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1947 Earth Vs. Cracking Inida Transition from a novel to a film is quite difficult at times especially when it comes to a partition like the one in India in 1947. The main purpose of my essay will be to find the problems and differences with the transition between the two works. Investigating the problem between Bapsi Sidwa's novel Cracking India and its film adaptation Deepa Metha's 1947 Earth by comparing the two together but focusing on Lenny's sexual representation, Ayah's transformation throughout the film and novel and how this causes Ayah's abduction with Ice Candy Man, will be my main target point.
I argue that Bapsi Sidwa’s Cracking India and Deepa Metha's 1947 Earth discuss the theme of gender and violence. The characters Lenny, Ayah, and Ice Candy Man all were affected by the trauma in some way or other.
The film adaptation fails to fully represent the book and has roots to its theme. The film focuses on Lenny's coming of age and how she changes and adapts to her problems with her nanny, Ayah.
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It induces the violence and partition events as well. In the film, it fails to show us Lenny's struggle with her coming of age due to her mother being extremely abused by her father.
Her mother was cheated and physically abused to the fullest by this man. The film also excludes Lenny's introduction to sexual activity when the novel strongly shows us Lenny's sexual situations with Cousin. This is when Ayah makes Lenny extremely upset. Ayah gets lots of looks and respect from men and Lenny sees that and is strongly bothered by it.
The novel does a wonderful job with bringing out Lenny's strong attitude towards sexuality and men in general.
This chips into how Ayah's and Lenny's relationship basically works and how Lenny feeds off Ayah and learns from how she does things. When looking at these stories, they both include the obvious, violence, love, and disloyalty. With the partition being the violence, Lenny and Ayah's opposite sex cravings being love, and Lenny's father cheating on her mother being the disloyalty in this situation. In Metha's film there is another blatant reason for these small stories. Trilogy's such as Fire, Earth, and Water represent a form of violence against the women apart of this area at the time. Fire conceals same-sex female desires that works in context with their morals. Earth is basically the overall violence against the women during this time and Water is the social limitations put in place in Hinduism (Metha's film). These three simple stories tell a story within themselves that basically explains why love and violence was such a large reason for women struggle existed at this time. In the film it is much easier to decrypt these 3 trilogy's but Metha struggles to implement some of the small details of the book. Obviously the film helps put a visual on Lenny's struggle with this sexual need but the film does leave out a lot of Lenny's sexual awakenings while the book shows us how Lenny used Ayah as a lesson of her own adolescence.
Within the entire Partition, both Metha and Sidhwa provide us with Ayah's transformation from a girl that a four year old strives to be to being an abducted rape victim. In the beginning of the novel, our narrator Lenny describes how Ayah gets “covetous glances” from a variety of men-beggars, holy men, hawkers, and so on” (Sidhwa 3). In the film, Metha uses the Queen's garden scene to show us Ayah's ability to attract all types of men. During this scene Ayah is basically sitting around a bunch of men, having a conversation which all the men look at her with plans on their minds. Once Ayah figures these vibes the men were gives off she puts on her sari and receives physical attractions from these men. Now, in the book Lenny points out that Ice Candy Man tries to put his shoed foot inside of Ayah's sari and says this, “things love to crawl beneath Ayah's sari. Ladybirds, glowworms, Ice Candy Man's toes” (Sidhwa 19). Basically what Lenny is trying to say is that once Ayah's sari is on anyone and anything will try to get underneath. In the film it shows Ayah getting angry with Ice Candy Man while in the book it doesn't provide us with that and tries to focus more on Lenny's side of things rather than the actual event occurring. As an addition to this, the film provides us with a part that shows us Ice Candy Man trying to teach Ayah to fly a kite holding her quite closely. What Ice Candy Man is trying to do is represent the kite as a lover. Basically, he is trying to win her body over without telling her to her face because he is afraid of what she will say. The book helps us understand Ayah's view of situations like these. Tolerating them is all Ayah knows and she has no other exposure to any other solution. Ice Candy Man in both the book and the film likes to represent himself as a form of power and control. This could be a reason on why Ice Candy Man believes he is winning Ayah over rather than giving in to the girl and allowing her to be able to say that she has won him over. Once Independence comes around the attraction from her admirers change drastically. I will discuss her center of attention and how quickly things changed for Ayah.
Ayah becomes part of a discussion that a group of men are having involving religious matters. On the day of Independence, Ayah is represented as something less than anything important. Ayah is abducted and raped by the Muslim mobs run by Ice Candy Man and she becomes the main figure in the film representing female violence and torture. Both the novel and the film show and represent Ayah's abduction but they take different routes with their explanation of how Ayah handled her abduction afterwards. Metha's film does not show us what happens to Ayah after she is abducted. At the end of the film it shows us Lenny in the Queen's Garden with her voice in the background saying "I never set eyes on her again” (Metha's film).
This gives us a hint that either Ayah is no longer living or she abandoned her country. Cracking India goes in a different direction and shows us Ayah's life in a brothel in Lahore. It shows us her recovery through Lenny's mother and godmothers eyes. Also we find out that in the novel, Ayah does not forgive Ice Candy Man. She marries a man, chooses to cross the border to mainly regain her identity due to her bad image in her home town. Again, in the film we are not given these scenes or pieces of information about Ayah which gives us more of a tunnel eye view on things.
In addition, with Ayah not being able to tell her story in the novel and Metha's film not giving us an ending to show us what happened to Ayah, shows us that silence is something that the partition held. Silence by many people throughout both the book and the film really haunts the violence during this time. Rape and abduction wasn't a big deal and female violence didn't seem to affect the people at that time.
In conclusion, Cracking India and 1947 Earth share lots of similarities and both portray violence during the partition. Ayah being our main focus helps show the different directions made by Metha in her film. Metha had a feminist perspective on things especially when it came to the violence against the bodies of women and her ability to work off of Sidhwa's novel showed to work quite well. Metha used Sidhwa's ideas and incorporated them into the over violence during the partition. She also successfully revamped the soul of the novel with her own observations to recreate the overall moral of the story, love, gender, violence, and disloyalty.
Gender Violence in Bapsi Sidwa's Cracking India and Deepa Mehta's Earth. (2022, Apr 12). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/the-problems-differences-and-the-theme-of-gender-and-violence-in-bapsi-sidwa-s-cracking-india-and-deepa-metha-s-1947-earth-essay
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