New Delhi: A novelist has more freedom compared to a film-maker, who is transposing a book into the fixed format of screen,
says award-winning bi-lingual novelist Sharat Kumar.
“The process of making a movie is expensive whereas a book offers infinite opportunity that engages the reader in a very proactive manner. It is a more comprehensive medium,” Kumar, who is also a filmmaker and scriptwriter, told this writer in the capital Monday.
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Duvidha”, a feature film based on Kumar's popular Hindi novel, “Lal Kothi Alvida”, and which has been made by the writer himself, has received “Mention Spectacle du Jury” at Strasbourg International Film Festival in France 2009.
Recounting his experience of making “Duvidha” from the book, “Lal Kothi...”, Kumar said, “In a novel you can take your characters anywhere. They can even ride horses, it does not cost anything. But in movies, you are restricted. You have deal with very different circumstances because no one knows the story barring the director and the scriptwriter. One has to depend on the crew and the ambience has to be constructive enough to get the best out of them,” Kumar said.
The fact that Kumar wrote the book also gave him the flexibility to change the personalities of his characters to fit the genre of celluloid.
“Farewell, Red Mansion”, the English translation of his popular Hindi novel, “Lal Kothi Alvida”, was released by former chief justice Leila Seth (mother of novelist Vikram Seth) at the Oxford Bookstore in the capital. Published by Stellar Publishers, the book has been translated into English by Kumar himself.
The novel set in a town in western Uttar Pradesh spans half-a-century. It swings between the pre-Independence years (1934-42) and the last year quarter of 1989, capturing two generations of the Sinha family.
“At the centre of the book are two women, Rukmini and Saroja, whose lives are 50 years apart and whose ethos are completely different,” Kumar says.
While Rukmini's life is high on social affinities and idealism, Saroja's life “is tortuous and full of intrigues in the late 80s”. The book is also the theme for a 82-episode serial made by Parikshat Shani that was aired on Doordarshan in 2006-2007.
“In the movie, I focus more on Saroja because I wanted to portray current times. She comes across as a gentler person in the movie - deviating a bit from the book where she is tougher. I added stray dialogues and told the artist, who dubbed Saroja's dialogues, to be more gentle and soft,” Kumar said.
Kumar says the success of the tele-serial prompted him to make “Duvidha” from “Lal Kothi...”
“I was told at least a million people watched the serial. But the hands-on experience of these diverse mediums of expressions has been fascinating. When I sat down to work on the script and to visualise the book in terms of moving images, I realised that many of the descriptive parts of the novel lent themselves effectively to
powerful pictorial presentation. The addition of just a few words could evoke the emotional ambience of the scenes,” the novelist-cum-filmmaker said.
Some sequences, Kumar said, which had been briefly described by a third person in the novel, “became powerful scenes in the movie”.
For writer Leila Seth, a movie may be more visually powerful but the words of a novel stay longer. “You can read, re-read and stop midway through a novel; but in a movie, one has to move fast with the scenes,” Seth said.
Kumar, a National Defence Academy graduate, a former Indian Navy personnel and a management guru, is also the author of “Shikhar aur Seemayen”- a Hindi novel that won Delhi Hindi Academy's literary prize and was translated in English as the “Orange Moon”.
--Madhusree Chatterjee and Jay Akbar