Adaptation as Provocation: the historical confrontations of Padmaavat (2018)

Abstract

The paper will draw upon my ongoing research on the mutual constitution of hurt emotions and popular cinema in South Asia. A case in point is the big-budget Indian historical film Padmaavat (Sanjay L. Bhansali, 2018) thatwas mired in national controversy. Involving Rajput Karni Sena’s ‘street censorship’ (Mazarella, 2013) and bodily threats to the film personnel, the film has also been appraised in terms of its ‘fascist aesthetics’ (Gehlawat, 2019) and capitulation to the Hindutva ideology. 

          Based on the legend of the Rajput queen Padmini and a sixteenth-century ballad that versified a historical battle, Padmaavat is a landmark iteration of various precursor texts.  The paper situates the adaptation and the surrounding protests in the larger intermedial history of the Padmini story in South Asian comics, television and cinema to examine the (in)fidelity demonstrated by the twenty-first century Bollywood movie.  This (in)fidelity has two implications, neither of which pertain to the artistic merit of the film.  The first draws on Thomas Leitch’s identification of an analogous relationship between history and adaptation (Leitch, 2015) in identifying a disposition for historical discourse in the cinematic reworking.  Secondly, I draw attention to the segmentation and dispersal of the film through representative clips on YouTube that declare an older history of censorship, which the adaptation seeks to confront. Enmeshed with the political motives of its chief opponents, the film ultimately offers an occasion to reflect on the ethics of adaptation as provocation.