Sangharsh (1968 film)

Sunghursh
Directed by	Harnam Singh Rawail
Produced by	Harnam Singh Rawail
Screenplay by	Anjana Rawail Dialogue: Gulzar and Abrar Alvi
Story by	Layli Asmaner Ayna by Mahasweta Devi
Starring	Dilip Kumar Vyjayanthimala Balraj Sahni Sanjeev Kumar
Music by	Naushad
Cinematography	R. D. Mathur
Edited by	Krushna Sachdev
Production company	Rahul Theatre
Distributed by	Shemaroo Entertainment
Release date	July 26, 1968
Running time	158 minutes
Country	India
Language	Hindi

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.

Bhavani Prasad (Jayant) is a powerful Shakta priest at Kashi. Prasad, a devotee of the black goddess Kali and a thuggee, religiously follows a practice to murder wealthy travelers who stay in his pilgrim guesthouse and offers them as a sacrifice to Kali. Prasad's son Shankar (Iftekhar) does not agree to such practices, opposes his father and decides to leave the village with his wife and their three children: Kundan (Dilip Dhavan), Yashoda and Gopal. Prasad forcibly takes Kundan with him to follow in his footsteps and forbids him from seeing the rest of the family.