Abstract
This chapter argues that adaptation theory and history must complement one another so that non-Western historical context and cultural particularities can provide comparative frameworks and insights that contribute to adaptation studies. By engaging with four critically acclaimed films by Bengali filmmaker Tapan Sinha – Kabuliwala (Fruitseller from Kabul, 1957), Khudita Pashan (Hungry Stone, 1960), Atithi (The Runaway, 1965) and Nirjan Saikate (The Desolate Beach, 1963) – that are adapted from well-known literary works by the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, and Samaresh Basu, a renowned Bengali writer – this chapter highlights the ways in which cultural prestige derived from the exalted position held by the authors and their literary textsadds critical and commercial value to the filmic adaptations.
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Notes
- 1.
All translations from Bengali sources are the author’s unless otherwise indicated.
- 2.
Calculations are based on The Bengali Film Directory, 1917–1997. Edited by Ansu Sur, Calcutta: Nandan Publication, 1999.
- 3.
For example, protagonists in Bengali films are often authors or poets; literary discussions frequently take place even if they have no direct bearing on the plot; characters recite famous poems; epistolary narratives are common; a film might begin with the pages of a book being turned or end with a hand picking up a pen and writing “The End.” These traits constantly remind the audience of Bengal’s literary culture and the implicit superiority of the bhadralok mindset.
- 4.
For more see: Acharya, Poromesh. 1995. “Bengali Bhadralok and Educational Development in 19th Century Bengal.” Economic and Political Weekly 30:13: 670–673; Bagchi, Amiya Kumar. 1985. “The Comfortable Fallacies of the Bhadralok Mind.” Social Scientist 13:4: 57–58. Sharmistha Gooptu (2010) explains that “the term Bhadralok, meaning refined/cultured gentility, was used in the nineteenth century to refer to an aristocratic and upper-middle-class Bengali intelligentsia, predominantly Hindu, who were responsible for Bengal’s cultural efflorescence. By the middle of the twentieth century however, the financial means and the power of this section of society diminished greatly though the sense of cultural refinement assimilated through western education and a cosmopolitan outlook remained its distinguishing feature.” Hence in the 1950s and 1960s, the bhadraloks constituted the middle class, while their sensibilities were largely catered to by the filmmakers of this period.
- 5.
The “Bengal renaissance,” set into motion by the bhadraloks, was a period during which Bengal witnessed tremendous literary and artistic output that has sometimes been compared to Italy’s role in the European renaissance. The impact of the bhadralok ideologies and their monumental cultural contributions made Bengal a powerful province at the turn of the twentieth century, and traces of the legacy still remain in contemporary middle-class Bengali society. See: Kopf, David. 1969. British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773–1835. Berkeley: University of California Press; Dasgupta, Subrata. 2007. The Bengal Renaissance: Identity and Creativity from Rammohun Roy to Rabindranath Tagore. Delhi: Permanent Black; Chakravarty, Dipesh. 2004. “Romantic Archives: Literature and the Politics of Identity in Bengal.” Critical Inquiry 30 (3): 654–682.
- 6.
Biswas mentions that the question of authorship was frequently highlighted given that many contemporary writers such as Premankur Atorthy, Sailajananda Mukhopadhyay, and Premendra Mitra had also worked as screenwriters and directors. Also with the formation of the Calcutta Film Society in 1947 there was an attempt to create “good cinema” and edify the mainstream film-going public. Most Bengali filmmakers during the 1950s and 1960s, especially those associated with the cine clubs and film societies, were also reading about Cahiers du Cinéma, and watching films by Truffaut, Godard, and Chabrol. They were greatly influenced by Italian neorealist films, and had even met filmmakers who had visited India: Jean Renoir, John Huston, Alfred Hitchcock, Roberto Rossellini, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Nikolai Cherkasov. Hence they were well aware of some of the key debates and discussion around cinema at the time.
- 7.
The example most commonly mentioned in any discussion of Bengali literature and film is that in Bengali the word boi means book but it is also used synonymously with “movie,” which led film critic Chidananda Dasgupta to write an essay titled “Boi Noy Chabi” that means films are “Pictures, Not Books.” Also noted by Biswas (1999).
- 8.
According to Gooptu, this is demonstrated by “the scathing criticism that the Parsi studio Madan Theaters received for its garish stage aesthetics in its adaptation of Bengali novels, which lacked the refined realism of Bengali novels or even some contemporary Hollywood films.”
- 9.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was a Bengali polymath whose prolific oeuvre and monumental contributions to Bengali literature, music, and art continues to be a source of pride for India. In 1913 he became the first Indian and the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, for his collection of poems titled Gitanjali that had a preface by W. B. Yeats. He travelled widely and interacted with intellectuals such as Ezra Pound, Romain Rolland, Anna Akhmatova, Albert Einstein, Will Durant, and Mahatma Gandhi. He was awarded a Knighthood in 1915, which he renounced in 1919 as a mark of protest against the British massacre of Indians in Jallianwallah Bagh. Rabindra Sangeet is a genre of Bengali songs comprising more than 2000 songs that Tagore wrote and composed, published in a book called Gitabitan in 1931. Any song by Tagore is generically referred to as Rabindra Sangeet, while singers also specialize in this particular style of singing.
- 10.
These technical lapses include imprecise editing and substandard make-up; for instance, Chhabi Biswas, playing the titular kabuliwala, refused to use spirit gum to glue on his moustache, so instead it was unconvincingly pasted on with a sticky cream. Sinha himself refers to some of these issues in his biography.
- 11.
Corrigan cites Stam, Robert. 2000. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” In Film Adaptation. Edited by James Naremore. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000, which makes a similar argument.
- 12.
In order to make this argument Stam cites Fish, Stanley. 1993. Is There a Text in this Class? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- 13.
Fanon explains that once a sense of inferiority has taken root, colonized people have to place themselves in relation to the language and culture of the colonizer.
- 14.
According to Chatterjee, “the authors of the Bengali novels were mainly influenced by modern English and classical Sanskrit literary models. As the form became more popular, the novelists shifted frequently from well defined forms of authorial prose to the direct recording of living speech, making it difficult to tell just by looking at the pages of popular Bengali novels, whether one was reading a novel or a play.”
- 15.
Sinha is referring both to the appeal of going to the “movies” and also to the low literacy levels in India, due to which more people watch films instead of reading. That also explains why, especially in the past, when films in various regional languages circulated within India, they were dubbed in other languages rather than subtitled. Furthermore, there was no single common language that all literate Indians could read, not even Hindi or English. This also presents problems for literature, since, for example, Bengalis would be able to read Bengali literature, but the rest of the country would not unless it was translated into English or other regional languages.
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Sen, P. (2017). Origins, Fidelity, and the Auteur: The Bengali Films of Tapan Sinha. In: Kennedy-Karpat, C., Sandberg, E. (eds) Adaptation, Awards Culture, and the Value of Prestige. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52854-0_7
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