Literary carnival notes 2: book-to-film adaptations

[Did a shorter version of this for my Sunday Guardian column]

At the Times of India Literary Carnival, I participated in a panel about books being adapted into films. Adeptly moderated though the discussion was – by author, screenwriter and all-round funny man Anuvab Pal – there’s no way an hour-long session can cover all bases on this wide-ranging topic. Still, it was a good excuse to put together some of my scattered thoughts about adaptation. Here goes:

One of my peeves as a film buff is that too many reviews these days discuss movies almost exclusively in terms of their plots. Overemphasis on story has the effect of neglecting how the story is told with the techniques that cinema has at its disposal (and which differentiate it from literature). It also fosters a culture where some reviewers (both in mainstream and online media) don’t even feel the need to be acquainted with the most rudimentary camera movements: the difference between a pan and a tracking shot, for example, or between a match cut and a jump cut.

If you even mention these things while discussing a film, you might be accused of getting “too technical”, but this is basic moviemaking grammar. It would be unthinkable for a professional book reviewer to not know the difference between active voice and passive voice, or between a first-person and third-person narrative. (Actually a good book reviewer would be expected to know much more, but I’m deliberately setting the bar very low here!) It’s a pity then that movie critics are held to much lower standards simply because cinema is such a popular and egalitarian form.

Anyway, this may be something to keep in mind while assessing the quality of an adaptation and the ways in which a film deviates from the book it was based on. One of the things that came up during our discussion was that the high quality of a literary work does not necessarily translate into high quality in the movie made from it. (If that were the case, a stationary-camera recording of a good stage production of Hamlet would automatically be a great film.) As our co-panellist Sooni Taraporevala, the screenwriter of such films as Salaam Bombay and The Namesake, put it: “A film mustn’t simply be an illustration of the book.”


I also liked the term Sooni used – “spiritual DNA” – to refer to the essence of a literary work, which is what an adapting screenwriter should mainly be concerned with. Thus, a good adaptation might capture the essential theme or mood of a book even if superficial details of period, setting and character names are altered. Shakespeare is a good example: there have been Japanese, Russian and Indian film versions of his work, made in languages that are arguably twice removed from the 16th century English he worked in. There have also been modernised versions, such as the 1995 Richard III which shifted the action to the pre-World War II years and included a scene where Richard speaks part of his “winter of our discontent” soliloquy while standing at a men’s urinal.

If you’re a purist, such changes might seem sensationalistic, but I think the film catches the essence of Shakespeare’s memorable protagonist: the self-loathing mixed with self-pitying, the insatiable appetite for scheming and deceiving, the need to avenge himself on everyone around him. (Another example in a similar vein: in Roman Polanski’s excellent Macbeth, Lady Macbeth does her sleepwalking scene in the nude. It has been cynically noted that the film was co-produced by Playboy, but I don’t think there’s anything gratuitous about the scene itself; it works quite well as a depiction of the sudden vulnerability of a character who has been so thoroughly in control for most of the play.)

But often, spiritual DNA isn’t easy to define, especially when adaptation involves a big change in period or setting. John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola adapted Joseph Conrad’s 1903 novel Heart of Darkness into Apocalypse Now, significantly updating the story – Conrad’s themes of imperialistic hegemony, exploitation and the savagery in human nature were set in a story about a man from a “civilised” country (England at the height of its powers) journeying into a “place of darkness” (the African Congo), and the film placed these ideas in the context of what America was doing to Vietnam in the 1970s. Yet the differences between the two works are just as important: Conrad’s book is full of darkness and despair, but it has a moral compass – a sense that one can visit the darkest areas of the soul and return with one’s sanity intact – whereas Apocalypse Now is a more nihilistic work – it’s very much a product of a century that had seen two world wars, nuclear destruction and the greatest horror of all, the Holocaust.

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Earlier at the festival, I spoke with the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid, whose novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist is being made into a film by Mira Nair. “I didn’t realise writers and filmmakers were such different sorts of people,” he said jovially, relating his admiration for how attuned Nair was to the activities of every last person on her set. Working in seclusion is central to what writers do, whereas film directors – even the relatively introverted ones – have to be adept at managing groups of people. This personality conflict between writers and directors (and occasionally between writer-directors and money-minded producers) has shaped the course of movie history, providing some hugelyentertaining anecdotes along the way. (Walking through a long hotel corridor that morning before leaving for the fest venue, I had a vision of the apocalyptic, burning-hotel climax of the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink, a film about a hapless screenwriter coming to Hollywood and ending up, quite literally, in Hell.)

But there are also times when a serendipitous collaboration occurs between two people who might seem very different “types”. Consider Ruskin Bond and Vishal Bhardwaj. Bond’s writing style is genteel in the old-fashioned English way, the prose Spartan and direct; Bhardwaj’s films tend to be baroque, set in the Indian hinterland and peopled by rough-speaking types. The two men barely speak a common language, but I watched them in conversation at an event earlier this year and realised that in some things – notably in their shared penchant for black humour – they were on exactly the same wavelength. This helps explain their friendship and frequent collaboration, most notably on Bond’s children’s story The Blue Umbrella, which Bhardwaj made into a film that was much lusher in tone than Bond’s story (right down to the claustrophobia-inducing close-ups of Pankaj Kapoor as the greedy shopkeeper). It’s an example of a really good adaptation that doesn’t try to be slavishly faithful to its source material.

On the question of slavish faithfulness: when a literary work is being turned into a commercial or semi-commercial film, it’s almost inevitable that there will be changes that the original writer doesn’t care for; there will be a certain amount of pandering to the star system, and so on. During the audience Q&A, someone mentioned the “Dola re Dola” song in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s version of Devdas, which brought together Paro and Chandramukhi, two characters who have nothing to do with each other in the original story. Even defenders of Bhansali’s opulent filmmaking style would probably concede that a large part of the motivation for the scene was having Madhuri Dixit and Aishwarya Rai together on screen for a spectacular, paisa-vasool dance performance.


I wrote in this post about R K Narayan’s sardonic essay about the making of Guide. The process of “glamorising” his small-town story and its characters would have begun at the point where Dev Anand and Waheeda Rehman – big stars with established screen personas – were cast in the roles of Raju the guide and Rosie the dancer. And of course, many changes were made to the story itself. But however much one admires and sympathises with Narayan the writer, the film must ultimately be judged on its own terms (and many movie buffs would agree that the Hindi version of Guide is an outstanding achievement in commercial filmmaking). There are many instances of movies that are excellent in themselves while being less than satisfying as adaptations.

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During our session Sooni spoke interestingly about how, when turning a novel into a screenplay, she had to find an exterior expression for the interiority of a character’s thoughts. This must have been especially relevant to her adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, because the book had surprisingly little dialogue; mostly it took the form of an omniscient narrator telling us about the lives and thoughts of Gogol and the other characters. Sooni had to create voices for these people, who had to be depicted on screen by flesh-and-blood actors who would actually talk to each other.

Writing aside, there are thousands of instances of a seemingly minor decision by a filmmaker adding layers to the story he is adapting – from Satyajit Ray’s use of Ravi Shankar’s shehnai music at key emotional points in Aparajito (based on Bibhutibhushan Banerjee’s book which, needless to say, did not use music of any sort as an accompaniment to a dramatic scene!) to Stanley Kubrick filming a frenetic orgy in fast motion (and with a fixed camera impassively recording the action) in A Clockwork Orange (based on Anthony Burgess’s novel, which was widely believed to be unfilmable). I'll be putting up a few more notes on this subject in the coming weeks, with more examples. Meanwhile, here are some earlier, related posts: Susannah’s Seven Husbands from short story to script; R K Narayan and Guide; The Namesake; Polanski’s Macbeth; my Yahoo column on story and storytelling.

Outside of a dog...

A shout-out (or woof-out) for How Cheeka Became a Star and Other Dog Stories, which is the first publication in Natraj’s Wagging Tales series. This is an extremely well-produced and designed book, full of nice illustrations, cartoons and dog-related trivia. The contributors include a few professional writers/journalists like Ruskin Bond**, Pavan Varma and Jug Suraiya, but also people from other fields such as actress Gul Panag and Jay Panda – most of whom have this in common: their lives were, at some point, taken over by a canine friend, sibling or child. The result is a varied (if slightly random) collection of short pieces ranging from full-fledged reminiscences to enjoyable trifles like Maneka Gandhi’s "Why do Dogs Go to Heaven?"

The book’s title comes from advertising executive Sneha Iype Varma’s account of how the Vodafone pug became a household name. I felt ambivalent about that one, given how the pug craze led to a surfeit of irresponsible impulse buying by that hideous breed of humans who are prone to abandoning pets. But the more personal stories here – such as Nafisa Ali Sodhi’s “Born Again” and Shirin Merchant’s “Price of a Life” – should be of interest to most animal lovers. Personally, I could relate to Dhiraj Nayyar's Editor's Note about his tentative steps into the world of dog-dom, since I wasn't quite a "dog person" myself - in the sense of having developed a really close bond with any one dog - until three years ago. But since then...

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** Ruskin Bond’s story is the one he wrote for the Tehelka Excess special that I co-edited in 2008

Susanna’s Seven Husbands, from short story to novella to script

[Did a version of this piece for Open magazine. Enjoyed writing it - it was like reviewing three stages of the same work]

Asked to write a film in the late 1940s, the novelist Graham Greene could only proffer a couple of lines he had once casually scribbled on an envelope flap: "I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity that I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the Strand.”

It was the bare outline of a story, having little to do with what producer Alexander Korda wanted – a thriller set in post-war, Allied-occupied Vienna – but Greene developed the premise, first into a novella and then a screenplay. That single-sentence scrawl begat one of the most visually distinctive films ever made – Carol Reed’s classic noir The Third Man, about an American pulp writer discovering that his supposedly dead friend Harry Lime was involved in a penicillin racket.

This back-story is a reminder that a full-length film can develop, incrementally, from a throwaway idea, so that the final product bears only a minor resemblance to the core text. Something comparable happened with Vishal Bhardwaj’s latest movie Saat Khoon Maaf, which was inspired by Ruskin Bond’s five-page short story “Susanna’s Seven Husbands”. Bhardwaj chanced upon the story a few years ago, requested Bond to expand it into a novella, and then developed a screenplay with his friend and associate Matthew Robbins. Now that the film is out, Penguin India has published the original story, the novella and the final screenplay (printed in a mix of Roman and Devanagari lettering) in a single book – an excellent idea, since reading them together provides a good insight into the conversion of a story into a filmable script, and what might be gained and lost along the way.

What makes this collaboration interesting is that Bond and Bhardwaj are unusual bedfellows. The former’s work is droll and genteel in the old-fashioned English way, evoking a bygone way of life, while the latter’s best films are set in the contemporary Indian hinterland, peopled by rough-speaking characters. The two men do share a penchant for dark humour (“I see Vishal Bhardwaj as the Hitchcock of Indian cinema, a master of the macabre,” Bond has said), but their personal styles are very different – Bond’s prose is marked by its seemingly effortless simplicity while Bhardwaj’s films tend to be dense and baroque, with layered use of colour and music. A few years ago he took Bond’s gentle children’s story “The Blue Umbrella”, gave it the texture of a Brothers Grimm fairytale, and shifted the narrative focus, providing Pankaj Kapoor with one of his best roles as a greedy Himachali shopkeeper. (A post about that film here.)

The original “Susanna’s Seven Husbands” is one of those concise, anecdotal tales that Bond does so well, with an unnamed narrator learning – through hearsay – about the life of Lady Susanna, an inveterate husband-collector (and probable husband-murderer) who lived in Old Delhi around a century ago. In the novella, Bond expands and modernizes the story, and gives us a new point of entry – a young narrator named Arun who lives next door to Susanna’s vast Meerut estate, forms a close friendship with her and tracks her conjugal adventures over the years with a mix of fascination, alarm and slight jealousy.

Reading this longer, commissioned version of Susanna’s Seven Husbands, one almost gets the sense of a storyteller writing an elaborate personal letter for a filmmaker friend – which is what Bond was doing in a way. He indulges himself, making a few filmi references: one of Susanna’s husbands is described as having a “Jackie Shroff-type moustache and the long legs of an Amitabh Bachchan” (a tongue-in-cheek attempt by the author to influence casting?), a minor character is named Shah Rukh, and there is a mention of Bhardwaj’s film Maqbool. The writing is somewhat hurried in places – as if done on a tight deadline – but all the Bond virtues are in place, notably the clarity and the graceful humour. More atypically, there’s even a bit of sex – nothing explicit, but candid enough. (“He started off by being tender and passionate, but his brain would not send the right message to his loins, and he found himself as ineffective as before.”)

The screenplay that follows retains some plot details – the idiosyncrasies of Susanna’s spouses and the manner of their untimely deaths, in which a “goonga” jockey and a middle-aged maidservant play their parts – but the changes are a pointer to the sort of film Bhardwaj wanted to make. Thus, one of the husbands, the Prince of Purkazi, becomes a well-known poet named Wasiullah Khan (facilitating the introduction of romantic Urdu couplets into the script) and a South American diplomat morphs into a Russian attaché who supplies comic relief by goofily speaking Hindi, using lines like “Mere paas ma hai” and singing “Awaara Hoon” at a piano.

In the original story, the narrator briefly likens Susanna to the husband-devouring Black Widow spider, and Bond jokingly expands on this in the novella (“It was some time since she’d dined off a fat, juicy male. Now she was thinking of moving her web elsewhere…”). However, the Susanna of the screenplay isn’t so much a spider as a chameleon, adapting herself to each new husband’s background and circumstances – she becomes a vodka-drinking “Anna” (and reads Anna Karenina) for the Russian Vronsky, she says namaaz when she’s married to the Muslim poet, and she sings a line of Rabindrasangeet for her Bengali husband. She’s a blank slate for these men – in one case, almost literally (one of the script's more romantic scenes has Wasiullah “writing” his name on her outstretched palm). And in the process she turns into a more sympathetic figure, which is one of the problems with this story’s makeover.

There are essentially two ways of handling the tale of a woman who bumps off a line of husbands: either be lightheartedly amoral about it or provide a properly worked out explanation for her psychosis. Bond takes the first approach in both his versions, helped by the fact that the original story was set in the time of the Raj – as he pointed out during a recent discussion in Delhi, distance lends a certain enchantment to sordid events: “Perhaps we find murder in colonial times easier to accept than murder in contemporary India!” In any case, the tone of his writing is influenced by the black humour of such classic British films as Kind Hearts and Coronets**, which didn’t much bother with conventional morality. The closest he comes to providing an “explanation” for Susanna’s impulses is a passage where she says she can’t help what she’s doing because after being married for a while she feels “the sudden hatred that practically every wife sometimes feels for her husband just because he is her husband”.

As psychoanalysis goes, this isn’t particularly deep or useful (at least not as a justification for multiple murders), and perhaps we should take it as a sign that Susanna has unfathomable depths and that her story is best read as a wickedly funny comment on gender equations. However, Hindi cinema doesn’t have a well-developed tradition of truly irreverent black comedy, and the screenplay tries for an uneasy middle ground; it retains the darkly comic aspects of the narrative but also resorts to sentimental explanations.

Bhardwaj and Robbins make the husbands more outright unpleasant, which has the effect of making Susanna likable in comparison. (One of the novella’s more flippant chapters – about a spouse who must be dispensed with simply because he is obsessed with his cellphone – has been dropped altogether, and replaced with an episode involving a shady policeman who gets his just desserts.) Another key difference is that Arun becomes a member of the servant class, an underprivileged boy on whom Susanna “Saaheb” bestows great kindness. To an extent, this was a practical consideration – Bhardwaj had to make his sutradhaar an active part of the story rather than someone whose life intersects with Susanna’s at irregular intervals – but it also performs the function of thickly emphasizing her compassionate side – something that was done in a few quick lines in the novella. (“She was kind to children and animals…kind even to odd creatures and freaks like the dwarf…her cruelty was reserved for another species of human.”)

On the whole, the script is at its least engaging when it tries to persuade us that Susanna “sacche pyaar ke talaash mein hai” (she’s searching for true love), and the resolution – with our heroine discovering the perfect “seventh husband” as well as personal salvation – is weak too, introducing ethical considerations and the concept of redemption into a story that could have done without them. Happily, though, this is one of those books where even the flaws are revealing and worth the reader’s time – especially if you’re interested in the complexities of story-to-film adaptation, and the nature of collaboration between artists with different sensibilities.

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** During his Delhi conversation with Bhardwaj and Mahmood Farooqi, Ruskin Bond also mentioned Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry as an influence on his darker writing - which was pleasing, for the film is a personal favourite.

Ruskin goes to Select (and journalism vs facts)

(Carrying this theme forward)

Witnessed at the Crossword bookstore in the Select Citywalk mall, just a few minutes before a book reading by Ruskin Bond: a chirpy young TV reporter, mike in hand, asks children facile questions about Ruskin and his books:

Reporter: So tell me, isn’t it exciting that you’re GETTING TO MEET RUSKIN BOND TODAY? (She widens her eyes dramatically and simulates excitement with a series of facial contortions, clearly intended as a cue for the kids to do the same)
Stoical child: oh it’s nice, but you know, my brother and I met him at a book fair just last year, so...
Reporter (puts mike down, bares teeth): Look, just say you LOVE HIM and are THRILLED TO BITS about being here! All right? All right?

(Precocious child quivers briefly, complies)

Yet another instance of journalism holding up a mirror to society. I shake my head in sadness – partly because that serious-faced boy could have been me 25 years ago.

But I should clarify that the overall response to Ruskin’s session was very enthusiastic. Dozens of wide-mouthed children listened to the reading and asked questions, dozens of adults (including one magnificently energetic middle-aged sardarji) tripped over themselves in a bid to capture the “author-saab” on their camera-phones. Don’t recall seeing anything quite like it even when Salman Rushdie was at the Jaipur festival. Poor Ruskin looked a bit ill at ease, and who could blame him: he spends most of his time in the quiet hill-town of Landour, which is very poor preparation for a Select Citywalk crowd on a Friday evening.

(This seems like a good time to mention that Ruskin’s story submission for the Tehelka anthology was written in his own hand – he doesn’t use even a typewriter – and sent across by courier, since email is out of the question. The handwritten original is with me and I have no intention of parting with it.)

Tehelka's fiction special

I’ve been helping the good people at Tehelka put together their year-end special, an anthology of short fiction. The authors we commissioned were given no brief other than the word “excess” and the result is a varied and exciting collection of pieces about (among other things): a vampire flummoxed by the system of faith prevalent in India; a pacifist vegetarian dog in South Africa; a group of people setting off from various parts of the country in an attempt to escape excess; a surgeon who likes working on cancers of the mouth and also enjoys videos of anal sex and facials; a little boy playing a mushroom in a school play. The contributors are Altaf Tyrewala, Ambarish Satwik, Amruta Patil, Anjum Hasan, Kalpish Ratna (Kalpana Swaminathan + Ishrat Syed), Manjula Padmanabhan, Mridula Koshy, Rana Dasgupta, Rajorshi Chakraborti, Ruskin Bond, Sarnath Banerjee, Sudeep Chakravarti, Sunetra Gupta, Tishani Doshi and Vivek Narayanan.

The issue will be on the stands by the 26th or 27th of this month, so do look out for it. The redoubtable Nisha Susan, who has been anchoring the special and generally bullying me into doing things I’m very bad at (brainstorming, attending meetings, calling up and speaking with people), will also put up something about it on her blog soon.

[Earlier posts on some of the contributing authors and their work: Patil’s Kari, Chakraborti’s Or the Day Seizes You and an interview, Kalpish Ratna’s Nyagrodha, Swaminathan’s Ambrosia for Afters and Bougainvillea House, Padmanabhan’s Escape and an interview, Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled, Narayanan at Jaipur, Chakravarti’s Tin Fish.]

Update: just saw all the pages before they were released and the illustrations accompanying the stories are stunning; the Tehelka design team has done a fabulous job. I'm feeling excited about the special all over again - this thing could be a collector's issue just for the artwork.

Notes on The Blue Umbrella

In his earlier work (including Maqbool and Omkara), Vishal Bhardwaj has shown a fine sense of shot-composition and the effective use of colour and music in film. These qualities are also on view in The Blue Umbrella/Chatri Chor, which he made in 2005 but which has only just been commercially released. It’s a very absorbing film, though perhaps 15 minutes too long. I’ve seen it described as a "children's movie", but this is slightly misleading: though it’s based on a gentle Ruskin Bond story, Bhardwaj’s treatment owes an equal debt to the dark fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, an effect that’s underlined by Pankaj Kapur's superb performance as a very Himachali Big Bad Wolf.

The story is about how a vivid blue umbrella affects the lives of a number of people in a quiet hillside village. A young girl named Biniya gets it from a group of tourists in exchange for her lucky charm, a bear-claw locket; thereafter, she carries the umbrella around with her everywhere, mesmerising the rest of the villagers who have never seen anything like it before. Kapur plays Nandkishor, a covetous, honey-tongued shopkeeper who is feared by children because of his habit of selling goods supposedly on loan but holding on to treasured items as collateral and never returning them. Naturally, he can’t tear his greedy eyes away from Biniya’s new possession. He tries to wheedle it out of her using such enticements as a year’s supply of toffees and biscuits, but when she refuses, he resolves to have it anyway.

The film is a bit uneven in places, but some bits are brilliant. Especially notable is the way Bhardwaj subtly changes the tone and mood of the story, giving us a gradual movement from a bright, sunshine-y world to a dark, nightmarish one. With the umbrella, Biniya’s world is happy and secure - she poses with it for tourist photographs and there is even a surreal moment when she turns into a swashbuckling heroine figure, saving her pehlwan brother from a cobra. But after the umbrella goes missing she enters a twilight zone full of shadowy figures. Even the once-friendly faces from the village can no longer be trusted - everyone seems to be gloating at her misfortune, for the umbrella had become a catalyst for envy and discontent. There is a sense here of simple, idyllic lives being thrown into disarray by the introduction of an alien object; of unseemly feelings being introduced into a garden of Eden. (Not making an absolute comparison here, or likening the villagers to monkeys, but the look of wonder and awe on some of the faces reminded me of the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey, with pre-historic man contemplating the perfectly smooth monolith that will change his life - for good and for bad.)

But the loss also awakens a new maturity in Biniya. Some of her later scenes show an intensity that belies her age: we see that she's learnt something about how the world works, and about the perils of getting too attached to something. (It’s worth recalling here that the Red Riding Hood story is sometimes seen as an allegory for a young girl's sexual awakening, though I doubt Bhardwaj - or Ruskin Bond - would have had this in mind!) Towards the end of the film, when Nandkishor has become an outcaste, it's fitting that the first person to reach out to him is the girl he stole from, who knows firsthand about the lure of the blue umbrella.

P.S. Kapur’s snivelling, predatory Nandkishor reminded me of another character that is a stand-in for the Big Bad Wolf, from a 50-year-old film: Robert Mitchum’s preacher in The Night of the Hunter. Like Nandkishor, the preacher is menacing and comic at the same time: he is deliberately made to look grotesque in some scenes, such as the one where he trips and falls, arms outstretched and flailing, while chasing his stepchildren into a basement, and the image of his shadow on the wall makes him seem like a villain out of a speeded-up Disney feature. Similarly Nandkishor, for all his meanness, is a basically pathetic figure, aspiring for things that will forever stay out of his reach. By the film's end, however, he has achieved redemption on a minor scale, which is more than can be said for the Mitchum character.