The art of gap management adopted and adapted from Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man to Deepa Mehta’s Earth

ABSTRACT

The literary adaptation into cinematic terms has become a ubiquitous phenomenon. In such a way, it brings about the intersection of the literary and the cine-text working towards assessing the intertextual resonances between the two. However, narratives can be subjected to several omissions and slippages which the artist intentionally devises. Formulating such gaps in between, the artist attempts to engage the attention of the readers/viewers and invites them to mend the fissures complying with the interpretive scope offered in the text. Venturing in a similar direction, the paper comparatively evaluates Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man with Deepa Mehta’s Earth. In doing so, it analyses the art of gap management as adopted and adapted from the literary precursor to the cinematic successor. To this end, it problematizes the creative approaches of the two artists involved. To put it differently, the perusal determines to what extent the writer and the director converge and diverge in the treatment of narratorial fissures by adopting the methodological tools of inclusion, omission and modification in the management of gaps in their respective renderings. Interestingly, such a perspective complicates the discourse around adaptation studies and offers a new insight into the process of adaptation.

KEYWORDS:

• Adaptation studies
• film studies
• literature
• gaps
• fissures

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The notion of the text which reader/viewer frames in his mind through the consumption of the particular text and can be considered as interpretants. The adapter also becomes the interpreter of the source text which he conceives, processes and then delivers with his vision into a new version.

2 Motif signifies the recurrent pattern of gaps surfacing in the text.

3 Projection suggests one extreme of representing the narrative which is liable to be revised later. This point has been elucidated through official historiographies which strengthen public memory, and the early speeches of the politicians and characters camouflaging their real intent.

4 Reality implies the other extreme of representing the narrative which is crystallized after the revisionary approach as in the case with private memory suggesting a counter narrative, and the revised stances of the politicians and characters flouting their earlier claims.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chitwan Kaur

Chitwan Kaur is working as an Assistant Professor at the Department of English at G.N.D.U, Amritsar. She has published several papers in reputed journals. She has research interests in media studies, film studies, adaptation studies, partition studies, queer studies, gender studies, cultural studies, plastic studies, plastic studies and postcolonial literature. She is keen to explore the interdisciplinary nature of literature and film, the impact of media on society and the various aspects of film making. Currently, she is working to discern the relationship between plastic and culture as depicted in literature and films.