Chapter 5 - Adaptation and Epistemic Redress: The Indian Uprising in Junoon

Summary

INTRODUCTION: INDIA – THE LOCUS OF ENUNCIATION AND ADAPTATION

If a memory wasn’t a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering its history: the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself.

Our interest – curiosity, even – in the Victorian Age has resulted in a continued investment in ventriloquising the Victorians themselves, as in the case of the various adaptations of Victorian novels and afterlives of Victorian literature in contemporary settings as well as through neo-Victorian renditions. Towards an epistemic reading of adaptation, this chapter discusses the Hindi film Junoon (The Obsession, 1979), directed by Shyam Benegal and produced by Shashi Kapoor, a screen adaptation of the neo-Victorian novella A Flight of Pigeons (1978) by Anglo-Indian author Ruskin Bond, set during the 1857 Indian uprising against British rule, as a creative exercise of epistemic redress whose locus of enunciation and adaptation is a former colony of the British empire. Bond admits to being inspired by Victorian authors such as R. L. Stevenson and Charles Dickens; nonetheless, A Flight of Pigeons was based on Anglo-Indian writer J. F. Fanthome’s 1896 novel Mariam.

Junoon follows A Flight of Pigeons closely plot-wise. Bond’s novella was chosen by Benegal and actor-producer Shashi Kapoor (Junoon was Kapoor’s first film as producer) to be adapted for the big screen following its publication. This double adaptative movement can be characterised as trans-temporal ventriloquism, as Benegal’s screen adaptation of Bond’s neo-Victorian novella is an instance of postcolonial epistemic remediation of Victorian mutiny fictions whose enunciators were British. In A Flight of Pigeons and Junoon the location of knowledge production about the 1857 uprising is post-Independence India. Miles Taylor explains that various causes led to this ‘widespread, organised revolt’ in northern India, reaching beyond the localised military mutinies: ‘[s]ocial change, modernised communications, religion, new taxes and old grievances.’ As such, the epistemic remediation of A Flight of Pigeons and Junoon involves issues of archive, memory and trauma, setting out to restate a sense of historical continuity.