Words that get shot

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

Related Articles

Wanted: CEOs from India

: Ben-Hur, The Godfather, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Schindler’s List, The Clockwork Orange, The Bourne Identity, Jaws, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Chronicles of Narnia… However eclectic this list is, it just reinforces that books have lent more than a helping hand to big budget blockbuster Hollywood. Just compare this to Bollywood’s produce and you have the same names turning up again and again. Devdas comes along every once in a generation and Parineeta threatens to follow the same path. Sahib, Biwi Aur Ghulam and Coolie round off the list. Directors like Gulzar or Basu Chatterjee have consistently sourced from a wider variety of literary sources, but their films were hardly ever seen by the producer-distributor nexus as being worth a pan India promotion.

However cinema in India’s regional languages has relied heavily on literature, with one director going to the extent of saying a lot of it is “literary cinema.” The giants of these cinemas, from Satyajit Ray to Adoor Gopalakrishnan, have consistently translated stories to celluloid, and with rare felicity. In recent times, the Indian literary connection comes across in films like The Mistress of Spices based on the novel by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Mira Nair’s The Namesake based on Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, and the forthcoming Hello based on Chetan Bhagat’s One Night @ Call Center. Bhagat’s earlier book, Five Point Someone, too is to be made into a film tentatively called Idiots. However the supreme fount of global inspiration is indisputably Shakespeare, often unacknowledged in the credits.

One wonders whether great film directors have a formula for zooming in on literature that meets their fancy, inspires them to turn it into film. Is it by accident that the meeting happens, as in the case of Aparna Sen encountering Kunal Basu over coffee at a Cambridge do, where the director heard about the writer’s ‘wonderful short story’ — The Japanese Wife? Or did Ray go looking for a Premchand novel to be translated into celluloid? Whatever be the merits of either case, unlike in the West, the tango here has been rather sporadic, usually confined to the elite margins.