Bollywoodising Literature Forging Cinema: Adaptation and Hindi Cinema

Contents: Introduction. I. Adaptations in contemporary Hindi Cinema: 1. Refraction or Parallel narrative?the imaging of R.S. Bedi’s Ek Chadar Maili Se/Jasbir Jain. 2. Madame Bovary and Maya Memsaab: narrative and image vis-a-vis form/Anand Prakash. 3. Fiction into film: inter-semiotic translation as interpretation and adaptation in Junoon/Anuradha Ghosh. 4. Rudali: from Mahashweta Devi to Kalpana Lajmi/Pragya Gupta. 5. Adapting Jane Austen to Hindi Cinema/Smita Mitra. 6. Screening the Novel: Umrao Jaan/Kathakoli Das Gupta. 7. Consider the source, but how much? Ruskin bond and Vishal Bhardwaj, The blue Umbrella/Prem Shristava and Shweta Teiwari. 8. From Devdas to DevD/Amitava Nag. 9. Usne Kaba tha: when the Camera saw too much/Nirmal Kumar. 10. The other side of nationalism in Rabindranath Tagore’s/Novy Kapadia. II. Theoretical frameworks: 11. Hindu Cinema’s adaptation of the Hitchcockian Idiom/Priyadarshini Shankar. 12. The colonial discourse of British heritage Cinema/Vijaya Singh. III. Text and film: 13. Celluloid representations of the partition of Punjab/Somdatta Mandal. 14. Cracking earth: Deepa Mehta’s adaptation of Bapsi Sidwha’s cracking India/Donna Coates. 15. Pinjar: Amrita Pritam to C.P. Dwivedi/Simran Chadha. IV. Adapting Shakespeare: 16. Tough love: reading the politics of violence and desire in Omkara/Sonali Pattnaik. 17. Dissidence and subversion within power structures: Maqbool and Macbeth/Shilpi Malhotra. Conclusion. Index.

While the dialogic between Hindi cinema and society is well acknowledged this anthology, the first of a kind, pays tribute to the resonating influence of literature on Hindi Cinema. We analyse the influence of literatures across cultures and time-frames to show the manner in which literary writing has moulded cinematic trends. Moreover, as cross-cultural recreations, not only do adaptations archive the contemporary and document the past but shadow the future as well. (jacket)