Thoughts on Kai Po Che! as an adaptation

The process of comparing a film with the book it was adapted from is often ridden with simplifications; such comparisons also tend to have an inbuilt bias towards the book, being premised on the condescending idea that cinema is merely illustrated literature. But I think most people who have seen the new film Kai Po Che! and also read the Chetan Bhagat novel The 3 Mistakes of my Life will agree that the film is a more fully realised work, and it may be worth looking at where its strengths lie vis-a-vis the source text.

At his best, especially when writing about things that he has firsthand experience of, Bhagat knows how to pace a story for his target readership and give them characters and conversations they can relate to. (An old post about this here.) But a self-conscious strain enters his work when he deals with situations requiring gravitas – such as violence during a communal riot – and in The 3 Mistakes of My Life, the writing becomes most clunky at the points of highest drama. Consider this bit from the book's climax, which reads more like the first draft of a screenplay than a well-crafted passage in a finished novel; an inert, disjointed description of things happening one by one, rather than an attempt to convey the messy, urgent wholeness of the moment:

Mama closed his eyes again and mumbled silent chants. He took his folded hands to his forehead and heart and tapped it thrice. He opened his eyes and lifted the trishul. Ali stood up and tried to limp away.

Mama lifted the trishul high to strike.

“Mama, no,” Omi screamed in his loudest voice. Omi pushed the man blocking him. He ran between Mama and Ali. Mama screamed a chant and struck.

“Stop Mama,” Omi said.

Even if Mama wanted to, he couldn’t. The strike already had momentum. The trishul entered Omi’s stomach with a dull thud.

“Oh...oh,” Omi said as he absorbed what happened first and felt the pain later. Within seconds, a pool of blood covered the floor. Mama and his men looked at each other, trying to make sense of what had occurred.

Even a moderately well-directed and well-performed movie sequence would be an improvement on the above passage (a competent sound designer might also replace the “dull thud” when a sharp weapon enters human flesh with a more appropriate sound), and Kai Po Che! is more than a moderately good film. It is wonderfully acted and has a real sense of character development. The screenplay – on which Bhagat collaborated with Pubali Chaudhari, Supratik Sen and director Abhishek Kapoor – is more focused, and the dialogue more authentic-sounding, than the often flat prose in the book. The decision to remove the novel’s framing device (in which Bhagat receives a suicide note from an Ahmedabad businessman) was a sensible one, as was the paring of a couple of flabby subplots and peripheral characters such as the Australian cricketer who uses similes like “I’m off like a bride’s nightie”.

In the history of Auteurism (which I will not go on about here!), there are many instances of directors choosing source material that will enable them to revisit their cherished themes and personal obsessions. Though it’s way too early to call Abhishek Kapoor an auteur – even if you’re using the word in the most modest possible sense – one should note that like his last film Rock On!, Kai Po Che! is about the gap between innocence and experience, and about how life can scupper the best-laid plans of shiny-eyed young people. In this coming-of-age tale set mostly in 2001-2002, the three central characters – the friends Govind, Ishaan and Omi – are affected by various important things that happened to Gujarat and to India during that period: the Kutch earthquake, the emergence of a mall culture with the promise of attractive retail space and new business opportunities, the historic India-Australia Test match in Kolkata in March 2001, and most significantly the Godhra massacre and the anti-Muslim riots that followed it. The book’s narrator Govind is the film’s quiet anchoring figure (extremely well-played by Raj Kumar Yadav), a young man whose interest in Mathematics – the one certainty in a world where pretty much everything else is ambiguous and up for discussion – was one of the more entertaining things about the novel (it is somewhat toned down in the film). Ishaan (Sushant Singh Rajput) is a temperamental cricket player who develops a bond with a 12-year-old Muslim boy, the extraordinarily gifted Ali. And Omi (Amit Sadh) is falling under the influence of his uncle Bittu maama, a leader of the chauvinistic local Hindu party.

With this basic information, it is easy enough to guess how the lives and personal equations of these three friends will be altered by the communal clashes – especially after Omi loses his parents in the Godhra attack. But I thought the film’s climax was more layered and challenging than the novel’s, partly because of how it makes Omi a participant in the riots. In the book he retains his innocence when crunch time arrives; he even ends up taking the trishul-blow intended for the boy Ali (as you might gather from the passage quoted above). And this allows the maama, a distant character in whom the reader has little emotional investment (fleshing out side-characters is not one of Bhagat’s strong suits anyway), to conveniently become the figurehead for Evil. Much of the responsibility for the bad things that happen in the end are fobbed off on him, while the three protagonists remain young innocents, our unsullied points of identification.

The film, on the other hand, has dramatic impetus (which is lacking in the final passages of the novel) along with a more developed sense of how “good” people – or “apolitical” people – can be engulfed by tides that they don’t fully understand. Long before Godhra, we have already seen Omi becoming a little closed and distanced from his friends, gradually turning into a puppet for his maama and a handsome public-relations man for the party. (Even his freshly grown moustache underlines his new status as his uncle's minion-clone and a card-carrying member of a group that feels the need to emphasize their masculinity because of the perception that they have been weak for too long.) Later, driven by personal vendetta in the climactic scenes where a Hindu mob attacks one of the city’s Muslim quarters, he is for a while indistinguishable from the older, more hardened men around him, and unrecognisable from the cheerful kid who helped his friends set up a sports shop earlier in the story.

Manav Kaul’s thin-lipped maama is a scary figure – the sort of man whom you can imagine planning a massacre, carefully examining the trunk-loads of scythes with which he will slit the bellies of his enemies. But watch Omi’s face near the end of the film – initial confusion and anguish slowly turning into watchful determination – and you see how he might become a similarly cold-blooded rabble-rouser a few years down the line. Eventually it takes a friend’s senseless murder – with his own hand on the trigger – for Omi to regain something of his humanity, but something much deeper has been lost. In the face of his transformation, the good guys-vs-bad guys dichotomy is no longer so easy to believe in. And this moral ambivalence belongs mostly to the film; there is no real parallel for it in the book.

[Some earlier posts on adaptations: Susanna’s Seven Husband/Saat Khoon Maaf; A Kiss Before Dying; notes from the Times of India lit-fest]