Piku grew from conversations about what adult children owe ageing parents—and from a strikingly specific premise: a Bengali father dealing with constipation and his independent working daughter. Screenwriter Juhi Chaturvedi drew on family memories and close observation, then shaped them into fiction with director Shoojit Sircar. The result finds comedy in the contradictions of caregiving without presenting the film as a literal account of Chaturvedi’s life.
How the idea for Piku began
Chaturvedi and Sircar began by talking about the responsibilities children carry as families become smaller and more nuclear. In their recollections, that broad concern met an unusually concrete character idea: a Bengali man preoccupied with constipation and his independent daughter, who works and has to reckon with his needs. Sircar recalled that the father-daughter relationship and the constipation element arrived together. (The Quint, updated 16 May 2015; Telegraph India, 7 May 2015)
Sircar also described the story as a Bengali family story that began in Delhi, drawing on his familiarity with Bengali life in CR Park. The specificity of place and family culture gave the premise a setting; its central question—how a daughter lives with a parent’s growing needs—made it broadly recognizable without making the characters generic. (Telegraph India, 7 May 2015)
Personal memories, transformed into fiction
Chaturvedi has pointed to several personal reference points: her educated grandfather becoming more childlike with age, the way her parents handled his health concerns, and her own experience of living with her father and his needs. Those experiences informed her attention to family behavior; they do not make Piku a one-to-one memoir. Chaturvedi’s account is one of observation and experience, while the film’s characters and events are constructed. (The Quint, updated 16 May 2015)
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Sircar likewise connected the father-daughter story to Chaturvedi’s experience as a daughter and her grandfather’s influence. In a later anniversary interview, Chaturvedi linked the impulse to write that bond to what she noticed while making Vicky Donor, as well as to her concern that smaller families can leave children carrying more of the work of caregiving. These are influences on the story’s emotional premise, not evidence that its plot reproduces her family’s life. (Telegraph India, 7 May 2015; NDTV, 9 May 2025)
How Chaturvedi and Sircar developed the screenplay
Sircar described an early process of informal, wide-ranging conversations with producer Ronnie Lahiri. They filtered ideas together and kept developing them through discussion; when the material had taken shape, Chaturvedi would go away and write a first screenplay draft, a stage Sircar said could take a month or two. That is his account of this collaboration, not a fixed timetable for writing a screenplay. (Telegraph India, 7 May 2015)
In 2025, Chaturvedi recalled that the dining-table scene was the first scene she wrote because it established the family’s chaos. Starting there makes sense for a story whose relationships emerge through everyday friction: the table is where family members share space, habits and competing needs. She also remembered the scene of Bhaskor’s death as emotionally difficult; after typing it, she shut her laptop and continued grieving for three days. (NDTV, 9 May 2025)
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Chaturvedi described Piku as a “hidden camera” showing viewers their own lives. Her aim was not to make the family’s difficulties funny from a safe distance, but to let humor arise from the contradictions people experience while living together and caring for one another. The comic details and the strain of responsibility belong to the same domestic reality in her conception of the film. (The Quint, updated 16 May 2015)
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Her advertising background also shaped how she approached dialogue. Chaturvedi said she valued each word and checked whether even a throwaway line made sense for both the story and the character’s way of speaking. That attention to voice helps explain how everyday remarks can carry character and comedy without turning the film’s family life into a string of jokes. (The Quint, updated 16 May 2015)
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