'Rudali': From Mahasweta Devi to Kalpana Lajmi (2008)

'Rudali', a short story printed along with others in Nairetey Megh, 1979 is a characteristically Mahasweta Devi venture. Addressing issues of socio-economic marginalisation of the village poor, 'Rudali' provides a wonderful meeting-ground for class and gender concerns. Kalpana Lajmi's decision to adapt the text into an audio-visual medium points to a promising audience-culture building up in India. Although a strict polarity between commercial and parallel cinema is illusory, one needs to acknowledge and encourage works, which move beyond established boundaries of mainstream concerns. Such movies often succeed in offering alternative modes of thought, desires and societal organisation. At the same time, one cannot deny that all movies are inevitably framed by the expectations of the available audience. Constraints of commercial viability and conducive audience reception often tamper with the plot construction, characterisation and the final resolution of all cultural productions. Kalpana Lajmi's Rudali. 1992, is an interesting case-study of how source material can be/needs to be re-arranged to fit the given horizon of expectations. The act of adaptation has always raised serious and vociferous debates on issues like faithfulness to the original work, cultural transmutations, relative validity of all adaptations etc. For a long time, any discussion on adaptations was high-jacked by fidelity-critics who insisted on a complete loyalty to the source text. This insistence was perhaps fuelled by the near paranoia felt by academics, theorists and latter day critics regarding an indecorous appropriation of high art. Even Virginia Woolf, herself a high modernist experimenting with different forms of narration decried the art of adaptation, viewing books as the prey and unfortunate victim and movies as parasite. A purist desire to retain art as elitist informs such fears. Joy Gould Boyum accurately articulates such prejudices: The biases underlying this view are hard to miss: that a work of literature (or anything truly worthy of the name) is by definition a work of complexity and quality which is addressed to an educated elite: that movies, in contrast, are mere entertainment, directed at anyone and everyone: and that to adapt a book to film is thus of necessity to adjust it, not so much to its new medium as to its audience. That is, to the uneducated, undifferentiated mass, with its inevitably limited comprehension and predilection for the homiletic sentiment. (Boyum 1989: 8) Although one cannot deny that films need to regulate their content and its treatment to suit the constraints of distribution and exhibition, one needs to acknowledge a similar regulation in the case of literature as well. The difference in the amount of manipulation (conscious and unconscious) that goes into the two mediums is only relative. A work of art is inescapably a public artifice. Instead of adopting a high-browed posture against popular entertainment, there is a need to recognise the mutual benefit that both mediums can offer to each other. Films have come more and more to depend on literature for newer plots, characters and ideas. Literature on the other hand can look to films for an intricate system of narration that unites the power of words, with the potentially even greater power of the images they aim to create [....] (Boyum 1989: 20). It is redundant then to raise the bogey of a film's real essence as a mere via media for other forms of art-literature, painting, dance, photography, theatre architecture etc. A film borrows from all of these to organically evolve them into an inseparable whole. An equally fruitless exercise is to determine the originality of an adaptation. While an insincere adaptation is accused of sabotaging the source text, a faithful one is dismissed for a lack of creativity and imagination. Boyum defends the legitimacy of adapting a text into a film: An artist has the right to look anywhere for his materials- and if he finds his stories and characters in books rather than life, if he finds his donnee on a printed page rather than in a glimpse of a painting or an overheard piece of conversation, so be it. …