Rabindranath Tagore’s story Kabuliwala, set in the early twentieth century Kolkata, which delicately explores the bonds of friendship, affection and then parting in the relationship between a middle-aged Pathan trader and a five year old Bengali girl. It is a simple tale of a father’s love for his daughter and the transfer of that love to another little girl. It is a love that transcends the borders of race, religion and language. The film belongs to the art-house genre in India known as Parallel Cinema and won two National Film Awards in the music category. In 1957 Bengali film director Tapan Sinha adapted it on screen. Then again in 1961 a Hindi film was directed by Hemen Gupta, starring Balraj Sahni, Usha Kiran, Sajjan, Sonu and Baby Farida. The simple story of Kabuliwala is about the affection between Abdur Rahamat Khan, an Afghani immigrant dry-fruit-seller in Calcutta and Mini, a girl who he imagines as his child-figure in memory of his daughter, Amina left behind in Kabul. This story, unlike many other Tagore-inspired films that are more strongly rooted in context and period, offers a more distinctive perspective on humanism and identity. It was published as a short story in Sadhana, a Bangla literary magazine he edited through the 1890s and the early decades of the twentieth century. The story was later translated from Bangla into English by the Irish woman Margaret Elizabeth Noble, more popularly known to the world as Sister Nivedita, and published in the Modern Review.