Ria De

Doctoral Student

Department of Film Studies

English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad

For those of us whose research draws extensively on the methods and orientations of multiple disciplines, the contemporary university system may offer little by way of cross-disciplinary engagements. The attempt in fact, in many departments, has been to close off their respective disciplinary boundaries with the effect of producing scholars, who could be described more as knowledge specialists of their own topics and areas. We are aware that such tendencies are part of larger changes in modes of academic dissemination, where disciplines are being professionalized through the creation of specific syllabi, enlistment of methodological frameworks and the careful cultivation of disregard for ‘issues’ raised by other disciplines. The compulsion to pass the subject-specific UGC-NET examination is also a part of this disciplinizing and professionalizing tendency. Another set of problems relate to the separation between subjects that offer ‘technical’ training and produce practitioners and disciplines that are particularly concerned with ‘academic’ work. The relationship between a practitioner (say a ‘filmmaker’) and a theoretician (a film scholar for instance) is determined by a number of anxieties and mutual hostilities and incomprehension. The general understanding is that the theoretician ‘benefits’ from those who practice (the ‘working’ class), while the practitioner remains alienated from the elevated academic language of the theoretician. There are only occasional instances during which practitioners and scholars from across disciplines can engage on an ‘equal’ ground without having to engage with the anxieties of each other’s specific environments. One such was a day-long program titled ‘A Day Traversing Literary and Cinematic Terrains’ organized by Dr. Nikhila H., Associate Professor, Department of Film Studies, EFLU, Hyderabad and Dr. Tharakeswar V.B., Associate Professor, Department of Translation Studies, EFLU, Hyderabad at ‘Imbu’, No. 24, Myevillas, Mallapur, Hyderabad on Saturday, 28 November 2015.

The audience comprised mainly of research scholars and faculty members from various departments of the English and Foreign Languages University and the University of Hyderabad. Beginning at 11 in the morning on a non-working day, the program went on late into the night with presentations, discussions and film screenings, and lunch and dinner. Having been organized away from the university campus, it gave the kind of breathing space that scholars often cannot afford under the pressures and anxieties of their own academic requirements. Without the external impositions of institutional formalities, and time restrictions, scholars were uninhibited in their engagements. In addition, the presence of the filmmaker B. Suresh also allowed for interesting questions across the separation of practice and theory.

A large part of the day’s engagement had to do with undoing discourses that measure the success of a cinematic adaptation according to the extent to which the adaptation is able to retain the ‘essence’ of the original text. Depending on a variety of factors, questions are usually about fidelity to the theme, the information and generic integrity of the source text. The adaptation, in its new form, on another medium and produced in different conditions is seldom considered ‘good enough’. Such discussions do not enquire further into the practices of adaptation and their different contextual significances. Adaptation studies along with Translation studies are engaged in understanding the political implications of such debates that privilege the source over the adaptation. We have seen how the status of the former is often pre-figured as an ‘original’ or a canonical or in many ways a first of its kind. And, now we have also learnt that such privileging, which is often clothed in the language of creative excellence has a lot to do with complex relationships of power between nations, genders, sexualities, races as well as castes. Susan Bassnett for instance has engaged with how the metaphorics of translation discourses appear to have historically been based on terms of hierarchies, those of fidelity, submission, servility etc. Much of the same may be said about the discourses around adaptation.

The day-long meet on the various aspects of adaptations and subtitling was an occasion to review many of the older anxieties and raise some interesting questions.The discussions following the screening of the film Adaptation (2002; dir. Spike Jonze; writ. Charlie Kaufman) raised a number of issues on the relevance of studying processes of screen adaptations (especially for scholars of cinema and translation studies). A presentation on the film by Vishnu, Raja Rajeshwari, Yamini Krishnan and Avnish (1st year scholars of the Department of Film Studies, EFLU) and the discussion that followed engaged with a number of questions on the ways in which the film treats the issues related to screen adaptations. What for instance, are the ways through which the film inscribes these factors in its text? How does the specific industrial nature of Hollywood limit the work of screen adaptations? What are the qualities of a text that make it adaptable? Is it linked to its reception, its conduciveness to adaptation to a different medium etc.? What kinds of transformations are necessitated by changes in instances of inter-medial adaptations?  How do we understand the omissions and additions in a film adaptation?   Under such circumstances, what then would be the stakes involved in producing an adaptation?  Would it also necessitate thinking about film adaptation in complete isolation from its source text? And if we were to take into account the popular basis of cinema, is to possible to think about screen adaptation as a mode of democratization, as a means through which the aura of the ‘original’ is disintegrated? Dr. Tharakeshwar V.B., responding to the film and the presentation on the film talked of adaptation as a process of constituting the self. Many of these questions, raised by Sandip Gawai, Suneel Menon and Sampath from the Departments of Translation Studies and Film Studies, EFLU Hyderabad seemed to be part of a larger concern about how one may understand the politics of contemporary adaptation and inter-medial practices, especially when one of the media concerned is that of popular cinema. Also important is how such a question may be addressed through the interaction of multiple disciplines of political economy, film studies, translation studies, literary studies, media studies and history.

Minu Sara Paul’s presentation, drawing on her on-going Ph.D. project in the Department of Translation Studies, EFLU, “A Bird’s Eye View to Sub-titling and Partial Sub-titling” brought together the concerns of film scholars and translation studies. Her study effectively looks at the relationships between sub-titling and film-form, genre, censorship and marketing. In addition to being an exhaustive study of the different functions and modes through which sub-titles have been deployed in film and other televisual medium, the study makes important connections between the contemporary phenomenon of sub-titling, specifically in Malayalam cinema and its expanding overseas market. Taking in to consideration the massive open-source practice of sub-titling on the internet, Paul’s work is an important intervention into the ‘after-life’ of a film. Is it then possible to think of today’s modes of reception (sub-titling being one of them) as a continuing aspect of the production of a film? What is the function of pre-release sub-titling at a time when there are guaranteed possibilities of open-source sub-titling on the internet? Can we think of pre-release sub-titling as a means of ensuring the ‘original’ meaning of the film? Would this then mean that contemporary Malayalam cinema, though popular in its modes of production and reception, has claims to auteur-ship? She also pointed to how sub-titling could be incorporated into the narrative logic, sometimes as an aesthetic element, at other times as a comic device. Her work enquires in to the commonsensical understandings of sub-titling as mere communicative device. The study of sub-titles is then integrally linked to the politics of translation and film-making. Some of the questions from the audience were then about the ways to study the semiotic differences between film dialogues and sub-titles. Does the rising phenomenon of sub-titling indicate at greater multi-lingualism and literacy in the contemporary world? Has there been a shift in the kinds of films that are now sub-titled, and what would it say about the aspirations of these film in terms of their desired audience?

Ankita Ram V., research scholar at the Department of Translation studies presented her work on “Translation of Characters across Semiotic Systems: A Case Study of Mathilukal Novel into Film”. Ankita made a comparative study of the film Mathilukal (1989; dir. Adoor Gopalakrishnan) and its novel (1965), looking specifically at the omissions and additions that the adaptation undertakes. She locates her case study in the historical backdrop of the large number of adaptations of classical literary works in Malayalam cinema since its inception. In addition to its rich archival value, her work attempts to engage with relations of gender and class in the Malayalam instances of screen adaptation. This specific presentation was on how ‘anonymous’ figures in the novel are differently personified and re-deployed for specific cinematic purposes. How do we then characterize the need for such cinematic translation? Are we to locate our concerns in the visual specificities of the cinematic medium? Ankita studies it through the frame of altered dynamic of class relations of the characters, not just between the adaptation and the original, but within the newer text and between the characters and the audience (who may have been readers in the prior instance). How do we evaluate the political charge of such hierarchical reorganizations? In the course of discussion after the presentation, Ria De, from the Department of Film Studies pointed out that the hierarchical re-structuring of characters (effected by the process of adaptation) may have a lot to do with the foregrounding of the figure of the star Mammootty. Would it also be related to the construction of the diversities of a national community? Ankita’s work is interesting in the way it allows to raise questions that are both textual in nature and have the scope to examine broader political and representative concerns.

Manoj Yadav’s presentation on the literary (1931) and cinematic (1981) forms of Sadgati is thematically close to Ankita’s research project in the way it explores the cinematic articulations of invisible textual elements. In his presentation, Manoj, who is also pursuing his research in the Department of Translation studies, EFLU, attempted to engage with the process of adaptation through a study of the historical context of each—the adapted as well as the adaptation. The primary concern of the study is how the film treats the question of caste differently from the novel, forcing us to look at the film not only in relation to its source but as a part of the political and social rhetorics emerging at the time of its making. Is it possible to think of the relationship between an adaptation and its original also as part of historical transformations taking place within a gap of 50 years? This opened up further discussions by Prof. Bhangya Bhukya, Department of History, University of Hyderabad on how cinema as a more contemporary phenomenon often emerged as a domain that both performed and witnessed the playing out of the Indian national modern. Dr. M. Vijaykumar Boratti’s (Assistant Professor, Department of English, Mysore University) presentation was on how 12th century vachanas were appropriated for 20th century Kannada cinema, particularly the way in which the trope of the female singing the vachanas brought together femininity and devotion. It looked at how the vachanas become part of a new national-moral discourse where the figure of the woman has a central function. Questions on cinema and public sphere were raised by Dr. P. Thirumal, Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad and Dr. Sowmya Dechamma, Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Hyderabad raised questions about vachanas and gendering in cinema.

The day-long event closed with a screening of the Kannada film Puttakkana Highway (Puttakka’s Highway, 2011, dir. B.Suresh) and a discussion with the director, who came for the event from Bangalore. The discussion was moderated by Dr. Tharakeshwar V.B. This was an occasion to understand some of the aspects of screen adaptation that are undertaken at the pre-production stage. Although the narrative was adapted from Nagathihalli Chandrashekhar’s short story, the director talked about how the central ideas of the film pre-existed the short story, which then provided a more concrete basis. Practices of adaptation therefore take place through multiple strands in a single film.  Puttakkana Highway for instance has adapted from the representative norms of theatre, and exhibits its inspiration from Mother India. Prof. Shivarama Padikkal from the Centre for Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies, University of Hyderabad, Dr. Raju Naik, and Madhumeeta Sinha, both faculty at EFLU, Yogitha Shetty from University of Hyderabad and Sandip Gawai from EFLU made detailed interventions in the discussion, which effectively reoriented our teleological understanding of how a screen adaptation takes place and left us with newer questions about the role of the ‘source’ text.

The good thing about such a meet is that it lets us undo the strictures of thought and language and practice that we are often stuck with. It allows us to move to and fro between practice and theory, between gossip and analysis, and between boredom and humor. And it enables for the positing of newer challenges to our ideas and positions that our narrow disciplinary preoccupations do not allow.