Mahasweta Devi was born into a distinguished family settled in Bangladesh when it was a part of undivided India and the British were in power. She was the daughter of Manish Ghatak, the eldest brother of late filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak. Over four decades, Mahashweta Devi wrote twenty published collections of short stories and close to a hundred novels, primarily in her native language -Bengali. She championed the cause of 25 million tribal people in India, who belong to approximately 150 different tribes. Her writing reflects the ugliness, squalor and misery in the lives of the tribal people and indicts Indian society for the indignity it heaps on its most oppressed constituents. Is it possible for any Indian filmmaker to represent her stories in and through the language of cinema?

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Cinema is a director’s medium. Literature is a writer’s world. How can these two worlds be brought together in harmonious unity? How much freedom does a director have to toy around with the literary source he has chosen? Does he need to stick to the original literary work? Or can be interpret it differently, or, question the basis or the morals of the characters therein? Her writing reflects the ugliness, squalor and misery in the lives of the tribal people and indicts Indian society for the indignity it heaps on its most oppressed constituents.

Only a handful of directors have made films based on her work. Because, frankly, her writings hardly lend themselves to the multi-dimensional creative art of cinema because they do not have any ‘commercial’ or even ‘artistic’ value as we understand it. Of around 100 novels, less than a dozen inspired filmmakers to turn them into cinema. Her writing was too difficult to enter, imbibe and translate without knowing, understanding and internalising the struggles of the marginalised adivasis – the Hos, the Mundas, the Oraons, the Shabars and the Santhals she wrote about. Their social structure is different from our own. The language they speak in, the food they eat, their lifestyle, their customs and rituals, the clothes they wear or do not wear, the sources of livelihood and even the gods they worship are a mystery to mainstream people like us and the filmmakers.

Film scholar and critic Chidananda Dasgupta insisted that a film adapted from literature “would contain something of the chemistry of the mind of the filmmaker.” He said that not only would some aspects of incidents and characters undergo a change, “but the very composition of the elements, the molecular structure if you like, would undergo a transmutation.” (Talking About Films)

Choli Ke Peechhey and Gangor

This writer watched eight of her stories presented/interpreted/portrayed as feature films in Bengali, Marathi and Hindi while two short stories were made into Hindi telefilms by Buddhadev Dasgupta. The short story Choli Ke Peechey turned into a short film for Doordarshan by Buddhadev Dasgupta dark and so differently expressed that the very spirit of the tragedy of Gangor, the woman with voluptuous breasts, is lost. Her wretched life is destroyed by a city-based photographer who clicks her pictures and gets them published in a city paper. This destroys Gangor’s life beyond rescue. The very breasts that brought her to hog headlines are reduced to ruin her life.

Choli Ke Peechey had another celluloid version titled Gangor directed by Italo Spinelli in Italian. True that since cinema and literature are two different forms of creative expression, the filmmaker has the liberty to change the original story to fit into his/her thinking and ideology. Though Gangor won several International awards, it twisted the original story so much out of shape that the film no longer remained a Mahasweta Devi story and the same applies to Buddhadev Dasgupta’s Choli Ke Peechey in two different ways. Both turned into sob-stories of the misuse and abuse of a tribal woman with well-endowed breasts in a way that destroys her life and her faith forever.

The opening scenes of Gangor breastfeeding her baby and Ullas photographing her for display remind us of Mrinal Sen’s Khandhar but Sen’s film rises way above the objectification of the woman by........

© Mathrubhumi English