Author–Screenwriter– Director (1930s–1950s): Articulating Authorship Through Self-Adaptations and Film Novelisations in Bengali

Introduction

While it is well known that across the world there were innumerable people from the domain of literature who worked in various capacities in the film industry, we hear more often about authors who became screenwriters, directors who wrote screenplays and critic–filmmakers. Fewer in number were the ‘author–screenwriter–director’ figures, such as Oscar Micheaux, Elia Kazan, Jean Epstein, Jean Cocteau, and later on post-1950, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Marguerite Duras, Peter Ulrich Weiss and Frank Gilroy. In the Indian context, besides the three major Bengali figures that I discuss—Premankur Atorthy, Sailajananda Mukhopadhyay and Premendra Mitra—there were also K. A. Abbas and Rajinder Singh Bedi in Bombay, B. Narsing Rao in the Telugu film industry and others from various regional film industries within the country. The Bengali playwright and actor Shishir Bhaduri, filmmaker Deboki Bose, followed by Ritwik Ghatak, Satyajit Ray and Tapan Sinha in the post-1950s, also wrote plays, short stories and novels which they self-adapted into films. In this essay, however, I focus on Atorthy, Mukhopadhyay and Mitra because they were primarily authors who went on to become prolific screenwriters and directors, never really abandoning their literary activities; and when it came to self-adaptations, they were the predecessors of Ghatak, Ray and Sinha.

Atorthy is best known for adapting Bengali literary classics for the elite studio New Theatres, where he ushered in the ‘literary film’ genre that sought to elevate the status of Bengali cinema by drawing on the prestige of literature (Mukherjee, 2009). Although New Theatres produced a large variety of films that catered to popular tastes, the literary adaptations became a ‘trademark’ of the studio, as did the ‘literary idiom’—derived from the ‘novelistic ingredients of realism and reflection’—which characterised many of the films (Gooptu, 2010, pp. 84–86). Besides enhancing the reputation of the studio and establishing an aura of respectability around Bengali cinema, the literary films also came to represent a Bengali sensibility and distinct cultural identity that was rooted in 19th- and early 20th-century Bengali literary culture. ¹ Here, it might be useful to recall the rise of Brit-Lit feature films between 1907 and 1920—Thanhouser’s Jane Eyre (1912) and King Lear (1916); Hepworth’s Hamlet (1913) and David Copperfield (1913); and three versions of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde released in 1920—that were ‘part of a defensive cultural “uplift” movement in which the film industry, particularly in the United States and Britain used such films to respond to charges that movies were morally degrading’ (Semenza & Hasenfratz, 2015, p. 16). Similarly, the ‘literary cinema of respectability’ was also prevalent in 1930s Hollywood, where, against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the Production Code, adaptations of canonical works by Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy and even contemporary novelists such as Pearl S. Buck became a significant trend; with half the films produced between 1934 and 1939 being designated as ‘prestige pictures’ (Debona, 2010, pp. 25–26).

Conventional in his approach to both literature and film, Atorthy directed a total of 20 films in Bengali, Hindi and Urdu, including Mohabbat ke Aansoo (1932), which was K. L. Saigal’s debut film. On Baburao Pendharkar’s invitation, he joined Kolhapur Cinetone in 1935 (Atorthy, 2011), followed by a brief stint at Imperial Film Company in Bombay, and is considered to be the ‘first Bengali film-maker to work in Western India’ (Rajadhyaksha & Willemen, 1999, p. 47). The adaptations undertaken by Atorthy were mainly from canonical texts such as Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s Dena Paona, Rabindranath Tagore’s Chirakumar Sabha, Bankimchandra Chatterji’s Kapalkundala and Agha Hashar Kashmiri’s Urdu play Yahudi ki Ladki; and only one Hindi film—Bhikharan (1935)—was a self-adaptation. In contrast, all of Mukhopadhyay’s 16 films were self-adaptations, and 18 literary works by him were adapted into films by other directors. All of Mitra’s 15 films were self-adaptations, and 15 other literary works by him were adapted by various filmmakers. No doubt the two of them valued the power of literature and its privileged position compared to the fledgling domain of cinema, but consciously stayed away from adapting Bengali literary classics. This had to do with the fact that Mukhopadhyay and Mitra belonged to the Kallol/Kali-Kalam group of young progressive writers who experimented with a modernist literary style that was inspired by Freudian and Marxist ideas, and was radically different from the humanism and romanticism of the previous generation of established writers like Bankimchandra, Rabindranath and Saratchandra.

In a sense, Atorthy might be seen as having taken the initial step of engaging with screenwriting and self-adaptations, while Mukhopadhay and Mitra systematically continued the trend, and in the process, fuelled the adaptation of contemporary literary works. Mukhopadhyay achieved commercial success and established a firm grip on the Bengali film industry with his films winning 30 awards (Mukhopadhyay, 2007). Mitra, however, was largely dissatisfied with his films because he felt that the screenplays did not do justice to his true writing skills (Roy, 1989). Mitra continued to pursue his literary career after leaving the film industry in the mid-1950s and won numerous accolades including the Padma Shree Award for literature in 1961. In spite of the differences in their approach towards adaptations—Atorthy turned to literature mainly to enhance the cultural value and prestige of his films while Mukhopadhyay and Mitra employed film as a vehicle to showcase their own written works and disseminate their social message to a wider audience—there was much in common among these three author–screenwriter–director figures. They were involved with theatre, radio and advertising; edited several literary and film journals such as Naachghar, Shahana, Bioscope, Kali-Kalam and Bangabani; and actively participated in critical discourses that ranged from examining the artistic potential of the new filmic medium to the excessively commercial underpinnings of both Hollywood and Hindi cinema. Together, the triad was instrumental in consolidating and giving value to the literary connection in the Bengali film industry.

Atorthy, having published numerous novels and collection of short stories such as Jharer Pakhi (1920), Bajikar (1922), Achalpather Jatri (1923), Chasar Meye (1924) and Anarkali (1925), joined the theatre troupe Indian Players Limited in 1926—started by the playwright and screenwriter Niranjan Pal—for its production of the play Goddess at Empire Theatre in Calcutta and Royal Opera House in Bombay (Atorthy, 2011, pp. 48–50). He went on to work for the silent studio Indian Kinema Arts as an actor and screenwriter for the film Punarjanma (Jaigopal Pillai, 1927), and then worked as an actor, screenwriter and assistant director for International Filmcraft’s Chashar Meye (Farmer’s Daughter, 1931), which was adapted from his eponymous novel (Das Majumdar, 2013). Between the production of these two films, he had published another novel, Dui Ratri (1927), and had founded the journal Betar Jagat (1929) for All India Radio where he was a Bengali presenter using the pseudonym Somdatta (p. 28). ² He worked briefly as a publicist for Seeta Devi (born Renee Smith); as a ‘continuity-man’ in Lahore, for Great Eastern Film Corporation’s The Loves of a Mughal Prince (aka Anarkali, Prafulla Roy & Charu Roy, 1928); and eventually made his directorial debut in 1931, with New Theatre’s first talkie Dena Paona, adapted from Saratchandra’s novel (p. 32).

Sailajananda Mukhopadhyay’s literary oeuvre comprised several hundred short stories, novels and essays that dealt with the lives of ordinary people, ranging from peasants and coal miners to the urban working class. He joined the film industry in 1935, as an actor and screenwriter for the adaptation of his short story Pataalpuri. His film career spanned 17 years, during which time he also started two film production companies, Your Films and Sailajananda Chitra Protishthan (1945), and continued editing various literary and film magazines such as Shahana, Chaya, Sabyasachi and Shanibarer Dak (Mukhopadhyay, 2007). ³

Following Mukhopadhyay’s lead, Mitra joined the film industry as a lyricist for the film Rikta (Sushil Majumdar, 1939), and inspired by Tagore’s poetry, he wrote song lyrics for several films such as Pratishodh (1941), Dabi (1943), Pratikar (1944), Kuasha (1949), Shetu (1951) and Hanabari (1952) (Roy, 1989). His financial needs, coupled with his interest in science, led Mitra to join Bengal Immunity Research Centre where he wrote advertisements that integrated scientific information into the form of short stories (pp. 52–53). ⁴ He was also a literary adviser and producer at All India Radio and continued writing numerous novels, which included science fiction, thrillers and literature for young adults and children. ⁵

So, when we consider the manner in which Atorthy’s, Mukhopadhyay’s and Mitra’s literary and film careers merged, we need to situate it within a network of intermedial relationships where the very act of writing and the language itself became the most important interface between multiple media. Furthermore, we can trace the flow of ideas, both global and local, that were crucial for their conception and articulation of authorship and underscores the cosmopolitan consciousness that continued from 19th-century Bengali literary culture to Bengali cinema in the 1950s and 1960s.

Global Ideas, Regional Implications

In 1908, Sir Matheson Lang, a Canadian-born Shakespearean stage actor, director and playwright, along with his wife, the English actress Nelly Hutin Britton, came to Calcutta to perform Shakespeare’s plays—Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Merchant of Venice and Midsummer Night’s Dream—as well as Jerome K. Jerome’s The Passing of the Third Floor Back (Das Majumdar, 2013). For the 18-year-old Atorthy, it was a turning point in his creative and intellectual life as he watched all the performances and also got the opportunity to spend time with the couple, discussing Shakespeare’s works and their adaptations for the stage and screen, and how that could shape Atorthy’s own literary endeavours (p.18). It inspired him to think seriously about theatre and complemented his deep interest in Tagore’s literary works that had an impact on his own style of writing. Atorthy began to publish essays in the Bengali periodical Bharati that had been started by the Tagore family. In Bharati, Tagore encouraged young authors to read foreign/European literature (through English translations)—which the budding authors then attempted to translate into Bengali—and in 1919, Atorthy did his bit by publishing two essays about Russian literature, motivated by the events of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the end of the First World War.

The impact of the Great War had reverberated across India, affecting the economic, political and social climate. Confronted by rapid and drastic changes at home and abroad—violent nationalism leading to the formation of new nations in Europe and Western Asia, passing of the draconian Rowlatt Act (1919), the Jallianwala Bagh massacre (1919) and Gandhi’s large-scale non-cooperation movement (1920-22)—the young generation of Bengalis in that era recognised the need for significantly transforming their social and political values. Kazi Nazrul Islam, through his experiences in the British army at this time, became familiar with the ideas of Bolshevism, and his volume of poems Agnibina (1922) demonstrated a radical shift in Bengali literature by distilling anticolonial consciousness and celebrating the ‘new human’, which in a sense ‘anticipated the poetic voices of Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon and Ernesto Che Guevara elsewhere’ (Majumdar, 2016, p. 419). Russian literature became of great interest to the Bengali youth, especially Maxim Gorky’s works. Inspired by social realism and sympathising with the plight of the oppressed, Atorthy used Gorky’s play The Lower Depths (1902) as a model for his own play Matir Ghar (House of Clay) and then wrote the novel Chashar Meye (Peasant’s Daughter, 1924), which is said to be the first novel in Bengali literature that dealt exclusively with the lives of peasants (Das Majumdar, 2013). The novel was eventually adapted by Atorthy into a film in 1931, directed by Prafulla Roy. Gorky’s ‘militant humanism’ and sympathy for the downtrodden had made a profound impact on the Bengali writers of the 1920s, and his novel Mother was translated into Bengali at least three times in that decade (Ghosh, 1969, p. 78). Saratchandra declared in his essay ‘Art and Corruption in Literature’ (1924), that like Soviet literature, modern Bengali literature also needed to recognise and record the suffering of the exploited masses, and ‘only then would the writers find a place for themselves in world literature’ (Mitra, 1979, p. 115). Nripendrakrishna Chattopadhyay, in an article titled ‘Russia and Young Bengal’ (1926), praised Leonid Andreyev and Maxim Gorky for the manner in which they had transformed ‘stories of human suffering [into] heroic tales of liberation’ (Manjapra, 2011, p. 346).

Similarly, there was a lot of interest in Russian cinema, as Atorthy explains:

In the aftermath of the Great War, there was much talk in India about Russian film art. We held many discussions based on what was read in books, recounted by Indians who had returned from Europe and the tales circulated by expert rumormongers. We heard that it [Russian cinema] was a major enterprise. [They had an] astonishing style of storytelling, astonishing equipment and techniques. But what was most astonishing was that Russian films were not shown in India at the time. It was much later that Russian films came to be screened in our country. (Atorthy, 2011, p. 40)

The unavailability of Russian films refers to censorship as well as the lag between the time that the films were produced and when they were shown in India. ⁶ Preoccupation with the developments in Russian cinema was probably also a reference to the complete overhaul of the Russian film industry under Lenin, post-1918. ⁷ Premendra Mitra makes a similar claim that ‘it was only through reading that some intellectuals got to know about Russian cinema and the experiments that were taking place in the Russian film industry. While the names of Eisenstein and Pudovkin were not unfamiliar, no one in India had had the good fortune of seeing their films until the early 1930s’ (Mitra, 2017a, pp. 411–412).

Responding to the sociopolitical upheavals and demands of the time, the Kallol group was formed in 1923, named after a little magazine, that sought to break away from the Tagorean and 19th-century renaissance literature of high culture, and introduced a sort of hyper-modern radicalism by creating protagonists who were marginalised, sub-proletariat types such as blacksmiths, potters, peasants, daily labourers, factory workers, sex workers, vagabonds and vagrants. Realistic portrayals of these impoverished subjects at the fringes of society often entailed the use of coarse obscene language and descriptions of vulgar acts that were shocking for middle-class readers and the older generation of bhadralok (cultured elites/intelligentsia) authors. Many similar journals soon sprung up—Kali-Kalam (1926), Pragati (1926), Parichay (1931) and Kabita (1935)—and Bengali writers such as Gokulchandra Nag, Dineshranjan Das, Santwana Basak, Suniti Devi, Manish Ghatak, Prabodh Kumar Sanyal, Achintyakumar Sengupta, Jyotirmoy Roy, Kazi Nazrul Islam and Buddhadeva Bose formed an integral part of the dynamic intellectual environment. Mitra made his debut at this time with the novel Paank (Slime, 1926) which depicted slum life in Calcutta; Mukhopadhyay, who had already begun writing novels and short stories about the hardships faced by coal miners of the Raniganj area (Koyla Kuthi, 1922), was instantly embraced by the Kallol group.

Over and above their clear-cut social agenda, one of the salient features of the Kallol writers was their ‘literary internationalism’ and ‘global imagination’, based on the realisation that it was important to make connections with literary developments around the world, for both artistic creativity and recognition (Manjapra, 2011, pp. 329–330). ⁸ To that end, they began to actively acquire English translations of international literature, translating those into Bengali for a wider readership, and also corresponded with authors such as ‘Johan Bojer and Knut Hamsun of Norway, Jacinto Benevente of Spain, Yonejiro Noguchi of Japan, Leonid Andreyev of Russia, Romain Rolland and Marcel Prevost of France’ (p. 344). Most interestingly, of the 31 international modernist writers who featured in the magazine, only six were English, while the rest were from ‘Norway, Japan, Russia and the defeated nations of postwar Europe’, which shows Kallol’s strategy to consciously bypass British writers and ‘impugn the moral claims of the British imperial order’ (Bulson, 2017, p. 71).

The term vishwa sahitya (World Literature) was frequently used by the Kallol clan, borrowed from Rabindranath Tagore’s essay written in 1907, that mentions ‘vishwa sahitya’ in relation to the ‘universal values that world literature can embody’ (Damrosch, 2014, p. 6). The concept became popular in Bengali literature and has gained attention in recent years in connection to Goethe’s Weltliteratur and its various manifestations around the world. Perusing through the essays, memoirs and biographical writings of the Kollol group, we come across references to and discussions about the works of Flaubert, Goethe, Balzac, Pirandello, Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, Eugene O’Neill, John Galsworthy, T. S. Elliot, Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, W. B. Yeats and E. M. Forster. Premendra Mitra points out, that when Gokulchandra Nag was writing his novel Pathik (The Wayfarer, 1923), Hemingway was in France writing Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises (1926). In spite of the geographical distance and differences between the two works, they both demonstrated how at that moment the East and the West were undergoing a churning, seeking ‘release from purification’ and finding integrity in an immoral world (Mitra, 2017b, p. 238). ⁹ In Mitra’s story Ahuti (adapted in 1941, director Dhirendranath Ganguly), the protagonist Uday has been described as being akin to Dostoevsky’s ‘universal man’ who overcomes all obstacles and serves the country and community, in spite of acute personal suffering (Roy, 1989, p. 83).

What is most significant is that the Kallol group, while rejecting the humanism and high culture of the earlier generation of writers, were nonetheless also using literature (and language) as a powerful tool for shaping society and constructing a modernist Bengali identity. With the self-positioning of the ‘author at the center of a discourse’ (Méchoulan, 2015, p.15), they were able to put forth new models of behaviour and meaning making, new codes of morality and decency.

It is important to bear in mind that the concept of authorship at this point was closely tied to notions of artistic originality, creativity and autonomy, which, in turn, formed the underpinnings of a universal aesthetic standard for World Literature, one that the Kallol writers aspired towards. The moment was several decades prior to the poststructuralism of the late 1960s, which saw theorists such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Julia Kristeva make influential arguments to demonstrate that an ‘author’ is an ‘epiphenomenon’, an ‘ideological or historical construction’ (Naremore, 2004, p. 19). While Barthes famously postulated the ‘death of the Author’ and the ‘birth of the reader’ upon whom multiple possible interpretation of texts would ultimately depend; Foucault conceptualised the author merely as a discursive ‘function’; and Kristeva propounded the notion of ‘intertextuality’ to show that infinite combinations of words, utterances and interconnections among various texts make it impossible to locate an ‘origin’ or determine artistic originality. ¹⁰ No doubt the poststructuralist de-emphasis of authorship upended traditional views on the subject. However, for feminist, postcolonial and other writers preoccupied with marginalised communities and individuals, the concept of ‘death of the Author’ and ‘celebration of interpretative uncertainty’ is not as ‘obviously liberatory’ as it might have been for theorists such as Barthes (Allen, 2011, p. 4). There is, after all, an important ‘political, legal and legitimising dimension’ to authorship and the very act of establishing an original text that can be claimed as one’s own unique creation or utterance, giving the creator/community a sense of ‘agency, self-worth and cultural prestige’ (Sen, 2017, p. 123). When Atorthy, Mukhopadhyay and Mitra were writing and making films, primarily in the colonial era, their conceptualisation of authorship entailed foregrounding creativity and asserting artistic originality as a form of articulating power and constituting the self. Authorship was synonymous with voice, expression and identity, persisting in the face of numerous challenges and hardships.

In 1928, the Kallol magazine ran out of funds and eventually wound up the following year. On the one hand, there was a growing sense that middle-class readers were getting tired of reading about the mundane lives of the impoverished masses, and those masses themselves were either illiterate or did not need outsiders telling them about their plight (Ray, 1987). ¹¹ On the other hand, the impact of the Kallol group altered modern Bengali literature indelibly, spilling over into other cultural and artistic productions as well. Achintyakumar Sengupta, in his fascinating book Kallol Yug (1951), documents the activities and vision of the writers, and the tremendous ‘young’ energy that continued permeating Bengali literature, long after the magazine had stopped publication. By the early 1930s, many of these writers had joined the Bengali film industry as screenwriters and actors, some even going on to become directors.

Privileging Screenwriting, Consolidating Authorship

Jack Boozer, in his book Authorship in Film Adaptation (2008), hones in on the screenplay as foregrounding the issues of authorship and being the ‘most direct foundation and fulcrum for any adapted film’ since it determines the subsequent choices that will be made with regard to the narrative, style, characterisation, settings and so on (p. 4). Since the late 1920s, Bengali film criticism by Biswabasu Roy Choudhury, Narendra Deb, Achintyakumar Sengupta and Gajendrakumar Mitra had consistently emphasised the importance of screenplays, and in this case, we have Sailajananda Mukhopadhyay providing insights into his own experience with screenwriting that informed his decision to undertake self-adaptations. He joined the film industry as a screenwriter, actor and author of the short story that was being adapted, Patalpuri (1935) directed by Priyonath Ganguly. The film was not a commercial success, and Mukhopadhyay writes that:

I knew that it [the film] would not do well. I had wanted to learn how to take a story from literature and give it the form of a film. I had gone there [Kali Films] more as a student who wished to learn all the techniques of filmmaking. … But I was disappointed to see their methods and practices. I was told to write the screenplay. Then during shooting, I saw a notebook in which the scenes had been divided up like a play, and the characters created by me had been given new dialogues. … Everything was bungled. This was not the story that I had written. … The santhals [tribal people] of the collieries were speaking in Shantipuri bhadra bhasha [refined Bengali], their acting and gestures did not match the setting. … The ending was totally changed. … Kamala of Jharia was made to sing a song. … Although the song’s lyrics were written by Nazrul, the tune did not match it at all. … There was no point in saying anything, it was too late. … I became determined to learn filmmaking. New Theatres was the only organization where, if I got in, I could learn proper film work. (Mukhopadhyay, 2007, pp. 17–18)

Mukhopadhyay did join New Theatres as an assistant director for Nitin Bose and co-wrote screenplays with Binoy Chatterjee. But there, too, he realised that his literary creativity and authorial vision were squashed by the collaborative efforts and hierarchies of decision-making within the large organisation (Mukhopadhyay, 2007). So, he underwent training, familiarising himself with various aspects of film production, and when the opportunity presented itself, left New Theatres and directed his first film Nandini (1941) at Bharat Lakshmi Pictures. The film was based on his story and screenplay, and won an award for Best Picture. However, it was his third film Sahar Theke Durey (Away from the City, 1943) that became a superhit, propelling him into fame and commercial success. Continuing with self-adaptations, Mukhopadhyay brought the subject matter of Bengali films away from the city into the villages, while the rich regional dialects, overall tone and realistic style of his films were in contrast to some of the theatrical qualities of Bengali cinema, as well as the polished prose of Bengali novels that were being used as dialogue in Bengali films up to that point.

Mukhopadhyay explains that in the Bengali film industry during the 1930s and early 1940s, screenwriters were usually expected to produce stories on demand, filled with exciting events and action scenes (Mukhopadhyay, 2007). In his opinion, the Bengali film stars occupied the highest position in the industry, followed by the director who was at the middle rung, while the story and screenwriter hovered somewhere near the bottom. He disagreed with this system of hierarchy and sought to legitimise the role of the screenplay and screenwriter:

Behind every story lies a lot of meaning, effort, anguish and the future of a country’s film culture. Therefore, a screenplay is not a formulaic activity with a list of shot numbers. … Just as a literary work that has conformed to aesthetic standards is the result of the author’s desire and arduous practice, a screenplay is also the successful embodiment of the screenwriter’s meditation, conceptualisation and imagination. Or even more than that. I say more than that, because, the screenwriter usually has to work on someone else’s story or play. … That aspect of life on which the author has shed light after much thought, stringing together a garland of words, and then touched the reader’s heart, filling it with rasa, that same task has to be fulfilled by the screenwriter by using other means of transformation. Both author and screenwriter have the same target, which is the human heart. One uses words, while the other uses images. … The screenwriting work is not imitative, it is harder. It includes visual form, language, rhythm, and speech. If it is not created with one’s heart, it will not be able to touch another’s heart. (Mukhopadhyay, 2007, pp. 22–23)

Examining the status of screenwriting in Hollywood, Boozer points to the ‘traditional low regard for the screenwriter generally’ (p. 2) and claims that even as late as 1967 and the birth of New Hollywood, ‘novelists and screenwriters continued to lack power in the production system’ (p. 16). It is interesting that Premendra Mitra also refers to Hollywood’s shabby treatment of its screenwriters during the studio era, and expresses concern about a similar situation prevailing in the Bengali film industry. Mitra mentions having read about Elia Kazan recounting his first day in Hollywood, describing the lunch hour when the dining hall was filled with film stars, and the screenwriters were made to sit in a far corner as though they were ‘untouchables’ and were expected to be satisfied just to have been given seats at all (Mitra, 2017c, p. 418). Using this example, Mitra argues that Hollywood had marginalised its authors and screenwriters, not recognising their efforts sufficiently, and then goes on to note the immense contribution of novelists like William Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald, John O’Hara and William Saroyan. ¹²

It is important to bear in mind that there were many established Bengali authors and playwrights during the 1930s and 1940s, who were engaged in screenwriting, and whose short stories, novels and plays were consistently adapted into film: Jyotirmoy Roy, Sajanikanta Das, Nripendrakrishna Chattopadhyay, Nitai Bhattacharya, Binoy Chattopadhyay, Saroj Mukhopadhyay, Narayan Gangopadhyay, Satya Bandopadhyay, Tulsi Lahiri, Manoj Bhattacharya, Manmatha Ray, Panchugopal Mukhopadhyay, Bijan Bhattacharya, Birendrakrishna Bhadra, Moni Burma, Salil Sen and Bidhayak Bhattacharya. They had active literary careers outside the film industry and played an important role in transposing the gravitas of authorship onto the screenplay and the process of screenwriting. Their contribution, along with the efforts made by author–screenwriter–director figures like Atorthy, Mukhopadhyay and Mitra, turned the idea of ‘the literary’ in Bengali cinema into a concrete practice and set of applied values. ¹³

With the screenplay becoming the crucial interface between literature and film, and a valuable repository of authorship, we see another strong tendency in the Bengali film industry—that of major filmmakers like Debaki Bose, Madhu Bose, Naresh Mitra, Sukumar Dasgupta, Chitto Bose, Nemai Ghosh, Phani Burma, Sushil Majumdar, Pashupati Chattopadhyay, Amar Mullik, Satish Dasgupta and Khagen Ray, frequently writing the adapted screenplays for their films. The two most eminent Bengali auteurs from the 1950s and 1960s, Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, wrote the screenplays for all their films, and Tapan Sinha wrote 34 screenplays of the 37 films that he directed in Bengali and Hindi. ¹⁴

When it comes to self-adaptations, the ‘conversation between authors and adapters’ changes significantly, because self-adaptations doubly articulate authority and provide ‘a shortcut through some of the thorniest debates’ about fidelity and authorial intent that are raised in adaptation studies (Kennedy-Karpat, 2015, pp. 68–70). Self-adaptations enabled the Bengali author–screenwriter–director figures to retain their personal vision, ideology and treatment of subject matter right from literary source through screenplay to film, leaving no scope for anyone else to manipulate the theme or style of the works. Although Mukhopadhyay and Mitra cannot be seen as auteurs along the lines of auteurism that would emerge in the United States and France from the late 1940s onwards—the French New Wave filmmakers championed cinematic specificity over literary value, were notoriously hostile towards the screenwriter in favour of the director, and in les politique des auteurs argued to subvert the film of quality that was based on a well-written screenplay—the Bengali duo cultivated the notion of the cinematic auteur without emphasising the cinematic/filming process in any way. From time to time, the style of their films was distinctive mainly due to the subject matter that they were dealing with and not because of innovative formal and aesthetic qualities, and the story was always more important than the technique or any new experimentation with film form. Yet, Mukhopadhyay and Mitra were clear about avoiding the prestige and aura of literary classics and can be said to have distinguished themselves within the standardising practices of the studio era, by claiming authorship of the story, screenplay and direction.

Furthermore, Mitra novelised some of his films as would the French auteurs with their cinéromans, that served to consolidate authorship and garner prestige. His short stories and original screenplays were developed into full-length novels by himself and by other writers, after the films had been released. For example, Ahuti (film Ahuti, Dhirendranath Ganguly, 1941), Pataka Jare Dao (film Abhijog, Sushil Majumdar, 1947), Shahashika (film Dui Beyai, Premendra Mitra, 1953), Aelo Melo (film Haath Baralei Bandhu, Sukumar Dasgupta, 1960), Abar Nadi Boye (film Kakantala Light Railway, Premendra Mitra, 1950), Hanabari (film Hanabari, Premendra Mitra, 1952), Digbhramanta novelised by Samar Pandey (film Digbhramanta, Sushil Majumdar, 1950), Samadhan (film Samadhan, Premendra Mitra, 1943) and Path Bhuley (film Path Bhuley, Dhirendranath Ganguly, 1940) novelised by Panchugopal Mukhopadhyay (Roy, 1989). But, once again, Mitra’s novelisations were largely an attempt to highlight and reclaim his literary expertise by turning his screenplays into ‘literature’ rather than using novelisations to demonstrate the distinctive qualities and achievements of his films.

Film Novelisations and the Unique Case of ’42 (Biyallish)

Film novelisations around the world have primarily been viewed as commercial products that are closely linked to film publicity as well as literary publishers’ profitmaking schemes, and rarely win awards or become canonised texts. Barring a modest number of experimental and prestigious auteur-film novels, the vast corpus of industrial novels is considered ‘authorless’ since they are written by ghostwriters and obscure authors, which has resulted in the genre’s belittled ‘paraliterature’ status (Baetens, 2018). While there is a fairly substantial amount of scholarship on French novelisations, followed by a growing number of books and essays on Italian and Hollywood novelisations, on the whole, film novels have not been accorded sufficient importance in adaptation studies even though they exemplify a valuable dimension of the literature–film connection. ¹⁵ In the Bengali/Indian context, to the best of my knowledge, there are no scholarly works on the topic. I believe it is important to initiate a conversation about film novels in India, taking into consideration their production histories, circulation and unique relationships with the cinematic texts on which they are based, in order to provide a holistic understanding of the relationship between literature and film. To that end, I provide a general overview of novelisations, drawing attention to the manner in which authorship functions; and then go on to discuss a handful of Bengali case studies.

The history of film novelisations has been traced back to ‘catalogue descriptions’ in early American and French cinema, which were a kind of ‘protonovelisation’ that described the content and new spectacle/attraction of each film; and was followed by the serialisation of multireel films that were accompanied by summaries of the stories, published in newspapers (Parys, 2009, p. 305). ¹⁶ By 1915, these episodic/serial novelisations were being collected and published as film books—known as cinéromans in France and cineracconti in Italy—that included ‘photographs or photograms’ of films, creating in turn a ‘hybrid’ brochure like format with text and image (pp. 307–308). In France, a ‘striking characteristic’ of the 1920s was that ‘real writers’ (and not hired ones) began taking control of the genre—for instance, Ricciotto Canudo wrote a novelisation of Abel Gance’s La Roue (The Wheel) in 1923, and the Surrealists published experimental novelisations as well as film scenarios as a literary form (Baetens, 2018, pp. 26–27). Gradually, the concept of the French cinéroman was differentiated from industrial novelisations and was broadened to include a range of works starting from ‘pulp novelisations accompanying silent films’ to the ‘published screenplay novel of the auteur films’ and ‘highbrow film novels’ like those published by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras in the 1950s and 1960s (Parys, 2009, p. 308). ¹⁷

Alternatively, ‘movie fictionalisations’ were novelisations of the short movie story, that began by way of weekly trade papers such as The Moving Picture World (1907–1922) and fan magazines like Photoplay in the United States, which published stories of films so that audiences could ‘prepare themselves for film viewings’ or ‘re-experience films’, especially movie melodramas, in the form of written stories (Verevis, 2017, p. 4). With the disintegration of the studio system and the rise of ‘media corporations’ that often owned both publishing houses as well as film studios, the movie fictionalisations, or ‘movie-tie-ins’, began to follow a different economic logic whereby commercially successful film adaptations were further promoted and redistributed through ‘book versions’ (p. 5). These book versions included reprints of adapted novels as well as novelisations of films. The corporate authorship and framework of industrial production associated with film novelisations, especially since the 1970s, resulted in novelisations being marginalised as ‘literary by-products’ for ‘Hollywood’s advertising and marketing machine’ (p. 7), while the authors themselves, often regarded novelisations as ‘hack jobs’ (Parys, 2009, p. 305). Thus, one of the biggest challenges faced by film novelisation stems from the prevalence of hired ghostwriters, which suggests that one writer can easily be replaced by another—‘the author is a function’—whereas ‘real literature’ is written by an individual author in a position of dominance (Baetens, 2018, p. 6). That also explains why most scholarly work on the subject revolves around auteur-film novelisations that demonstrate a personal approach to the genre and bear the real name of the author.

With regard to Bengali novelisations, the earliest examples that I have come across are from the mid-1940s, and were written by established authors. Jyotirmoy Roy’s Udayer Pathey is considered to be the first Indian novelisation, identified as such, since it was published after Bimal Roy’s Bengali and Hindi film adaptations were released in 1944 and 1945, respectively (Chatterji, 2017, p. 54). ¹⁸ Of course, the unpublished story on which the film was based was also written by Jyotirmoy Roy, who was yet another author–screenwriter–director figure.

An interesting feature in most Bengali novelisations is that the authors first published their short stories, which were then adapted into film by various directors, and, thereafter, the authors themselves expanded the short stories in keeping with the film version, to produce longer fictionalised novels that adhered to the classical/traditional novelistic form. Thus, the Bengali film novels do not fall into the commercialised, authorless, industrial category; neither were they perfunctory expansions of the cinematic screenplays; or anything like the French nouveau roman with its highly experimental style and form (collaborations among the Left Bank writer-filmmakers).

For instance, the famous author Tarashankar Bandopadhyay published a short story, Naa, in the literary magazine Prabasi in 1938, which was adapted into a film in 1954 by the director Shri Tarashankar; in 1960, it was novelised by Bandopadhyay himself (Bandopadhyay, 1998, p. 358). ¹⁹ The title was the same in all three works. Interestingly, Bandopadhyay dedicates the novel to the filmmaker, closely follows the film’s plot, incorporates substantial amounts of dialogue from the film, and also includes scenes from the film where songs are sung. While the novelisation was not coauthored by the filmmaker, the author nonetheless goes along with the film version without radically departing from it. This could mean one of two things: that the author and the filmmaker chose to be ‘true’ to the original short story in their filmic adaptation and novelisation; or that the legalities of copyright determined what liberties could be taken with the text and film. However, given that the novel was dedicated to the filmmaker, we might surmise that there was an amicable spirit of collaboration between both parties.

Shaktipada Rajguru’s short story Chena Mukh, first published in the puja special issue of Ultoroth in 1959, ²⁰ was adapted into Meghe Dhaka Tara by Ritwik Ghatak in 1960 and then novelised by Rajguru in 1962, which retained Ghatak’s film title.

Another example is Samaresh Basu’s Nirjan Saikate, written under the pen name Kalkut, which was first published in 1961 as a travelogue in the magazine Jalsha (Basu, 1972). Tapan Sinha adapted it into a film that was released in 1963. It was only in 1972 that Basu decided to develop it into a novel; and ‘in the foreword, he specifies that the novelisation includes many characters and incidents that the travelogue did not have, and since Sinha’s film was based on the earlier version, there was something new to read even for those who had seen the film’ (Sen, 2017, pp. 126–127). These examples of novelisations highlight the continuing importance of authorship and the articulation of authority that is imprinted on the film novels as well, by virtue of their reliable authors. On the one hand, it suggests that the authors were, in a sense, ‘reclaiming’ their original texts that had been adapted into film in the first place; on the other hand, commercial motivations came into focus since the film novels were published after the critical and box-office success of the films.

Finally, the most compelling case of novelisation that I wish to discuss occurred because the West Bengal Censor Board did not give the film clearance for release.

The Bengali filmmaker Hemen Gupta (1912–1967) made a patriotic film in 1949, titled ’42 (Biyallish), which dealt with the Quit India Movement against the British in 1942. The West Bengal Censor Board banned the film on the grounds that it had the potential to ‘incite passion and encourage disorder’ in the region (Gupta, 1950). Amidst the controversy that ensued, the filmmaker made an ingenious move by converting his original screenplay into the novel ’42 (Biyallish) which was published in 1950. The following year, 1951, the film was finally released after undergoing further editing, by which time the novelisation was already in circulation.

After India’s independence and partition, Hemen Gupta had already made a patriotic film Bhuli Nai (Unforgotten, 1948)—based on Manoj Basu’s eponymous novel about the first partition of Bengal in 1905—that was released after facing severe difficulties with the censor board. There was much public debate and animosity brewing about the stringent censorship laws, when Gupta’s next film, Biyallish, was not allowed to be exhibited. Writing about Biyallish, Bhaskar Sarkar explains that the West Bengal Censor Board ‘took the unusual step of releasing a public explanation’ about why the film could not be screened; and that the apprehensions regarding the incitement of passion were perhaps in relation to the film’s ‘vivid depiction of police and military brutality against freedom fighters’ during the Quit India Movement (Sarkar, 2009, p. 137). Hemen Gupta contradicted the censor board’s allegations in lengthy statements that were published in the Dainik Basumati and Satyajug newspapers. Subsequently, his writer-friend Manoj Basu, with whom he had collaborated on an earlier film, encouraged Gupta to novelise ’42 and present it to the public as soon as possible.

In the preface, Gupta clarifies that he is not a novelist and asks for the readers’ forgiveness for any noticeable flaws in the writing. He then goes on to explain why he undertook the novelisation in the first place:

In countries all over the world it is being accepted that film is a vehicle of mass education. Various experts are freely acknowledging that through cinema, education can be spread more rapidly than any other means. They also believe that mass education includes introducing people to their country’s heritage and giving them the responsibility of keeping that heritage alive by making others aware of it.

During two hundred years of colonialism, the efforts that were made by our leaders who were thirsting for freedom, have now become a part of our proud heritage. The last and most important struggle for freedom was in 1942, and referring to those events, I made a film called ’42. I am sure that you have heard through various Bengali and English newspapers and student protests that the film was censored by the West Bengal government and film censor board for the potential to incite passion and encourage disorder. Some parts of the film were even considered to be obscene. … I am confounded by the film board’s and government’s decision but not discouraged by it. You could not watch the film, so I took the story of ’42 and gave it the form of a novel. That way you can judge for yourselves that depicting the events of our people’s struggle cannot incite passion or encourage disorder. And, whatever the story of ’42 might be, it is not obscene in anyway … The song lyrics in the film were written by Sri Tarit Kumar Ghosh, and I have taken his permission to include it in the novel. (Gupta, 1950, preface)

The function of this particular film novel went beyond any commercial and advertising strategy since it was used to counter and bypass the censor board’s decision to ban the film, and convey the message to the audience in lieu of the film. That Gupta chose to write the novelisation himself instead of hiring a professional writer or author-friend is noteworthy. It is the filmmaker’s authorial presence and expert knowledge of the original screenplay that we feel when reading the text. The need of the moment turned the filmmaker and screenwriter into an author: it matters who speaks.

Conclusion

The Bengali literature–film connection has evolved through various phases that highlighted different dimensions ranging from the bestowal of cultural prestige from literature to film, to the cultural capital of film that intermittently brought attention to authors and their literary works. During the mid-1950s, after Premankur Atorthy’s film career had come to an end, he went back to his literary pursuits, and one of the short stories that he wrote, titled Pancham Paksha (The Brightening Moon), was in the form of a screenplay with directions and gestures: ‘Within moments Bantul decided what to do. He said, “let’s go Radharani.” Cut. Bantul and Radharani’s running feet can be seen in the distance. Fade Out. Fade In. The lights in the clubhouse had been turned on. It was still quite empty’ (Das Majumdar, 2013, p. 79). Here, we find an experimentation of the short story with a new form of expression that was directly inspired by the cinematic screenplay, and is a one-off example that shows how literature was explicitly informed by film. On the whole, the author–screenwriter–director figures from the Kallol generation played a crucial role in mobilising the concept of authorship in Bengali cinema, and cemented the literature–film connection.