Jeffrey Santos Essays - Indian Films, English-language Films

Jeffrey Santos Professor Shrivastava 11/2/2017 2 November 2017 1947 Earth Vs . Cracking Inida Transition from a novel to a film is quite difficult at times especially when it comes to a partition like the one in India in 1947. The main purpose of my essay will be to find the problems and differences with the transition between the two works. Investigating the problem between Bapsi Sidwa's novel Cracking India and its film adaptation Deepa Metha's 1947 Earth by comparing the two together but focusing on Lenny's sexual representation, Ayah's transformation throughout the film and novel and how this causes Ayah's abduction with Ice Candy Man , will be my main target point. I argue that Bapsi Sidwa's Cracking India and Deepa Metha's 1947 Earth discuss the theme of gender and violence. The characters Lenny, Ayah, and Ice Candy Man all were affected by the trauma in some way or other. The film adaptation fails to fully represent the book and has roots to its theme. The film focuses on Lenny's coming of age and how she changes and adapts to her problems with her nanny, Ayah. It induces the violence and partition events as well. In the film , it fails to show us Lenny's struggle with her coming of age due to her mother being extremely abused by her father. Her mother was cheated and physically abused to the fullest by this man. The film also excludes Lenny's introduction to sexual activity when the novel strongly shows us Lenny's sexual situations with Cousin. This is when Ayah makes Lenny extremely upset. Ayah gets lots of looks and respect from men and Lenny sees that and is strongly bothered by it. The novel does a wonderful job with bringing out Lenny's strong attitude towards sexuality and men in general. This chips into how Ayah's and Lenny's relationship basically works and how Lenny feeds off Ayah and learns from how she does things. When looki ng at these stories, they both include the obvious, violence, love, and disloyalty. With the partition being the violence, Lenny and Ayah's opposite sex cravings being love, and Lenny's father cheating on her mother being the disloyalty in this situation. In Metha's film there is another blatant reason for these small stories. Trilogy's such as Fire, Earth, and Water represent a form of violence against the women apart of this area at the time. Fire conceals same-sex female desires that works in context with their morals. Earth is basically the overall violence against the women during this time and Water is the social limitations put in place in Hinduism ( Metha's film). These three simple stories tell a story within themselves that basically explains why love and violence was such a large reason for women struggle existed at this time. In the film it is much easier to decrypt these 3 trilogy's but Metha struggles to implement some of the small details of the bo ok. Obviously the film helps put a visual on Lenny's struggle with this sexual need but the film does leave out a lot of Lenny's sexual awakenings while the book shows us how Lenny used Ayah as a lesson of her own adolescence. Within the entire Partition, both Metha and Sidhwa provide us with Ayah's transformation from a girl that a four year old strives to be to being an abducted rape victim. In the beginning of the novel, our narrator Lenny describes how Ayah gets "covetous glances" from a variety of men-beggars, holy men, hawkers, and so on " ( Sidhwa 3). In the film, Metha uses the Queen's garden scene to show us Ayah's ability to attract all types of men. During this scene Ayah is basically sitting around a bunch of men, having a conversation which all the men look at her with plans on their minds. Once Ayah figures these vibes the men were gives off she puts on her sari and receives physical attractions from these men. Now, in the book Lenny points out that Ice Candy Man tries to put his shoed foot inside of Ayah's sari and says this, " things love to crawl beneath Ayah's sari. Ladybirds, glowworms, Ice Candy Man's toes" ( Sidhwa 19).