composer-lyricist duo of the time in Bollywood. Sunghursh was popularly mistaken to be a debut film of Sanjeev Kumar. It did fairly well commercially on release and is often called as a "classic" Bollywood film. It is the last film where Kumar and Vyjayanthimala worked together. The actors had done a maximum number of films together in the lead roles, and every one was a commercial success.

The director Harnam Singh Rawail's son Rahul Rawail, who is also a director, paid a tribute to this film by titling one of his as Jeevan Ek Sanghursh (1990) starring Anil Kapoor and Madhuri Dixit.