Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Literary Pasts, Presents, and Futures
- 1 Beginnings: Rajmohan's Wife and the Novel in India
- 2 The Epistemic Work of Literary Realism: Two Novels from Colonial India
- 3 “Because Novels Are True, and Histories Are False”: Indian Women Writing Fiction in English, 1860–1918
- 4 When the Pen Was a Sword: The Radical Career of the Progressive Novel in India
- 5 The Road Less Traveled: Modernity and Gandhianism in the Indian English Novel
- 6 The Modernist Novel in India: Paradigms and Practices
- 7 “Handcuffed to History”: Partition and the Indian Novel in English
- 8 Women, Reform, and Nationalism in Three Novels of Muslim Life
- 9 Found in Translation: Self, Caste, and Other in Three Modern Texts
- 10 Emergency Fictions
- 11 Cosmopolitanism and the Sonic Imaginary in Salman Rushdie
- 12 Postcolonial Realism in the Novels of Rohinton Mistry
- 13 Far from the Nation, Closer to Home: Privacy, Domesticity, and Regionalism in Indian English Fiction
- 14 Ecologies of Intimacy: Gender, Sexuality, and Environment in Indian Fiction
- 15 Some Uses of History: Historiography, Politics, and the Indian Novel
- 16 Virtue, Virtuosity, and the Virtual: Experiments in the Contemporary Indian English Novel
- 17 Of Dystopias and Deliriums: The Millennial Novel in India
- 18 “Which Colony? Which Block?”: Violence, (Post-)Colonial Urban Planning, and the Indian Novel
- 19 Post-Humanitarianism and the Indian Novel in English
- 20 Chetan Bhagat: Remaking the Novel in India
- 21 “New India/n Woman”: Agency and Identity in Post-Millennial Chick Lit
- 22 The Politics and Art of Indian English Fantasy Fiction
- 23 The Indian Graphic Novel
- 24 “Coming to a Multiplex Near You”: Indian Fiction in English and New Bollywood Cinema
- 25 Caste, Complicity, and the Contemporary
- Works Cited
- Index
24 - “Coming to a Multiplex Near You”: Indian Fiction in English and New Bollywood Cinema
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Literary Pasts, Presents, and Futures
- 1 Beginnings: Rajmohan's Wife and the Novel in India
- 2 The Epistemic Work of Literary Realism: Two Novels from Colonial India
- 3 “Because Novels Are True, and Histories Are False”: Indian Women Writing Fiction in English, 1860–1918
- 4 When the Pen Was a Sword: The Radical Career of the Progressive Novel in India
- 5 The Road Less Traveled: Modernity and Gandhianism in the Indian English Novel
- 6 The Modernist Novel in India: Paradigms and Practices
- 7 “Handcuffed to History”: Partition and the Indian Novel in English
- 8 Women, Reform, and Nationalism in Three Novels of Muslim Life
- 9 Found in Translation: Self, Caste, and Other in Three Modern Texts
- 10 Emergency Fictions
- 11 Cosmopolitanism and the Sonic Imaginary in Salman Rushdie
- 12 Postcolonial Realism in the Novels of Rohinton Mistry
- 13 Far from the Nation, Closer to Home: Privacy, Domesticity, and Regionalism in Indian English Fiction
- 14 Ecologies of Intimacy: Gender, Sexuality, and Environment in Indian Fiction
- 15 Some Uses of History: Historiography, Politics, and the Indian Novel
- 16 Virtue, Virtuosity, and the Virtual: Experiments in the Contemporary Indian English Novel
- 17 Of Dystopias and Deliriums: The Millennial Novel in India
- 18 “Which Colony? Which Block?”: Violence, (Post-)Colonial Urban Planning, and the Indian Novel
- 19 Post-Humanitarianism and the Indian Novel in English
- 20 Chetan Bhagat: Remaking the Novel in India
- 21 “New India/n Woman”: Agency and Identity in Post-Millennial Chick Lit
- 22 The Politics and Art of Indian English Fantasy Fiction
- 23 The Indian Graphic Novel
- 24 “Coming to a Multiplex Near You”: Indian Fiction in English and New Bollywood Cinema
- 25 Caste, Complicity, and the Contemporary
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
The story of the adaptation of Chetan Bhagat's best-selling 2004 debut, Five Point Someone, into the blockbuster Bollywood film 3 Idiots (dir. Rajkumar Hirani, 2009) is an interesting one. While most discussions around an adaptation stress how different the film is from the book, Bhagat and his fans stress how similar the two properties are, insisting that perhaps the author should have received greater prominence in the film's credits and promotion than he did. Bollywood has a long history of borrowing (to be generous) plots and ideas from other (especially Hollywood) films, but the case of 3 Idiots is not one of intellectual property, as both parties agree that no legal injury has been done to the author. The film's producer, Vidhu Vinod Chopra, director, Rajkumar Hirani, and star, Aamir Khan, have averred that although Bhagat had been given his due, he was generating controversy in order to cash in on the film's success. Bhagat and his supporters agree in a sense by suggesting that his claims are moral rather than legal. Given how closely the film resembles the novel – down to such details as the red Maruti 800 car featured in several scenes – Bhagat's supporters stress that the author of the bestselling novel on which 3 Idiots is based should have received a little more airtime in the media blitz that preceded and followed the release of the film. They repeatedly contrast Bhagat's shoddy treatment at the hands of a Bollywood producer to that of Vikas Swarup, on whose novel Q&A (2005) the international hit Slumdog Millionaire (dir. Danny Boyle, 2008) was based. While Swarup was front and center at all events celebrating the film's phenomenal success, including at the Oscars, Bhagat's name appeared just once in the credits for 3 Idiots and that too at a very low billing!
For an English-language novelist such as Bhagat to desire a closer association with a blockbuster Hindi film such as 3 Idiots is indeed noteworthy if we consider the cultural dynamics that have historically kept the Indian novel in English at a great remove from the Hindi popular cinema.
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- A History of the Indian Novel in English , pp. 359 - 372Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015
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