Connecting dots (and being underwhelmed by Shyam Benegal’s Kalyug)

Usually, when adapting a book into a film, the scriptwriters don’t take it for granted that their viewers have read the source text; the movie should work on its own terms. But it gets trickier when a film tries to do new things with the template of a very well-known tale and a degree of familiarity is presumed. I enjoyed Vishal Bhardwaj’s Hamlet adaptation Haider when I saw it two months ago, but since then I have wondered how I would have felt if I had watched it knowing nothing about Shakespeare’s play. Because the thrill of connecting the dots was central to my viewing experience – noting how Bhardwaj and Basharat Peer had turned Rosencrantz and Guildenstern into buffoons who idolise Salman Khan, or anticipating the famous grave-digger scene, complete with the “Aha!” moment where Haider holds up a skull, and the goofy little song (“So Jao” – a take on the recurring links between sleep and death in Hamlet?) that would probably have delighted Shakespeare’s own, plebeian heart.

Would the descent into madness of Haider’s girlfriend Arshia have been credible if one weren’t prepared for it by knowledge of Ophelia’s tragedy? Possibly not: the film is cantering along at this stage, and the abrupt cut to the scene where Haider sees Arshia’s funeral procession might puzzle an unprepared viewer – I remember a few murmurings in the hall – especially since being reduced so quickly to a nervous wreck doesn’t seem consistent with Arshia’s personality (unlike the sheltered Ophelia, she is a journalist working in Kashmir, accustomed to seeing bad things happening).

To some extent the question “How important is pre-knowledge?” applies to all of Bhardwaj’s Shakespeare adaptations (even if the answer to the question is unclear or variable). The first and still arguably the best of them, Maqbool (Macbeth), began with a brilliantly atmospheric scene where two crooked cops gossip about the Bombay underworld and use astrology to predict a gangster’s rise and fall. The scene works well by itself, but gains a new dimension once you realise these are versions of Shakespeare’s witches, commenting from the sidelines while also helping to engineer and direct events. And who can forget Maqbool’s pitiful “Main bachunga ya maroonga?” followed by the witch/cop’s reassurance that he is safe until the “dariya” comes right up to his house, a Birnam Wood drifting to Dunsinane.

Anyway, what started me on this "adapting an over-familiar tale" subject was a recent re-encounter with Shyam Benegal’s 1981 film Kalyug, a modern-day Mahabharata about a business family split into rival factions. I loved Kalyug when I was 10 (back then it was the only Benegal film I would have touched with a long spoon, much less forced my mother to take me to Palika Bazaar to find a video-cassette of, as I did)... or at least I thought I loved it. Possibly what really stimulated me was the Mahabharata dot-connecting game (then as now, I was obsessed with the epic), and especially seeing my hero Karna sympathetically portrayed by the film’s biggest star (and producer) Shashi Kapoor.

Watching it again now, I was disappointed. It is enjoyable in bits and pieces certainly – the cast is full of interesting people, and the plot is busy enough: the cousins keep raising the stakes passive-aggressively until things get out of control; Amrish Puri plays a Krishna who doesn’t have anything like the agency and influence of the charioteer-God; Kulbhushan Kharbanda is an amusingly priapic Bheema; Rekha and Raj Babbar sleep in separate beds and look unhappy; the smooth Victor Banerjee looks as if he would be perfectly happy sleeping alone forever; Supriya Pathak is sexy. But these elements don’t add up to very much. The film shifts between big-canvas cynicism – with its caution about how, in the machine age, everyone sinks morally into quicksand – and trying to evoke sympathy specifically for one character, the underdog Karan (using Shashi Kapoor’s personality and star-cachet to achieve this without a great deal of help from the actual writing). There is a neither-here-nor-there feel to the whole, which is a reminder of the film’s unusual conception: getting a Serious Director to helm a project that would be backed by money and a cast of well-known names from the mainstream, but would also have the sort of verisimilitude that can be created by Om Puri seething and shaking his fists in a small part as a trade-union rabble-rouser.

Take away the Mahabharata-awareness and this is a confused story with too many characters, most of whom are underdeveloped and don’t get enough screen time. There are tensions and meaningful silences that don’t seem to stem from anything – except, well, as a viewer you are simply supposed to know that Karna was rejected by Draupadi at her swayamvara, or that Yudhisthira is a bit of a non-entity who is over-fond of gambling, or that Abhimanyu may simply have been an overenthusiastic kid who got too involved in adult games. And those who don’t know all this are naturally foxed. A non-Indian friend, who loves old Hindi movies but hasn’t read Vyasa’s epic, had this take on Kalyug: she felt it played like a sort of home video where a viewer has all the relevant information beforehand about the people, and then indolently watches their little dramas play out. Interestingly, in the film itself, there’s a scene where the characters sit together watching a video of themselves at a wedding function. Vanraj Bhatia’s stirring music score aside, I’m not sure that Kalyug on the whole is much more interesting than that footage.

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Update: a follow-up conversation with my erudite friend/fellow Mahabharata nut Karthika Nair helped me articulate another reason why Kalyug didn't work for me this time: the best Benegal films, including the ones that are more "art-house", like Suraj ka Saatvan Ghoda or Mammo, are very far from the art-cinema cliche of the "boring", "educative" movie; they are kinetic and have a sense of style, they do interesting things visually (look at Nihalani's cinematography in Bhumika, and how it uses four  different types of film stock to capture different periods in the protagonist Usha's life). Whereas this film, for all its glamorous, "commercial" trappings, is formally static, and content to rest on the Mahabharata references.

[Two old posts about Benegal films I like very much: Trikaal and Charandas Chor. And this one on Junoon, written back when I was trying to sound more knowledgeable about Benegal than I actually was, and which I should probably watch again some time]

Notes on Vishal Bhardwaj's Haider (and a brief chat with Basharat Peer)

To begin by stating the obvious – Hamlet isn’t a great, enduring play because of what it tells us about the politics of 16th century Denmark or Europe. The reasons for its appeal are more universal: the quality of the poetry and how it fuels the narrative, creating a weave of human emotions, relationships and duplicities; the portrait of the sensitive young prince at the centre of it all, wise and callow by turn, child and man at once, never quite sure of what he must do; and the many ways in which the particular sheds light on the general. (I have always been puzzled by Charles Chaplin’s remark that he wasn’t too interested in Shakespeare because the plays were mostly about privileged royals whom he couldn’t identify with.)

But Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider isn’t “just” an adaptation of one of the most celebrated English plays ever (which would have been a big enough challenge) – it is also concerned with the recent history of Kashmir, which is an immediate, politically charged subject (so charged that the film has already run into trouble for its refusal to treat the Indian Army as unblemished angels of mercy and righteousness). And what made Haider compelling for me was the friction I sensed within the film: a conflict between the need to do well by Shakespeare – to do new things with a major literary text that has universal appeal – and the need to address Kashmir’s complexities. This tightrope act gives a pleasingly schizophrenic quality to a movie that is, after all, about a young man on the cusp of madness.

Some thoughts (mainly for those who have seen the film):

– Can a script that carries the load of Kashmir PLUS Hamlet avoid patches of heavy-handedness? Probably not, but Haider acquits itself well in the circumstances. I liked the non-underlined way in which this story's Gertrude – Haider’s mother Ghazala, wonderfully played by Tabu – becomes a sort of symbol for Kashmir herself: the object of desire or (blood)lust, the thing that needs to be possessed (the film isn’t coy about Haider’s own ambiguous relationship with her), the woman – “our sometime sister, now our queen” – whose very body is a battleground (an idea literalised in an explosive climax where Ghazala is given more agency than Gertrude has in the closing moments of the play).

– Other noteworthy things are done with the original text, such as the use of the character Roohdaar, who presents himself as the “rooh” (soul) of Haider’s father, a mouthpiece for a dead man. It’s a good way of sidestepping the supernatural aspects of the play, but it also ties in with a basic ambiguity in Hamlet itself: until the moment of Claudius’s confession, we can’t be completely sure if Hamlet’s father really was betrayed and murdered; the prince might be hallucinating, or the ghost might be a malevolent spirit leading him astray. In Haider, the very nature of the setting – the moral murkiness, the deceptions and counter-deceptions – is such that there exists at least a small possibility that young Haider is being set up. This adds a layer to his madness, uncertainty and his rambling, Toba Tek Singh-like soliloquy, which touches on how the people of Kashmir are caught in events they can’t fully understand. Which side, which border to trust?

– Scenes such as the gravediggers’ goofy song “So Jao” are reminders of how similar Shakespeare’s work is to a certain type of Hindi film: the episodic structures with constant shifting of moods and tones, the melodrama and the cheerful bawdiness, the use of clowns as sutradhaars who get to say unexpectedly profound things. Watching the “Ek aur Bismil” sequence where Haider confronts his uncle during the course of a celebratory song, even someone who knows his Hamlet might forget the play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king and instead recall “Ek Haseena Thi” in Karz – but of course Shakeapeare’s “lowbrow” dramatic flair has influenced popular Hindi cinema for decades, and that Karz song is part of the tradition.

This is also one reason why Haider’s wildly over-the-top Rosencrantz and Guildenstern worked for me. Turning these two spy-buffoons into Salman Khan-obsessives in a video parlour (complete with the playing of “Tumse jo Dekhte Hi Pyaar Hua” on the car stereo in a grim late scene) was an inspired touch. It’s loud, cutesy, front-bencher stuff…and I think Shakespeare would have heartily approved of it.

– In Hamlet, because the focus is on individuals and their conflicts, revenge is a relatively straightforward thing: there is a sense of loss, of course, and a sense that innocents like Ophelia have been swept away in other people’s battles, but the canvas is small and self-contained. In Haider, despite the emphases on relationships (Haider and his mother, Haider and Arshia, Arshia and her father), the big picture is always in view. And the thought that inteqaam followed by more inteqaam can only lead to wholesale destruction is a philosophical statement that keeps in mind the generations of self-perpetuating distrust and antagonism in Kashmir.  (It is also an apt thought for a film released on Mahatma Gandhi's birth anniversary.)

I liked the way the film ended, but I felt it might have been even better if the last shot had been the one of Haider indecisively holding the gun over his uncle’s head, and a simple fadeout on that image, along with the dual voiceover, one voice urging revenge, the other urging restraint: that would have been a fine encapsulation of the “to be or not to be” (or “to do or not to do”) theme, and an image of Kashmiri lives in a state of suspension.

P.S. Shortly after writing the above, I spoke with Basharat Peer who, in preparing the Haider screenplay, revisited Hamlet and simultaneously drew on his own wide-ranging experiences of Kashmir (including some that have been chronicled in his excellent Curfewed Night). Basharat said he wasn’t consciously thinking of Ghazala as a symbol for the “motherland”, but in writing the character – and in trying to make this Gertrude a more active participant – he had in mind the many stories involving unsung heroines from the Kashmir struggle: women who are often forgotten in official and unofficial records, and who defy the stereotype of the submissive Muslim woman who stays at home with eyes lowered.

The gravediggers too were inspired by some of the old men Basharat knew who were running around trying to save – or avenge – their children. “When we talk of the violence, we usually think of young, able-bodied men," he said, "but there are so many older people too who picked up guns after losing everything. And people like that don’t do this for big ideological reasons, it is purely personal: you lose your child, and all you want to do is destroy the world. It’s all part of the overwhelming complexity of what has happened in Kashmir, where the personal is always mixed up with the political.” I thought it notable how this view of embittered old people, dealing with grief, knowledge of mortality and the possible meaninglessness of it all, fits so well with the absurdist-nihilistic graveyard scene in Hamlet, and with Vishal Bhardwaj’s own dark sense of humour (also mentioned here and here, in the context of his collaborations with Ruskin Bond).

Basharat also mentioned that the “roohdaar” – Haider's father's twin soul, so to speak – was drawn from a real-life incident where a man, fired upon and dumped into the river (with a sack containing the chopped-up limbs of his friends tied to his back), survived to tell the tale. Another case of fiction huffing and puffing to keep pace with the implausibilities of real life. No wonder great Elsinore to high Srinagar can come.

United we shoot - quotes from a few good men in movies

[This is a piece I did for Elle magazine last year. It was done to a clearly specified brief: here’s a list of eight men who are doing interesting, behind-the-scenes work in Hindi cinema, and whom we have gathered for a photo shoot; speak to them and weave their quotes into an essay. As such, it wasn’t much of a challenge writing-wise – apart from the fact that there were a disproportionate number of cinematographers in the list, which made it tricky to divided up the quotes – but the conversations were nice. I have other bytes that I hope to use in a column sometime]

“There is usually a sound in my head when I am writing a scene,” says director Bejoy Nambiar, “and when the time comes to score the film, I look for musical possibilities to match that sound.” In one of the best scenes in Nambiar’s stylish film Shaitan, a brilliantly reworked, trippy version of the old romantic song “Khoya Khoya Chand” plays during a violent action sequence shot partly in slow motion. This is a conceit that might not have made sense on paper, but on screen it perfectly fits the film’s hallucinatory mood.

It also suggests a couple of things about contemporary movie-making: that a director with a strong vision can bring his stamp to every aspect of the process (“My films must have me in them,” Nambiar says, “they have to be expressions of my personal tastes and interests”), and that there is a greater willingness to experiment, to do things that would once have been considered very radical. Music producer and composer Mikey McCleary, who reworked “Khoya Khoya Chand”, points out that filmmakers are no longer hung up on having a single composer doing the music for their movies, and that they often choose pre-existing tunes from the independent scene, rather than commissioning scores from a familiar set of insiders. “This brings in more variety and opens up fresh possibilities for a film.”

More generally too, today’s Hindi cinema has shown a willingness to step outside traditional comfort zones. Thanks to a combination of the Internet, the DVD culture and greater dissemination of information, a generation of young writers and directors have been absorbing the best of other cinemas and bringing their own sensibilities to them. There are offbeat stories, newer settings, more realism in language, and greater emphasis on background detailing and production design – things that are vital for capturing a sense of place and time. The industry’s newfound confidence about being part of a larger filmic universe is also reflected in the growing participation of non-Indians – such as McCleary or the cinematographers Nikos Andritzakis and Carlos Catalan – who are now key contributors to major films.

“Earlier, our films were largely about escapism, such as showing Switzerland to an audience who would never go there,” lensman Kartik Vijay points out, “but today directors are making films about things they have firsthand experience of.” Naturally, to realise their visions, these directors need high standards of craftsmanship in every field. Speaking with some of our leading technicians, one is reminded that the best films represent a smooth synthesis of different elements, aimed at maintaining the reality of the world depicted in the movie. Vijay – who has worked with such major directors as Vishal Bhardwaj and Dibakar Banerjee – relates how he used bright colours to capture the vibrancy of the West Delhi Punjabi culture in Banerjee’s Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, and how subtle alterations in lighting can signal a narrative shift from a warm, happy mood to something more hard-edged. For Bhardwaj’s Matru ki Bijli ka Mandola, he tried to reflect the character Mandola’s darker shades by gradually letting the colours go out as the story progresses. While shooting Banerjee’s Shanghai, the Greek-born Andritzakis converted his first-time impressions (as a foreigner) of Mumbai busy street-life into images that matched the grim mood of the story, and also worked closely with the art designers to get the right look. McCleary, who did the soundtrack for the same film, embellished the sound of Mumbai street-drums with dark, ambient music to achieve an effect that would be familiar and sinister at the same time.

“The entire team needs to work in tandem from the very beginning – you can’t have a situation where two departments don’t know what the other is doing,” says costume designer Kunal Rawal, pointing out that a well-conceptualised wardrobe can help an actor get into the skin of a character long before shooting begins. Rawal recalls once designing a shirt with subtle off-white stripes that he thought would work very well for a scene, but then the lighting rendered the stripes invisible. On another occasion, carefully chosen shoes were wasted in a scene that only had close-ups and medium-shots. Little wonder then that he now wants to be present even at a DoP meeting, to understand the shot breakdown and the quality of light for a particular scene.

Those of us on the outside make simple distinctions between “commercial” and “art” cinema, or grumble that financial considerations always undermine artistic integrity, but things aren’t so cut-and-dried – big production houses are more open to fresh, edgy films. Director Shakun Batra, who is a big fan of Woody Allen and Wes Anderson and has a taste for quirky, character-driven stories himself, speaks of his producer Karan Johar being happy to finance the kinds of films that most viewers would never associate him with. “He is very supportive, never interferes or pushes you to do things in a particular way.” As Batra points out, the film world today is more balanced, allowing creative helmsmen with an indie sensibility to get the budgets for what they want to do. “You have to be good enough to win your producers’ confidence and trust.”

But as Andritzakis points out, even mainstream films are becoming better crafted, and there is less self-consciousness now about categories. Cinematographer Ayananka Bose, who has worked on a number of very high-profile, big-budget movies, says every film presents its own special challenge: for instance, Jhoom Barabar Jhoom required a flamboyant, colourful, big-musical feel, but Kites had to be suffused with the heat of the desert and the Las Vegas setting. “I don’t think much about the ‘big-budget’ or ‘glamorous’ tags,” he says, “What matters is quality of execution. The camera is the same, the lens is the same – you are in control of your craft.”

Speaking of which, changes in technology have been levelling the playing field and making filmmaking much more democratic than it once was. “Technology has put a movie camera in the hands of anyone who has a smart-phone,” says Vijay, and this means young talents have an early outlet for their imagination. Simultaneously, social media has made filmmakers more accessible: Nambiar speaks of musicians sending him their tunes online, which he can listen to instantly. Naturally this can cause clutter, but the best work does tend to stand out; as Bose points out, ultimately, the mind behind the equipment is what matters. “You can always identify someone who is a pseudo-intellectual imitator of Godard or Truffaut vs someone who has originality.”

Communication can flow in the opposite direction too. There have been cases of directors and writers getting their films financed by reaching out to like-minded people on Facebook or Twitter: one such film, Onir’s I Am, even went on to win a National Award. Meanwhile, viewers too are more aware and sophisticated than before, which means they are open to new forms and idioms. “Audiences are exposed to more, and willing to accept more,” Rawal says, “Animation for grown-ups is a field that I am very excited about – I think Indian cinema is going to go places in it.”

What all this adds up to is a scenario where people with a passion for cinema are pulling each other up, showing a collaborative generosity that represents the opposite of the crabs-in- a-well mentality. It comes out of a genuine sense that everyone can be part of the change. No wonder the enthusiastic statements made by these young talents don’t seem glib or facile. When Batra says “It is the beginning of a golden age in Hindi cinema”, or Andritzakis says “I’m very lucky to have arrived at a time when things are starting to explode”, it sounds like an accurate response to working in an increasingly vibrant industry. “Every time I am at a film festival,” says Carlos Catalan, “I realise that there is a talented wave of Indian directors telling different stories in different ways. World audiences are hungry to watch those films.” With these good men working away behind the scenes, that appetite should increase.

[A related piece: short profiles of 10 trailblazers of the new Indian cinema, across categories]

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.

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.