University of Arizona South Asian Film Productions Discussion

There are 2 questions, each one about a separate film, and you have to respond to each question with 300 words minimum. So total 600 words minimum. You do not have to watch movies, just answer them enough to complete question.

Movie 1: NAMESAKE

“The formal organization of time and space in each version of The Namesake, for example, determines its engagement with a historically specific “life‐world” in which the events of the text transpire. The novel begins in 1967 and ends in 2000, while the film begins in 1977 and ends in 2004. This shift in time relocates the historical and social contexts in which the story of Gogol’s parents, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, unfold. In the novel Gogol’s birth takes place in 1968, an iconic year in American history that locates the growth of Ashoke and Ashima’s family in the midst of institutional shifts in both immigration policy and civil rights in the US; by advancing the timeframe of the narrative, Nair effectively disrupts that relationship, displacing the primacy of the nation in the representation of the film’s cultural and social milieu. The novel and film also take place in two different spaces, shifting from Cambridge to suburban New York City.” (Brennan, “Time, Space,…3)

Based on Brennan’s analysis of the book versus film, elaborate on how spaces and temporalities of the novel are reconstructed in the film and to what effect. In other words, why did Nair make the changes to times and places that she did? How do these changes affect the narrative, and what are their implications? Also comment on the conclusions of the book and film. Feel free to note any other points of interest in terms of this adaptation.

Movie 2: A PASSAGE TO INDIA

In their respective essays on Lean’s adaptation of Forster’s novel, both Levine and Lyndley are considerably critical of the filmmaker’s intentions as well as political leanings. For Levine, Lean’s omissions make A Passage to India “a completely ethnocentric film, geared to a parochial Occidental point of view…” (139), The imposition of a certain streamlined narrative structure enables this inversion of intent. For Lyndley, Lean “pervasively romanticizes Forster’s relentlessly anti-romantic text,” (62) to the extent that the “priggish” Adela must be made sexy, and an extension of this is that the Raj too is “larger, hansomer, and grander.” Comment on these critiques of Lean’s adaptation of the novel with special reference to additions and omissions that enable the inversion (or “straightening out”) of Forster. How does the sexual politics of the film–the collapse of racial tensions into sexual proclivities–play into these larger transformations? How is the thematic focus on a mystery as well as a muddle elaborated in book versus film?