Fawad Khan and Sanam Saeed in Hum TV’s Zindagi Gulzar Hai
But then again, adapting novels for television presents its own set of problems. One has to expand and divide scenes, characters and situations into television’s format. Both writers, it seems, have made peace with their reservations.
“It’s a different medium with its own set of requirements,” Ahmed tells me. “One learns by experience.” Ahmed admits that on her first screenwriting job, adapting her own material to television, she didn’t want to cut down the events in her novel. She was quick to realise that she had mucked up when the show aired on television. Ahmed didn’t make the same mistake twice.
She also didn’t contest when I suggested that Alif would have worked quite well as a motion picture.
Now, one might be inclined to argue why a bulk of this article is focusing on a specific genre — drama and romance — when literature has much more variety.
The reasoning, again, is simple to comprehend. Since the early 2000’s, no one, either in the film business or vaguely associated with it, has mentioned adapting a novel that has action or thriller elements to this writer. A widespread myth everyone believes in is that action and thriller are expensive genres; raunchy comedies work best, executives and filmmakers say time and again.
When prodded about past examples, the oldest ‘action’ title one industry executive recalls is Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi’s Gandasa, which became the basis of Wehshi Jutt (1975) and Maula Jutt (1979). (On that same note, crediting Bilal Lashari’s adaptation as an extension of Qasmi’s work is both unwarranted and immature, because the matter of its literary legacy is still up in court — and that the teaser looks nothing like the author’s work. Think of it as a derivation of a derivation.)
One other title is Dhamaka (1974), a lost film that gave Javed Sheikh his debut, based on Ibn-i-Safi’s Baibaakon Ki Talaash, a novel from the once-famed Imran series.
Coming back to the present, one has few other choices when one goes out hunting for material. The names that routinely pop up during highbrow, pseudo-intellectual conversations are Mohsin Hamid, Muhammad Hanif and Omar Shahid Hamid.
Hanif’s novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, I’m told, had never been taken up in Pakistan and Our Lady of Alice Bhatti has long been in development. Unverified sources also claim that Omar Shahid Hamid’s The Prisoner was also looked into by producers, but abandoned because it would be un-filmable in Pakistan. Of the three, Mohsin Hamid’s works had better luck being turned into motion pictures. The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012) was a foreign production by director Mira Nair, while Moth Smoke was adapted as a badly filmed, ponderous, made-for-TV movie by writer-producer-actor Shehzad Nawaz.
Ahmed says that one of the main reasons our literary works lack visibility is the language. Since people aren’t inclined to read Urdu novels, they have little awareness of promising novelists, or new or old existing novels that have the right cinematic panache for film adaptation.
We only know a handful of names (such as the aforementioned two Hamids and Hanif), because their works are in a universally preferred language and have gained international recognition. It’s the same case with prominent names in Urdu literature, whose works have been adapted into English.
Ahmed, however, tells me that she has a solution in the works. Her publishing house, Alif Kitab, is striving to create original voices, with an aim to mentor those with talent. The publishing house is also striving to adapt novels in English, she tells me, which might also help.
As it happens, we need all the help we can get.
Self-induced illiteracy — or at the very least, an utter contempt for reading — coupled with the absolute reluctance to set up story development divisions at production houses, has brought us to our present state of misfortune.
Even if there are story executives in place, almost no one has the training, the experience or the acumen to design motion pictures. Developing ideas for film, as we’ve painstakingly learned, isn’t the same as developing episodic stories for television.
Even if, for the sake of argument, there are intelligent people helming story divisions, independent filmmakers — especially the successful ones — have no desire to work under supervision.
In a state of ego-driven imperative to pitch and make their own ideas, filmmakers choose to disregard other alternatives. Stories, then, becomes the default casualty.
Now, I’m not saying that novels are an absolute solution to save the dwindling industry — far from it. Poorly defined stories and bad prose pop up in novels, or in well-thumbed yellowing pages of a digest too — but at least, it is an alternative worth looking into.
Who knows, the next big blockbuster could be lying at a rickety book-cart at Sunday Bazaar.
Published in Dawn, ICON, December 8th, 2019