The ease with which his books are adapted by Hindi cinema and the success of these films have not only put him in an enviable position but may have also set the foundation for new terms of engagement between filmmakers and screenwriters
The year 2014 was nothing less than monumental for Chetan Bhagat. Besides being an active social commentator on the lok Sabha Elections, that in many ways changed the way India looked at itself, Bhagat had a new bestseller, Half Girlfriend, a film adaptation that became the second one based on his works to join the Rs100-crore league, 2 States, and a screenwriting credit that wasn’t based on any of his previous writing, Kick. With the production of Half Girlfriend already underway, Bhagat could very well be the only Indian writer whose entire fiction bibliography has been adapted by Hindi cinema. The ease with which his works make themselves readily adaptable by popular Hindi cinema and moreover the proven track record of these films that include 3 Idiots (2009) and Kai Po Che (2013) at the box-office have not only put him in an enviable position as far as writers in Bollywood go but may have also set the foundation for newer terms of engagement between filmmakers and screenwriters. In what could be a first of its kind, beginning with Half Girlfriend, Bhagat will also command a stake in the production of films based on his works — something that would have been impossible to conceive a few years ago for most film writers, including the man himself.
like most things in good fiction and life, Bhagat accidentally stumbled into writing for films. In fact, all he wanted from Hindi films once upon a time was someone who was familiar enough with his work to launch his second book, One Night @ the Call Center. Per chance he read somewhere that Vidya Balan had launched a new edition of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Parineeta following the success of her film based on the acclaimed author’s book and got in touch with her regarding his book launch. The actress knew Bhagat’s first book centered around an engineering college and in the course of the conversation mentioned that the director she was working with at that point in time, Rajkumar Hirani, had made a film around a medical college, and Bhagat asked her to help him send Five Point Someone to him.
Although based out of Hong Kong and working in a bank, Bhagat was more than aware about the reach of Hindi cinema and wondered if the book could entice someone like Hirani to make a film. Hirani was immersed in the sequel of Munna Bhai MBBS (2003) and told Bhagat that he might not get time for the next six months to even read the book. But the unexpected cloudburst of July 2005 changed everything. Stuck in his home for days, Hirani picked up the copy of Five Point Someone and found his next film. Although Bhagat’s maiden book was also the first one to get optioned, his follow-up ended up becoming his first release. The success of lage Raho Munna Bhai (2006) had led to widespread speculation that Hirani might end up making the third Munna Bhai instead of adapting Five Point Someone. Bhagat wanted a film based on his book to get out there and numerous discussions with Hirani in the early stages of mapping out the adaptation had been inspirational enough to give screenwriting a shot. He considers Hirani to be one of his first teachers who made him want to get more involved with the process of transforming his books into screenplays, but there were unexpected delays, and so when Atul Agnihotri came up with the offer of adapting One Night @ the Call Center, Bhagat lapped it up with both hands.
Ultimately the film version of One Night @ the Call Center, Hello (2008) didn’t do much for Bhagat expect teach him that he’d need to put in more effort into his screenwriting skills. Bhagat doesn’t doubt that he didn’t do a great job adapting his book but believes that the failure of the film couldn't be attributed to lacklustre screenplay.
At a time when commercial Hindi cinema was opening up to a new kind of realism in the form of Rock On!! (2008), the commercialisation of the basic plot by way of fancy sets and a cameo by Salman Khan, who also happened to be the director’s brother-in-law, increased the distance between the book and the adaptation. The first casualty of such changes ended up being the realism, which in a sense is the hallmark of the universe that Bhagat’s books explore, and even though the book on which it was based sold well, the film failed.
By the time Five Point Someone was adapted and released as 3 Idiots, Bhagat had become a brand unto himself. His name was enough to sell books in millions and an entire generation of young Indians looked up to him, but that still didn’t stop Hindi cinema from treating him worse than a rank newcomer. The creative team behind the adaptation of Five Point Someone included some of the biggest names in the trade — Hirani, Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Abhijat Joshi and Aamir Khan — and even though 3 Idiots was an official adaptation, something went wrong following the release and Bhagat found himself in the middle of a controversy regarding his contribution.
The film’s pre-release publicity prominently featured Bhagat’s book as the basis for the film’s screenplay, but once the film was released there was a belief amongst the production house that Bhagat, and by extension Five Point Someone, were at best an inspiration. In spite of being a bestselling author and a well-known name across the nation’s bookstores, Bhagat was labeled as someone desperate to partake on the success of a film that was being lauded across the board. The controversy raised questions about Bhagat’s contribution and the runaway success of the film, which was rightfully credited to the screenwriters, pushed Bhagat to the sidelines. The end credits of the film did mention Bhagat’s name but the writer felt a need to be acknowledged in the right light as the one who provided the platform for the film that opened up a national debate about the pressures of academics on students. Irrespective of the level of the success, the book benefitted from how its subject became a topic of serious discussion, which was largely due to the triumph of the film. The sheer reach of a successful commercial Hindi film elevated a popular novel to the level of cult, and perhaps this made the filmmakers believe that this was the screenwriter’s contribution, but still one wonders if they would have reacted with the same disdain if the writer concerned happened to be an Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth or Mulk Raj Anand.
Irrespective of where one stood on the issue, it made one thing very clear that film writers would always be considered dispensable. Bhagat might have been on solid footing from a legal perspective, but there was nothing that these laws could do when it came Bollywood. In spite of a cinema that loves its stars and where the entire star system depends on the aural skills of its performers, it somewhere fails to show the same love for the men and women who write these lines. Writers were mostly treated as labourers and made to work like machines. Some writers were better off if they attached themselves to filmmakers such as Khwaja Ahmad Abbas and Raj Kapoor, or became a part of big production houses’ story departments, such as Satish Bhatnagar with Sippy Films, and Akhtar ul Iman and Rahi Masoom Reza with BR Films. Non-film writers saw films largely as a source of quick bucks and literary stalwarts such as Saadat Hasan Manto, Pandit Mukhram Sharma or popular ones such as Gulshan Nanda tried to keep one foot in and one foot out.
Things changed for writers with the emergence of Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar, who changed the landscape of Hindi cinema with films such as Yaadon Ki Baraat (1973), Zanjeer (1973), Sholay (1975), Deewar (1975), Trishul (1978), and Shakti (1982) to name a few, but more importantly brought respectability, and even authority to writers. They were perhaps the first writers to get credit on the poster of the film, and not only demanded but also got astronomical fees, sometimes more than the stars they wrote for.
But this success didn’t really empower the writers in general and the advent of a new crop of filmmakers like Vidhu Vinod Chopra (Khamosh, 1985) Mansoor Khan (Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak, 1988) Sooraj Barjatya (Maine Pyar Kiya, 1989), Ram Gopal Varma (Shiva, 1990) and Rajkumar Santoshi (Ghayal, 1990) changed the status of writers as they preferred to write their own scripts. They inspired the next crop — Aditya Chopra (Dilwale Dulhania le Jayenge, 1995), Sanjay leela Bhansali (Khamoshi: The Musical, 1996), Karan Johar (Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, 1999) and Farhan Akhtar (Dil Chahta Hai, 2002), who then went on do the same for many who followed them. By mid-1990s, collaborations with non-film writers had reduced considerably and it was a time when remakes — official or otherwise — were in vogue, and the writer was seen as a translator.
Even now it’s the top production houses that call the shots and maybe that’s why no one within the industry supported Bhagat or understood the idea of intellectual property that was behind the struggle. It would take a few years and one half of the original trailblazers of writers’ rights, Javed Akhtar, to champion the cause and fight for the Copyright Amendment Bill of 2012 that would make producers wary of pushing their luck.
The late 1980s updating of commercial Hindi cinema’s grammar altered the syntax of the hero, which by virtue ended up redefining the star, the entity in mind while writing stories. Besides being a function of the star, screenwriting in Hindi cinema is often forced to work around a bunch of dos and don’ts, and in Nasreen Munni Kabir’s book Talking Films, Akhtar best defines this job as one where the writer is to write a totally original script that has come before. like most non-film writers, Bhagat took a while to understand this aspect of the business, but today, he sees the ability of a script to attach itself to a star as one of the biggest difference between a book being optioned and a film getting made. He cities the example of 3 Idiots where the character played by Aamir Khan walks off with the girl in the end as opposed to the book where the one portrayed by R Madhavan gets the girl to elucidate how someone from a non-film background might take a while to adjust to the reality of screenwriting.
Following the 3 Idiots controversy, Bhagat doubted if he even belonged here and would have given up had it not been for the faith shown by Abhishek Kapoor, who was directing Kai Po Che, an adaptation of his book The 3 Mistakes of My life. Bhagat remembers how he argued with Kapoor that he might end up being a pariah for taking on the biggies, but Kapoor knew better. The former actor, who made a name for himself as the writer-director of Rock On!! and had also undergone a similar phase, urged Bhagat to hang in and practically restored the writer’s faith. Bhagat had longed for a second shot at getting screenwriting right and being more actively involved with the entire process. Kai Po Che turned out be the one stone that got both birds for him. It proved to be a tough book to adapt largely due to the fact that the narrative of the book included the Godhra riots that, besides making many A-list names pass the film, was also turning out be something that wasn’t falling into place even after 15 drafts. On top of it, Bhagat was also reeling under the pressure to not mess it up with the filmmakers this time around. Collaborating with Kapoor as well as Pubali Chaudhari and Supratik Sen proved to be a worthwhile experience for Bhagat, the screenwriter, who managed to come up with a critically acclaimed as well as commercially successful film that fetched him a Filmfare for writing. But the best thing that Kai Po Che did for Bhagat was the manner in which critics responded to him. The unlikely adaptation that in a way emulated the manner in which 3 Idiots elevated Five Point Someone to a different level compelled the critics to take him slightly seriously and consider him to be slightly profound.
If Kai Po Che changed things, the next Bhagat adaptation 2 States (2014) established him as a brand name that could sell films. The film became his second Rs100-crore box-office success, and this time around Bhagat’s was by far the biggest name attached to the project. The same year also saw Bhagat becoming one of the writers of Kick, a Salman Khan film that was unlike any of his previous writing assignments.
This kind of success is enough to make a writer a star and even catapult him to the same category as, say, a Salim-Javed. And while the comparison might be audacious, the plain truth is that there isn’t any other screenwriter today whose name might act as a guarantee as Bhagat’s does. Unlike other contemporary big draws in screenwriting, Bhagat isn’t rapt with the thought of donning the mantle of a fulltime screenwriter. Not yet at least. For someone who believes that he’s always been medium ambivalent when it comes to exploring an idea, Bhagat would rather write his next book than work on an original screenplay. He feels that as a writer he can express more with a book and there’s always the option of adapting it into a film.
Moreover the enviable position that he enjoys as a popular writer and the influence his social commentary wields on a huge segment of young Indians would surely be at risk if he were to limit himself to a specific field. The only risk that Bhagat seems to be keen on taking is one where he pushes the writer within. Something that he believes he tried with Half Girlfriend. Bhagat wanted to do break away from the predictable urban set-up that all his books featured and at the same time didn’t want to lose the cool quotient that his regular readership craves. Bhagat might have specifically designed Half Girlfriend as a safe love story, but the background with reference to the rural education system was a departure from his usual metro based observation.
Half Girlfriend was criticised for reading like a screenplay and many believe this to be a subconscious impact of his film adventures, but Bhagat isn’t too bothered with the reaction. He points out that the book was three times the length of a standard screenplay and although he doesn’t know how much of the rural detailing would be retained in the film version, he is happy that he took the risk while writing it. Furthermore to opening up new vistas for Bhagat, the cinematic success of Bhagat, the writer, has also in a way revived the idea of getting Hindi cinema interested in the idea of exploring non-film writers and literature as source material. It has started a trend of big production houses optioning works of bestselling authors such as Amish and Anuja Chauhan.
For a writer whose average readership runs into millions, Bhagat believes that he is at a place where it would be incorrect to not take risks. Even if the readership for his subsequent book drops by a few hundreds or thousands, it would still remain a substantial number and that is enough for him to try something new.
Chintamani is the author of the best-selling Dark Star: The loneliness of Being Rajesh Khanna (HarperCollins, 2014) | Tweet him @gchintamani
