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Tag: Film adaptation

  • The City of Joy

    First published in French in 1985, The City of Joy is set in Anand Nagar, a crowded slum in Howrah across the river from Calcutta. Lapierre based his book on years of research and on real people, whose names and details he altered, and wrote it in a novelistic style that blurs reportage and fiction.

    Three main figures carry the narrative. Stephan Kovalski, a Polish Catholic priest, chooses to live among the slum's residents rather than minister to them from outside. Hasari Pal, a farmer driven from his Bengal village by drought and debt, becomes a rickshaw puller in the city. Max Loeb, a young American doctor, arrives to help run a clinic and confronts leprosy, cholera, monsoon floods and the slum's own mafia.

    The book was a worldwide bestseller and was filmed by Roland Joffe in 1992. Some Indian critics objected to its portrayal of Calcutta as a byword for misery, while admirers praised its insistence on the dignity, humour and solidarity of the poor. Lapierre donated a large share of his royalties to charitable work in the region.

    Book details

    AuthorDominique Lapierre
    First published1985
    Original languageFrench
    Translated byKathryn Spink
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)470
    SettingAnand Nagar slum, Howrah, near Calcutta, 1970s and early 1980s

    Themes

    • Poverty and resilience
    • Faith and service
    • Migration from countryside to city
    • Solidarity
    • Human dignity

    Who should read it

    Readers moved by stories of courage in hardship, with an awareness of the outsider's lens it brings to Calcutta.

  • Pinjar

    Pinjar, meaning skeleton, was published in Punjabi in 1950. Puro, a young Hindu woman engaged to a man she has barely met, is abducted by Rashid, a Muslim from a family that nurses an old grievance against hers. When she escapes and returns home, her parents, fearing the community's judgement, turn her away, and she must make a life within the marriage forced upon her, renamed Hamida.

    Puro's inner world is the centre of the book: her anger, her sense of being reduced to a body without a self, and her slow, complicated understanding of Rashid, who is both her wrongdoer and capable of remorse. As Partition violence engulfs Punjab, she sees other women abducted, raped and abandoned, and her own experience becomes a lens on theirs.

    Amrita Pritam wrote with stark economy and fierce sympathy for women whose bodies became battlegrounds of family honour and communal revenge. Khushwant Singh translated it into English as The Skeleton, and Chandraprakash Dwivedi's 2003 film brought it to a wide audience. It remains one of the most important literary works on women and Partition.

    Book details

    AuthorAmrita Pritam
    First published1950
    Original languagePunjabi
    Translated byKhushwant Singh
    GenreHistorical fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)120
    SettingVillages of Punjab, 1930s to 1947

    Themes

    • Abduction of women
    • Family honour
    • Partition
    • Identity and renaming
    • Resilience

    Who should read it

    Anyone seeking a woman's perspective on Partition in a brief, powerful novel.

  • Train to Pakistan

    Mano Majra is a small village on the Sutlej, with a railway bridge and a station whose train timings organise the day. Sikh farmers and Muslim tenants have lived together for generations, largely untouched by the politics of Partition. Then, in the summer of 1947, a ghost train arrives from Pakistan carrying the bodies of murdered Sikhs and Hindus.

    Khushwant Singh moves between a handful of characters: Juggut Singh, a hulking local thug in love with a Muslim weaver's daughter; Iqbal, an English-educated activist sent to rouse the peasants; and Hukum Chand, the district magistrate, a weary, compromised man who tries to manipulate events from his rest house. As refugees and armed groups arrive, the village is pushed toward retaliation.

    Written with unsentimental directness and dark humour, the novel was one of the first major works of fiction about Partition violence. Its manuscript won the Grove Press India Fiction Prize, and it was filmed by Pamela Rooks in 1998. It is brief enough to read in a sitting but lingers long afterwards.

    Book details

    AuthorKhushwant Singh
    First published1956
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreHistorical fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)181
    SettingMano Majra, a village on the India-Pakistan border in Punjab, summer 1947
    AwardsGrove Press India Fiction Prize 1954

    Themes

    • Partition
    • Communal violence
    • Love across religion
    • Moral responsibility
    • Village life

    Who should read it

    Anyone wanting a short, unflinching novel about how Partition reached ordinary villages.

  • The Namesake

    Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli leave Calcutta for Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the late 1960s, he as a graduate student and she as a homesick young bride. When their son is born, a delayed letter from her grandmother means the boy is registered under a pet name, Gogol, chosen by Ashoke for reasons connected to a train accident he survived in India.

    The novel follows Gogol from childhood birthdays through Yale, an architecture career in New York and relationships with women who represent different escapes: a wealthy Manhattan family, and a fellow Bengali American with her own restlessness. Renaming himself Nikhil, he keeps his parents at a distance, until life forces him to reckon with what they carried.

    Jhumpa Lahiri's first novel is understated and observant, built from meals, rituals and long silences rather than dramatic plot. It is one of the best-known novels of the South Asian diaspora in America, and Mira Nair's 2006 film with Irrfan Khan and Tabu brought it to a wider audience.

    Book details

    AuthorJhumpa Lahiri
    First published2003
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)291
    SettingCambridge and suburban Massachusetts, New York and Calcutta, 1968 to 2000

    Themes

    • Diaspora identity
    • Names and selfhood
    • Parents and children
    • Assimilation
    • Grief

    Who should read it

    Anyone who has felt caught between their parents' homeland and the country they grew up in.