Before Aamir Khan's 'Laal Singh Chaddha', check out 8 best Hindi movie adaptations of books

An adaptation of one of RK Narayan's best works, the 1958 novel 'The Guide' was written and adapted by Vijay Anand for his brother Dev Anand and Waheeda Rehman and was almost as good. Narayan, himself, was not too fond of the film, however. The film told the story of a guide called Raju (Dev Anand) who befriends and falls in love with Rosie (Rehman), a woman married to a wealthy man. 
 

Vishal Bhardwaj has pioneered adapting Shakespeare's works for Indian context, and this list will have multiple films directed by him.   'Maqbool' (a remix of 'Macbeth') was his first attempt to present a story from the Bard with an authentically Indian setting and a cast of desi characters. Populated by performers like  Irrfan, Tabu, Pankaj Kapur, Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, and Piyush Mishra, 'Maqbool' had aged like a fine wine.
 

There is something about Shakespeare's stories whose core elements can be lifted and applied on pretty much any setting. Gulzar's 1982 movie 'Angoor' is one of the finest examples of this. Ancient Greece and modern India could not be more different. And yet, Shakespeare's 'The Comedy of Errors' feels just right for a Hindi comedy film about two identical twins who get seperated at birth and meet in their adulthood, creating, well, a comedy of errors. 
 

This film gave Anurag Kashyap a lot of headache as it had to cross several legal and funding hurdles before it could be released in 2007, three years since its original release schedule. The film was based on Hussain Zaidi's 'Black Friday: The True Story of the Bombay Bomb Blasts' and is a prime example of an early Kashyap film when he was still developing his style. 
 

Vishal Bhardwaj's Shakespeare adaptation that is arguably more popular than 'Maqbool', 'Omkara' was an Indian remix of the Bard's tragedy 'Othello' and again made great use of its cast to tell a story that may have been rooted in mediaeval Europe and Middle-east but was at its heart India. Watch out for by far the best performance of Saif Ali Khan's career. 
 

A rare example where the movie adaptation was way better than the rambling source material, Meghna Gulzar's 'Raazi' was about an Indian woman who goes deep undercover in Pakistan and even marries a Pakistani military officer to keep up the secret. A thrilling tale, superbly told.
 

Directorial debut of one Shekhar Kapur, 'Masoom' was an adaptation of author Erich Segal's 1980 novel 'Man, Woman and Child'. Spearheaded by Naseeruddin Shah and Shabana Azmi at the top of their game. The film sensitiively tackled a serious like infidelity in marriage -- unlike most Hindi films of that era.
 

Sanjay Leela Bhansali's 2002 film 'Devdas' is fine, but one has to really witness the king of tragedy that was Dilip Kumar in 1955's adaptation of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay's novel to see what acting really is.