UNUSUAL FOOTPRINTS:

Cinema’s literary turns

With particular reference to Rabindranath Tagore
Someswar Bhowmik

Hello everybody, and a very good morning from Kolkata. I am thankful to the
Federation of Film Societies of India for inviting me to contribute to their Film
Appreciation Course. But I come on board with an unusual topic, bordering
almost on improbability. Today, I propose to deal with an engagement between
film and literature that is not often discussed. In our discussions on the
engagement between literature and cinema, one of the focal points remains the
adaptation or adaptability of literary texts into films.

As a matter of fact, we are very much accustomed to accepting and

acknowledging the contribution of different art forms to cinema. Sergei
Eisenstein once wrote, ‘Cinema is the first truly synthetic art’. By the term
‘synthetic’, he of course didn’t mean ‘artificial’; he was actually pointing to the
fact that since its inception cinema has been borrowing from and synthesizing
elements of several preceding art forms, especially from painting, dance, music,
sculpture, architecture, photography, theatre, and literature (both written and
oral). Eisenstein called this synthesis a process of coalescence into an “organic
essence”. So cinema is perceived as a derivative art form.

What I am going to discuss today is a process of a reverse engagement—which

may be called cinema’s literary turns, where literature derives from cinema. To
substantiate my argument, I have chosen the works of an Indian literary icon,
who is not only a pre-modern litterateur but also perceived as anti-modern. But
let me leave it at that for now and keep you in suspense. I shall unfold it as I
progress.
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Many of you probably know that the German playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote a
highly polemical but extremely insightful piece in 1931. It was titled “The
Three-Penny Law-Suit”. In it he dwelt upon the practical relationship between
film and literature based on his personal experiences. i At one point in this very
long essay he pointed out that the old media of communication hadn’t
remained unchanged by the newly emerging media (the foremost among
them being radio and cinema), and that the former hadn’t somehow
coexisted with the latter in an uncomfortable truce. So he writes:
The old forms of transmission are not unaffected by the newly emerging
ones nor do they survive alongside them. The film viewer reads stories
differently. But the storywriter views films too.ii

In this connection he particularly mentioned an evolving relationship

between literature and cinema after the advent of feature films. Brecht
noted that cinema had changed both the reading and the writing of
narratives. In fact, Brecht points out that:

It is conceivable that other kinds of writers, dramatists or novelists, can

for the moment work more cinematically than the film people. To some
extent the former depend less on the means of production. But they
nonetheless depend on the cinema on its progress and regress [...]
Literature needs the cinema not only indirectly but also directly.iii

He implied that modern novelists were both aware of and wished to imitate
the new representational possibilities opened up by films. This, Brecht
opined, might mean, as much as anything else, adopting a less ‘artistic’, and
more ‘instrumental’ attitude to writing. He termed this as the “technological
advance in literary production” or “technification of literary production.” And
he felt that this process was “irreversible”.

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The playwright was quite sure that the world of literature did not remain the
same in the age of cinema.

Western scholars have undertaken extensive research on the impact of cinema

on twentieth-century literary consciousness, and unearthed both perceptible and
not-so-obvious cinematic turns in the works of western litterateurs.

In recent times, literary theorists have unearthed some instances of this “direct
need” from the works of the European novelists of the 1930s. The British
novelist Graham Greene, who regularly wrote film reviews in newspapers in the
1920s and was a reader of Close Up, a reputed journal on cinema, had, at a time,
been anxious of the advent of the talkies. He had felt that the talkies would ruin
the artistic potential of cinema. However, his worries were soon proven to be
unfounded. Greene welcomed the talkies with great affection. A new chapter
began in his love story with cinema. Such was the depth of this love that in his
two novels Stamboul Train (1932) and It’s a Battlefield (1934), he ‘consciously’
used cinematic elements. Greene wrote:

When I describe a scene, I capture it with the moving eye of the cine-
camera rather than with the photographer’s eye – which leaves it frozen.
In this precise domain I think the cinema has influenced me....iv

Of course, one must remember that these scenes are very much urban scenes.
Ezra Pound had spoken of this very matter in a 1922 piece. In the words of
Pound, rural life is like a spread-out narrative. Urban scenes shift from one to
the other, covering or transcending the other, just like cinema.v

The British novelist Christopher Isherwood begins his novel Goodbye to Berlin
(1939) by identifying his narrator as a cine-camera which, through its cinematic
eye, looks at the city of Berlin riddled with economic problems:

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 I am a camera with its shutters open, quite passive, recording, not
thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the
woman in the kimono washing her hair. Someday, all this will have to be
developed, carefully printed, fixed.vi

Another British novelist, John Sommerfield, in his novel May Day (1936)
depicts the diversity of modern urban life through apparently unrelated
fragmented images in the style of a montage.vii In reading such narratives, one
can almost hear the echoes of the famous words of John Grearson, one of the
pioneering figures of the documentary movement, that documentary is the
creative representation of reality.

When, on the one hand, there were various means prepared for representing
unfiltered reality in active prose fiction, on the other hand, contemporary
literature became the companion of film in a deeper sense. Ulysses, a novel of a
completely different kind by the Irish novelist James Joyce, was published as a
book in 1922. The German novelist Alfred Doblin dragged cinema into his
review of the text. Because, from the very beginning to the very end, Leopold
Bloom attracts the attention of the reader to various extremely mundane scenes.
In the words of Doblin:

The cinema has penetrated the sphere of literature; newspapers must

become the most important, most broadly disseminated form of written
testimony, everybody’s daily bread. To the experiential image of a person
today also belongs the streets, the scenes changing by the second, the
signboards, automobile traffic.viii

In 1944, the literary critic Harry Levin described Ulysses in these words: “In its
intimacy and in its continuity, Ulysses has more in common with the cinema
than with other fiction. The movement of Joyce’s style, the thought of his

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characters, is like unreeling film; his method of construction, the arrangement of
this raw material, involves the crucial operation of montage.” ix The most
interesting comment about Ulysses comes, however, from Sergei Eisenstein.
According to him, this novel is a landmark event in the history of cinema. In
this novel he found the successful use of his favourite style – the montage. He
said, as a structure, the montage is “a reconstruction of the laws of the thought
process reconstructs the threads of human thinking.”x

Alfred Doblin was not only inspired as a critic by the way in which Joyce was
able to connect the scenes of the modern world to literature. In his novel Berlin
Alexanderplatz (1929), he too represented the narrative of modern urban life. In
his 1930 essay “The Crisis of the Novel”, Walter Benjamin has lavished praise
upon this effort. In the eyes of Benjamin, it is not Joyce but Doblin who had
successfully used the cinematic montage in literature.xi Critics are also of the
opinion that the manifestation of urban consciousness comes very close to
cinematic consciousness in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925).xii

In point of fact, since the First World War, questions about the classical
elements of novel-writing had been rife in the literary world. Many felt that
chronological and showy grand narratives were no longer suitable for
representing human life marred by economic, social, and political crises. Of
course, the novelists were not alone. In different fields of art, questions had
already been raised about the traditional methods of artistic composition. Young
artists felt that an image – whole and complete – was inadequate to capture
modern life. They saw life as the temporary sum of many alienations and states
of incompleteness. Cubist painters were denying the wholeness of images and
filling their canvases. Sculptors were forsaking grandeur. Songwriters were
expressing their unwillingness to think about perfection in tune and the
mellifluous quality of music. They wanted to end consistent musical
arrangements and expressed a single, particular essence. They wanted atonality.
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Modernist artists of this new age wanted to see and show life with all its blood,
tears, sweat, and incompleteness. No matter if it fails to reveal beauty. They had
been encouraged by the new methods of construction in cinema – of
discontinuous spatial designs centred round the imitation of reality and a
temporality devoid of sequence. It inspired them to engage in experiments.
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Since the nineteen-twenties, cinema has been a major influence on the cultural
consciousness of the Indians. The impact has been particularly significant in
Bengal, thanks to the steady production of social films from popular literature.
Bengali literary icons relished regular adaptation of their works for cinema. But
Rabindranath Tagore, the tallest of these icons, resented this onslaught of
literature on cinema. He sincerely believed that cinema deserved a better
treatment. This belief evolved into a complex engagement.

The last fifteen years of Tagore’s life is a veritable delight for an aesthete or a
connoisseur. The range and diversity of Tagore’s creative endeavours during
this period is fascinating and mind-boggling. As if he was trying overreach
himself under the influence of a centrifugal force. He began to explore novel
expressions for his sensitivity and creativity. He wanted to no more remain
confined within the world of literary and musical output, which had shaped his
identity so far. Now began an intense engagement with the visual media.

His passion for painting during this phase of life is well-known. In a span of
twelve years Tagore created nearly two thousand and five hundred
unconventional images. He didn’t have any formal training in painting, but that
did not prevent him from building this visual oeuvre using pen, ink, colour,
brush, crayon and pencil. Admirers have termed this as a volcanic eruption of
his imagination. During the same period, he woke up to the potential of dance as
an art form. To him dance was the music of human body. Charmed by its visual
plasticity, he proceeded to create a permanent place for dance within the
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cultural practices of Bengal. To fulfil this dream, he not only transformed a few
of his narrative poems into dance drama but also began incorporating dance in
some of his new plays. He was no doubt fascinated by the visual plasticity of
this art form. Besides these, another plastic medium beckoned him. Nowadays
we call it cinema, in those times it was more familiar as bioscope.

There are quite a few, curt, references to cinema in his writings—mostly in his
letters, but also in some of his articles. Following these references
chronologically one will see Tagore’s response to cinema evolving with time.
Initially he characterised it as a technological devise that panders to cheap
popular tastes. But gradually he warmed up to the possibilities that he thought
this medium gave rise to. He especially noted the fluidity and liveliness of form
that it had inhered as also its power to manipulate time and space through a
stream of live visuals. We find a surprising reference to cinema in the Hibbert
lecture series he delivered at Oxford in May 1930, “In a cinema picture our
vision of time and space can be expanded or condensed merely according to the
different techniques of the instrument.” [“Religion of Man”] Such admiration
notwithstanding, he was very critical of the uses that these possibilities were
being put to. He was especially disappointed by the techno-commercial
endeavours surrounding cinema. These, he thought, were only leading to
gimmicks, making bioscope an addiction for the masses.

Beyond these sparse references the only substantial articulation of his feeling
about cinema can be found in a letter that Tagore wrote to one of his
acquaintances:
My belief is that the desired emergence of a new art form based on
bioscope has not yet happened….Bioscope is all about a stream of live
visuals [দৃশ্যের গতিপ্রবাহ]. The beauty or dignity of these moving images
should be articulated in such a way that it can fructify itself without
recourse to written words. …Just as music can deliver its charm with a
stream of notes and without words, why can’t the fluid movements of forms

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 [রূপের চলৎপ্রবাহ] deliver itself as an autonomous art form? It’s only
because of an absence of a capable artist—and also because of the naïveté
of lazy-minded masses, who only fall for gimmicks as they do not have
access to real pleasure. [November 26, 1929]

Beyond its apparently pessimistic tone, the letter contains some positive hints.
Tagore has acknowledged here that cinema had all the potential for becoming
an autonomous art form on the strength of its visual fluidity or plasticity. He has
also welcomed the prospect of it widening the horizon of human creativity. But
was he only counting the quantitative gain? An unbiased scrutiny of Tagore’s
literary output during his twilight years reveals that he had developed a much
more nuanced response to cinema. He had created an experimental realm upon
which cinema left a significant impression.

To illustrate my point, I shall refer mainly to two texts, which are contemporary
with the above letter.
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The first is his novel, Shesher Kabita, which he published only two months
before the letter was written.

In it he has woven an incredible tale of love, spread over seventeen chapters.

But he did not strictly follow the traditional sequence of a beginning, middle,
and end. After the first two chapters, he suddenly abandoned the forward flow
of narrative to take his readers to happenings in the past, in the way films did
through flashback. The final couple of sentences in the second chapter of the
novel are as follows:
Here it is necessary to look back. Telling the story of the past will remove
any obstacles for the story to move forward.

The names of two subsequent chapters reveal their backward pull—‘ পূর্ব ভূ মিকা’
[Retrospect] and ‘লাবণ্য পুরাবৃত্ত’ [Labanya’s Past]. More remarkable and
infallible are the strategic placements of these two chapters. In the first two

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chapters, Tagore establishes the personality of his protagonist Amit with great
care. In the second chapter, the main dimension of the story concerning Amit is
delineated. On the silver screen, establishment shots have been used in this way
for a long time to set the tone. In spite of his limited exposure to cinema, Tagore
had taken note of this strategy.

The main treasure of this narrative is its emphasis on visual details. In nine of
the seventeen chapters, Tagore enchants the reader with descriptions of various
shades and tastes. These descriptions transcend their literary dimensions. They
rather enrich the narrative by making the space, time, and characters more
ii
In May, 1930, the German production company Nero Films bought the rights to Brecht’s successful, song-filled
stage-play The Three-Penny Opera. In August, they made another deal with Brecht. According to that contract,
Brecht and some of his assistants would have to submit a screenplay by a deadline, keeping the subject matter
and style of the dramatic production intact. One of the notable conditions of the contract was that if the film
did not follow this screenplay, Brecht could demand changes to be made. Brecht was unable to complete the
work by the deadline set by the production company. A few days after the deadline Brecht submitted, not a
screenplay, but what may be called a treatment based on the play, in which the original characters were all
retained, but the tone was magnified to a great extent. Citing the delay as an excuse, but actually worried by
the change of tone made by Brecht, the production company gave Bela Balazs and Ladislau Vajda. By then,
keeping the international market in mind, it had already been decided that Georg Wilhelm Pabst was to direct
the film. Pabst shot the film, based on Ladislau and Vajda’s screenplay, from mid-September to mid-
November. But in the middle of the shoot, on 30 September, Brecht went to court. He claimed that he held the
copyright for the subject matter of the film and that the actions of Nero Films had violated the importance of
those rights. While the battle in court waged on, Pabst repeatedly tried to explain the economics of film and
the demand of the audience to Brecht. But Brecht remained steadfast in his objection to Ladislau-Vajda’s
screenplay. However, Brecht hadn’t been successful in bringing the shooting to a halt. And eventually, on 19
December, he had to make an out-of-court settlement with Nero Films. The verdict was to be delivered four
days later. But Brecht had figured out, based on the way the case was progressing, that it would not be in his
favour. In this failure, he still found pleasure in having been able to stand in court and describe in detail the
process of film adaptations from literature as a totally commercial undertaking – thoughtless and devoid of
aesthetics. The film, directed by Pabst, released on [date; 31st Feb in original] February, 1931. Brecht had
collected, expanded, and theorised his statements made in court and presented them in the form of an essay.
ii
The essay has recently been translated into English. See, Marc Silberman trans. and ed. Brecht on Film and
Radio, London: Methuen, 2001. pp. 147–199. The section qtd is on p.161.
iii
Ibid, p. 355.
iv
Laura Marcus and Peter Nichols eds. The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century English Literature,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p.355.
v
“Paris Letter: December 1921”, Dial, January, 1922.
vi
Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, London: Hogarth Press, 1939, p.13.
vii
Laura Marcus and Peter Nichols eds., Op. Cit., p.344.
viii
Alfred Doblin’s essay “Ulysses by Joyce”. Reprinted in Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg eds., The Weimar
Republic Sourcebook, Berkley: University of California, 1994, p.514.
ix
Harry Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction, London: Faber and Faber, 1960, p.82.
x
Richard Taylor trans. and ed., Sergei Eisenstein, Selected Works, Volume I, Writings, 1922–1934. London: B. F. I
Publishing, 1988, p. 236.
xi
See, Walter Benjamin, Selected Writing Volume II: 1927–1934. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 1999, p.301.
xii
Laura Marcus and Peter Nichols ed., Op. cit., p. 344.

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tangible. Let us take, for example, the first chapter. “Amit is obsessed with
style”—with this short phrase, Tagore pinpoints not just the psyche of his
protagonist, but the personality of a flesh and blood human being that is
required for the narrative. The poet pulls us into the core of the character.
Thereafter, with deft pen strokes, he creates the physicality of Amit that is more
alive than most figures in Tagore’s narratives. In earlier phases, in his stories
and novels, Tagore had created larger-than-life characters based on ideas. In
such images, the focus was on the internal greatness of the character. But from
now on, the poet will emphasise the physicality of everyday existence. It is not
as though the characters will be mundane or average. But Tagore will now focus
more on the character’s visible self. Amit, certainly, is no average character. But
the author does not use hidden symbols to indicate the character’s
exceptionality. Rather, Amit is created through the assemblage of a variety of
sensory, material signs. He begins by trying to create a general impression:
Amit is obsessed with style—not only in his literary preferences, but in
his dress, outfit and manners as well. His appearance has a distinction
which singles him out in any company, not as one of the five but as the
absolute fifth which extinguishes the rest. His full, clean-shaven face is
dark, smooth and glowing, his manner vivacious, his eyes lively, his
smile playful and his movements restless.

It is followed by a description of his Bengali attire, which the novelist

characterises as “an uproarious joke”:
He is usually dressed in Bengali attire, for the simple reason that it is not
vogue in his circle. His carefully crinkled dhoti is plain and borderless,
for that too is “not done” at his age. His tunic is buttoned from left
shoulder to right waist and his sleeve-seams are open from cuff to elbow.
Girdled around his waist over the dhoti is a broad, maroon-coloured,
gold-embroidered band, to the left of which hangs a small bag of
Vrindavan chintz, carrying his pocket-watch. On his feet is a pair of red-
and-white slippers of Cuttack workmanship. When he goes out, a Madrasi
border hangs in neat folds from his left shoulder to his knee; and when he
is invited to dinner at a friend’s he flaunts on his head the white
embroidered cap worn by Muslims of Lucknow.

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A description of his English attire follows:
The principle of his English attire is not quite comprehensible, but those
who know best affirm that though somewhat loose and baggy it is what is
called in England “distinguished”. It is not that he affects the odd so
much as that he is possessed by a zeal to hold up fashion to ridicule.
There are too many young men who have to prove their youth by their
birth certificates. Amit’s youth is of that rare kind which needs no proof
save its sheer, unashamed youthfulness, at once extravagant and
irresponsible, like a flood that overflows, letting nothing accumulate,
sweeping everything along.

Although I have segregated the different elements for the benefit of the
listeners, in the novel itself the description of Amit’s personality continues
without any break, much like the fluid movements of forms to which he had
referred in his letter mentioned above.

[It is comparable with the almost 10-minute-long opening scene of

CHARULATA. First 2:15 minutes establishes Charu as a dutiful wife, the next
7:30 minutes highlights her loneliness and neglect from her husband.]

In another instance of fluid movements of forms, Tagore delineates the dramatic

maiden encounter between Amit and Labanya in chapter II, titled “Conflict”

[সংঘাত]. It begins with the description of a careless drive by Amit along the
hilly tracts:
The road leading to Amit’s house was narrow and crooked. On its right a
precipice overgrown with jungle. As there was little likelihood of other
traffic, Amit was driving his car rather carelessly, neglecting the horn. He
was fancying that since smoke, water, air and the spark which, according
to the Sanskrit poet, has synthesized to form the cloud-messenger, were
all present in their proper proportion in the automobile, a motor-
messenger in these modern times was the right thing to send to the distant
beloved; and if the driver were given a letter, no room would be left for
any vagueness or mistiness.

But his day-dreaming is suddenly ruptured by the unexpected appearance of

another car from the opposite direction:

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 Just then, as he reached a curve, he suddenly saw a car coming up on the
opposite way. There was no room to pass. Amit pulled the break but
before it could work the other car came up against his. There was a
collision—but no catastrophe. The other car jerked back a little and came
to rest against the mountain side.

The clarity of the description is such that it appears to have been lifted from the
pages of a screenplay. The description brings the reader to a turning point in the
narrative—mere visuality is not its only symptom, in it is hidden the seeds of an
imminent drama.

In chapter after chapter, new twists and turns to the story or the field of dramatic
possibility is created through descriptions pregnant with visual appeal. These
descriptions are both sensual as well as dynamic.

In terms of its literary characteristics, such as narrative construction and appeal,

Shesher Kabita is certainly a novel. But the visually dynamic descriptions in the
novel do not remain mere ornamental elements. They organically influence,
control, and provide new dimensions to both the narrative and the characters.
The written narrative becomes like a cinematic diegesis, much like a screenplay.
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The second of my chosen texts is an exceptional one, which does not have any
parallel in Tagore’s oeuvre.

In July 1930, while in Munich, Rabindranath was commissioned to write a

screenplay in English. It was to be based on his experience of watching the
famous Passion Play in the nearby town of Oberammargau. But in his
composition, the poet completely ignored the narrow religious connotations of
the pitiful Easter spirit recalling the final sufferings and death of Christ reflected
in the Passion Play. The poet's screenplay celebrated its opposite—the
Christmas spirit, touching upon the folklore and myths around Christ's birth and
is full of optimism. However, no film was made out of the screenplay. It was

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ultimately published as a long poem, titled The Child. Shortly afterwards,
Tagore trans-created it in Bengali, and titled it Shishutirtha.

The three compositions are not exactly similar—the original screenplay, the
poem adapted from it or its Bengali trans-creation. But there is a consistency in
their emotional content. And beyond their literary nature, their main strength
lies in their visual appeal. The images that the words in these compositions
evoke are not just poetic imageries or symbols, borne out of imagination or
feeling. Moreover, they are not static, but taken together they evince a measure
of fluidity as if bestowed with plastic quality. Their form is palpably tangible.
They directly engage our eyes and ears and take over the senses. In this
creation, the poet wanted to paint the pictures of jealousy, envy, violence and
brutality of the deranged time and society. He was portraying a bruised, battered
and darkened humanity. Memorable as palpable images depicting reality, and
not as fantasy. In the 4th Stanza, he describes the build-up to a large gathering of
distressed human beings, which reads like a series of cinematic shots and scenes
seamlessly blending into a film sequence and showing the tumult among a mass
of humanity.

It begins with images of faceless humanity from different geographical

locations.
Men begin to gather from all quarters,
From across the seas, the mountains and pathless wastes,
They come from the valley of the Nile and the banks of the Ganges,
from the snow-sunk uplands of Thibet,
from high-walled cities of glittering towers,
from the dense dark tangle of savage wilderness.
Some walk, some ride on camels, horses and elephants,
on chariots with banners vying with the clouds of dawn,

Then come images of men from various walks of life.

The priests of all creeds burn incense, chanting verses as they go.
The monarchs march at the head of their armies,

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 lances flashing in the sun and drums beating loud.
Ragged beggars and courtiers pompously decorated,
agile young scholars and teachers burdened with learned age jostle
each other in the crowd.

Images of women follow.

Women come chatting and laughing,
mothers, maidens and brides,
with offerings of flowers and fruit,
sandal paste and scented water.
Mingled with them is the harlot,
shrill of voice and loud in tint and tinsel.

Finally, we come across the challenged or differently abled.

The gossip is there who secretly poisons the well of human sympathy
and chuckles.
The maimed and the cripple join the throng with the blind and the
sick,
the dissolute, the thief and the man who makes trade of his God
for profit and mimics the saint.

In fact, each one of the poem’s eleven stanzas or divisions resembles a film
sequence. Within each division, there are passages that can be compared with a
scene in a film. And, these passages contain discreet images similar to shots.

These eleven divisions add up to a complete narrative, woven around several

plot points. Being originally conceived as a screenplay, its impact is visual and
sensuous. In image after image, it creates a sense of unadulterated stream of
palpable and raw physicality. It is really a carefully structured stream of live

visuals [দৃশ্যের গতিপ্রবাহ], nothing short of cinematic diegesis.

[That this screenplay has not been turned into a film does not nullify its value as
a cinematic text. But a film made around the same time—French poet Jean
Cocteau’s film BLOOD OF A POET (1930)—is ample proof of how a poet’s
vision takes shape as a film.]
----------

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In conclusion, I would like to say that the above is but two examples of
Tagore’s conscious assimilation of cinema’s structural elements in his literary
works. More examples can be found in his novels, short stories and poems,
created during the last decade his life, that is the decade of the 1930s. These
works are marked by a palpably narrative construction. These also evince a very
special kind of visual appeal, transcending decorative or ornamental dimension.
In such works the narrative and the visual become entwined, like integral
organic elements. The quality of content, structure, tone, and tenor of these
creations vary significantly from those of his creations prior to the 1930s. It is
not the case that through all these efforts he was facilitating, what we can call,
“literary adaptation of the techniques of cinema”. But many of his works in this
decade inhere a reverse journey from cinema to literature—abounding in what
Tagore had termed fluid movements of forms and stream of live visuals in his
letter of 26th November 1929. These works were a reversal of the established
norm of cinema’s adaptation of literature. Through these, was he trying to
respond to the criticism that he was essentially anti-modern? In any case, he
was negotiating modernism on his own terms—fully aware of its strength and
pitfalls.
Finally, let me emphasise that Tagore was definitely not the lone contributor to
this trend of “literary adaptation of the techniques of cinema” by Indian
litterateurs. Even Satyajit Ray has complimented Kamal Kumar Mazumdar for
creating distinct cinematic turns in some of his novels. Ray commented that
those parts in Mazumdar’s novels acquired the qualities of screenplays.

It will be a very good exercise for the students of cinema to keep looking for
such instances in the works of others Indian litterateurs.

Thank you very much for lending me your ears.

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[Delivered on 25th July, 2021 [Sunday], 11 am IST]

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