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From manuscripts to scripts

Amit Dutta’s Aadmi ki Aurat Aur Anya Kahaniyan (2009), which is fast becoming a landmark in Indian cinema, has a section called Adam ki Aurat based on Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Hindi short story by the same name.

From manuscripts to scripts


Shardul Bhardwaj

Amit Dutta’s Aadmi ki Aurat Aur Anya Kahaniyan (2009), which is fast becoming a landmark in Indian cinema, has a section called Adam ki Aurat based on Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Hindi short story by the same name. The section opens with the written text of the short story with the opening lines thus: “He was walking with Jayanath as if he was not walking with Jayanath”. Dutta, then, cuts to a close up of the opening lines. There is a narrator saying the same lines in a flat tone and simultaneously Jayanath and his friend are seen walking.

The beauty of the line can be summarised by what Arvind Krishna Mehrotra has to say about Shukla’s writing, which is that he eliminated weight from the narrative or the structure of writing. In other words, Shukla’s writing, replete with images, is full of varied perceivable possibilities. The above-mentioned line suggests an image which some might call association but very few of us would be able to describe that very image in exact words. This is because writers like Shukla have not written to convey the precise meaning; the very act of arriving at a precise meaning is the destruction of his work. Thus, the writing acquires a kind of weightlessness.

Such an author’s vision could be a treat for a director like Amit Dutta. He seems to understand that the unexplored potential of the visual medium lies in giving an experience to an audience rather than burdening them with the task of making meaning. During the making of the film, Dutta was adamant upon not meddling with the text of the author but wanting to be the author of the images. In the opening scene, we see Jayanath walking on an elevated platform while his friend walks behind him varying the distance sometimes stepping left and sometimes stepping right. Though he keeps the narration flat, he creates the image in th manner which is in keeping with the way Shukla writes.

But the debate over how an author has written his story or novel and how it should be presented by the filmmaker has raged on in India and abroad for a longtime. Mani Kaul’s Naukar ki Kameez (1999), based on Shukla’s Hindi novel by the same name, received an incredible amount of criticism in Hindi journals for having killed the soul of Shukla’s writing by Hindi critics. At the same time, another camp (mostly consisting of cinema lovers and filmmakers) claimed that the rhythm of the novel and the film seem to be identical, be it the pace of a scene or movement or developments of the characters/ actors on screen. Similarly, Ritwik Ghatak’s Titas Ekti Nadir Naam (1973) based on Adwaita Mallbarman’s Bengali classic novel by the same name came under strict criticism by Gautam Bhadra, an eminent historian and part of cine clubs in Bengal. The historian felt that Ghatak’s film rarely recognises the economic upheavals of the Malo society, which the film represents, along with a Muslim peasantry in a post-Partition time, whose representation is characteristic of Mallbarman’s novel. In defence of Ghatak’s film Parichay Patra writes in his article that Ghatak “like Kracauer was concerned less with representational authority and more with a mode of experiencing and encountering the world.” His characters placed in a wide frame were allegorical of how the macro and the micro viewpoints ran parallel in Ghatak’s cinematic world. 

The question is when a written work is adapted for a visual medium does the work still remain the author’s or becomes partially the filmmaker’s? Are the writer of a novel or story and filmmaker coauthors of a film? Does the visual language and textual language differ from each other, and if yes, then how much? What happens when a text is made into a film? These are questions which have different answers depending on the filmmaker, we look at but an attempt at converting a text into the visual medium without dwelling on the nature of both the mediums is probably futile.

A certain kind of specificity is in the nature of the visual medium. The moment one sees a house or a man dressed a certain way, one starts to associate them with a temporal space and geographical region. It is hard to shy away from that in a visual medium. But within that specificity also lies a boon for cinema, something that a film like Aadmi ki Aurat aur Anya Kahaniyan made full use of; we know that the stories are roughly placed in North Indian setting and the story is set in a time title before than 2009, when the film was shot, taking from here the film begins to look at possibilities in the image, which seems to be real to an extent that Barbara Wurm described as “a sophisticated plot wandering from reality and back as a result.” Each frame has a real grounding and the people in the frame also seem to be standing or moving in societal ways but there always lies a sense of multitude of meaning within. Poetry and in Shukla’s case, all of his works, seem to follow what Arvind Mehrotra says poetry is: “A disappearing thought or impression brought into hard focus.” This disappearing thought or impression is of our everyday life. A scene from Dutta’s film where Jayanath is trying to remove the tattoo from his wife’s hand seems to have multiple meanings in a moment. It seems violent, desperate, horrible and the adjectives can go on. 

Another aspect could be how and what a filmmaker chooses to adapt to the visual medium , a film like Shatranj ke Khiladi (1972) is adapted from a short story by Premchand. Premchand was a literary pioneer in Hindi of a movement, which has been called social realism where it was necessary to evoke a complete and a definitive image through the words. While on the other hand Mani Kaul’s film Satah se Uthta Aadmi (1980) is a cinematic experiment of presences rather than characters walking in and out real and surreal spaces while the voiceover of Muktibodh’s poems, essays and stories goes on. Muktibodh was a poet who has been classified as somebody who ushered in the Nayi Kavita or modern poetry in Hindi literature. His depiction and fight against a certain kind of hegemonic depiction of working classes led him to write images into his poetry which are evocative in nature rather than descriptive. For example, in his poem Chand ka Munh Teda Hai used by Mani Kaul in Satah se Uthta Aadmi has its final line as: “Minar, Minaron ke Beechon Beech Chand Ka Teda Munh”. In Mani Kaul’s film, there is repeated imagery of blue sky and factory chimneys rising in the background with presences walking and the railway track leading the eye to the chimneys.

Films based on written texts are adaptations and visual translations at the same time. Also there is specificity inherent to the medium of cinema itself, mere highlighting of that specificity is limiting what the visuals can add to the text. This might apply not just on films, which are adapted from written texts but also on films with original screenplays. What films like Paheli (2009) based on a beautiful story by Vijaydan Detha seem to do is the opposite. By doing so, they seem to kill the text and the visual medium both. It all boils down to the market economy where to earn money the commercial market has to make things specific and of one meaning. Ambiguity is bad for business even if it comes at the cost of sacrificing a medium. Perhaps, this could be a reason for Titas Ekti Nadir Naam being a flop in the boxoffice and Amit Dutta’s work having to occupy the seat of ‘intellectual cinema’. While it is easier for us to consume Shukla’s or Vijaydan Detha’s written works but it is very difficult for us to watch works which seem to add another dimension to their work through the visual medium.

— The writer is an actor and theatreperson

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