In the 2015 film Baahubali: The Beginning, the mighty Prabhas uproots a shivling from the ground, carries it on his shoulders and places it under a waterfall so that his mother need not travel everyday to pour water over it. If you read the narration, the removal of the shivling sounds quite controversial and reason enough to blame the scriptwriter. But when you watch the film, the emotion the scene evokes and its respectful portrayal make all the difference.
The film went on become one of the biggest blockbusters of Indian cinema and the image of Prabhas carrying a shivling on his shoulders went viral. During the launch of his book War of Lanka last year, author Amish Tripathi was asked why his portrayal of Shiva in Immortals of Meluha or any of his retellings have never stirred controversy. Tripathi, known for his bestselling series of mythological fiction, said that as long as one writes with respect, Indians are open to different interpretations of gods and their stories.
Hundreds of authors in the last two decades have attempted and successfully put together retellings of the Ramayan. But what went so wrong with Adipurush, filmmaker Om Raut’s attempt at an adaptation, that the makers had to tweak dialogues which turned a highly publicised film into an overly criticised one?
Author and screenwriter Anand Neelakantan explains: “Indian civilisation, ethos, morality and culture are deeply rooted in the Puranas, cutting across the differences of caste, religion and languages. Films and TV are mass mediums; one cannot toy with content or form. People expect their gods and characters to look how they are used to seeing them.”
Neelakantan, whose 2018 book Vanara is being adapted into a film, says that the Golden Lanka should look like an ancient royal Indian palace made of gold and not the dingy Gothic castle of Lord Dracula and Ravana should look like the learned emperor of Asuras, not like a “school boy’s fancy dress imitation of a Taliban chief”.
He further says: “Hanuman should look like the mighty hero of Ramayan, as he is portrayed in thousands of temples and not like a comical clone of Caesar from the planet of Apes after a bad haircut. They all should walk, talk and behave like the characters of Ramayan, not Game of Thrones. In short, these are Indian epics, and they should look and feel Indian in form.”
Neelakantan is also scripting a two-part film based on Ajaya book series and has a major show based on Indian epics in the pipeline.
When Adipurush writer Manoj Muntashir was asked why he chose the much-criticised colloquial dialogues for Hanuman and other key characters in the film, he said he wanted to resonate with the young children who had never seen Ramayana onscreen. However, he failed miserably and instead ended up making the film look like a poorly done job.
In the past, Volga has given a voice to Sita in The Liberation of Sita, Amish Tripathi’s Sita: Warrior of Mithila shows Sita as a strong woman, Devdutt Pattanaik explores the relevance of Ram in modern times in The Book of Ram and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Forest of Enchantments is a critically acclaimed retelling of the story of Sita from her perspective. These authors have not only brought out the voices of repressed characters through their retellings o f the Hindu epic, but also portrayed them as powerful people, and explored their stories in modern times, through gendered lens, and so on.
Adipurush fails to uplift the original; rather it diminishes the original story.
For filmmakers, Banerjee suggests that the original work must be kept in mind and one should ask themselves, ‘how would their films affect the current generation? How can they balance authenticity with relevance?’
Distorting the original in order to retell is a strict no. Neelakantan feels that creative liberties should be exercised but stories and values should remain the same. “Indian literature has given voice to the muted many times by retelling the epics through the eyes of characters like Ravana, Sita, Soorpanakha, Urmila, Mandodari, Bali, Lakhsmana, Duryodhana, Panchali, Kunti and Bhima. But in visual mediums we should never try to imitate the superhero films that come out of the conveyor belt of Hollywood film factories. A great epic like Ramayan cannot be reduced to a simplistic fairy tale retelling of Marvel films, where good triumphs over evil,” he says.
“Our epics are deeper and layered than that,” Neelakantan concludes.