A Modest Proposal

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CHAPTER ONE

ADAPTING, INTERPRETING AND TRANSCREATING RABINDRANATH TAGORE'S WORKS ON SCREEN
SOMDATTA MANDAL

A minor work has no claim to act as more than a springboard when adapted for another medium, but a major work deserves, that any approach is made with respect to its essence. The scenario must express the quintessence of the book. It must emerge as clearly as possible, an honour to the original, to our process of transportation, and to cinematic art.

One of the most interesting things about the early twentieth century is that the arts of literature, painting and cinema went through the modernist crisis at approximately the same time, despite the fact that the cinema was a fledgling art and the others were well into their maturity. …show more content…

Nitin Basu reminiscences how in 1917 Prashanta Mahalanobis and Rabindranath Tagore took him to Bolpur requesting him to film a dance performance accompanied by Tagore’s songs in Uttarayan one evening. He took pictures, processed them in Mahalanobis’s laboratory at Presidency College, developed the print at home, again processed it in the laboratory and projected it for Gurudev. He liked this 17 minute film so much that he saw it again and again. Unfortunately the film is now lost and if available it would have been the first film in which Rabindranath had also performed a role. After this, in 1920 there was an attempt by Madan Company, which got permission to film Tagore’s play Biswarjan, but the project was aborted due to lack of female …show more content…

Incidentally, in Calcutta during that time people had already started cinematic ventures based on his stories. In 1923, the first ever silent film Manbhanjan based on Tagore’s story of the same name was made by Naresh Chandra Mitra. From Madhu Basu’s autobiography, it is also known that he had interacted with Tagore in making a film on the same short story, and after Madan Company signed the bond with Visva-Bharati, Tagore had even revised Basu’s film script, added some dialogues to it and advised a name to it, Giribala. All these events make it clear that Tagore was already aware of the immense possibilities of the new medium of the cinema and by 1929 his relationship with it became quite strong. The same year, in a letter to Murari Bhaduri (brother of theatre legend Sisir Kumar Bhaduri) written on 26 November 1929, he stated that the flow of images constitutes cinema. This flow, he wrote, should be used so that it can communicate without the help of words. “The cinema (chhayachitra, in his words) is still enslaved to literature,” and he attributed this ‘dependence’ to the general ignorance of the masses to which cinema caters. He added that a time will come, when cinema will cease to depend on literature for inspiration and

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