In any debate concerning the relative merits of a novel and its film version, usually, since the first film based on a novel “Uncle Tom's Cabin” (1903), the novel comes off better – for obvious reasons. Besides constraints of time and space, a film, being a composite art, depends on the competence of many to succeed. Also, it cannot easily communicate abstractions which includes the inner world of individuals; and it can offer only ‘one film' chosen by the director whereas every reader sees ‘his own film'. However, a few creative directors conceive of many strategies to transcend these limitations. P. Sheshadri, the director of the award-winning film, “Bettada Jeeva” , is one such.
“Bettada Jeeva” (1943),one of the major novels by Shivaram Karanth, does not tell a story. Rather, it is a study of an extraordinary individual. The protagonist, Gopalayya, decides to live in a dense forest and makes it habitable. The place he lives is in the valley of the awesome Western Ghats, notorious for horrid rains, wild animals, and Malaria. Against all odds, he and his wife succeed in taming the forest and raising a coconut-betelnut garden and lush paddy fields there. But his son, Shambhu, gets ‘modern' education, hates forest life, and runs away from home; and his old parents keep waiting for his return.
The novel can be read as a record of Man's indomitable will pitted against harsh Nature; and, from this point of view, it resembles Hemingway's novel, “The Old Man and the Sea” . However, Karanth's novel is also concerned with the effect of alien culture and education; what defeats Gopalayya is not wild nature, but Shambhu's English education. The narrator of this novel, Shivaramayya, is city-bred and hence, has no taste for the kind of life chosen by Gopalayya. With the use of such a narrator, Karanth frees his novel from simplistic judgments about Man and Nature.
P. Sheshadri, who shot into fame with the award-winning film “Munnudi,” based on a story by writer Boluvaru Mohammed Kunhi, has directed this film very sensitively. He is mostly loyal to the ‘original' work, but nevertheless offers something of his own. He turns both the novel's narrator and Gopalayya's son into freedom fighters; and it is while fleeing the Police that Shivaramaiah stumbles upon the Gopalayya couple. This framework of freedom-struggle gives the narrator an identity of his own and a valid rationale for Shambhu's running away to escape an isolated and enclosed life. But the factors that reveal the director's creative imagination are, primarily, two: exploiting the visual medium to convey experientially what the novelist ‘tells' his readers, and focussing upon the ‘defining trait' of a character.
Consider the camera-work. The scene in which Shivaramayya (deftly played by Sucheendra Prasad) is chased by the Police is unexpectedly long — intentionally. Karanth describes very vividly the harshness of the forest-life; but the film, patiently and methodically, shows us all these hazards when Shivaramaiah struggles to walk in the forest: dark and slippery jungle tracks, fallen trees functioning as adhoc bridges, swarms of mosquitoes and leeches, and the cries of wild animals. This one long scene helps the audience not only to experience the harshness but also, to appreciate better the adamantine will of Gopalayya. In fact, the brilliant camera work establishes both the pristine grandeur and terror of the jungles near the Western Ghats.
Karanth's narrator is ‘city-bred.' But the film establishes that factor in many other ways. The language Shivaramayya uses throughout is bookish and his delivery stylised. These two factors, bookish vocabulary and stylised delivery, establish that he is an ‘outsider' to the particular environment. In other words, Shivaramaiah is what Karanth makes the narrator ‘tell' us: “But, this much is certain: a man like me, even if he were offered one hundred rupees a month, couldn't live here even for six months.” Shivaramaiah's cry, “don't kill the tiger,” may appear to be an attempt by the director to enlist himself with environmentalists; but it also establishes that Shivaramayya is an alien in that environment. Only a city-bred man can plead not to kill the tiger; for people like Gopalayya, it is a question of survival.
In the novel, by the time the narrator meets Gopalayya and his wife, they are heartbroken by their son leaving home. But, in the film, the defining trait of ‘the man of the hills,' Gopalayya, is his ‘unending zest for life'. The film brilliantly establishes this gushing spirit of Gopalayya through many incidents: for instance, how he jumps splashes around sensuously in the clear stream; his love for paan and how he puts it lovingly in his wife's mouth. And he even tells Shivaramaiah: “If I will it, even now I can raise a garden on the slopes of that hill.” The ‘oil bath' scene is the highlight; and Dattanna, who has donned this role inimitably, appears to be ‘a man of many roles'; with each different role, his gait, bodily gestures, facial expression, and speech-delivery – everything changes to suit his role. In this film, of course, he lives the role of Gopalayya. And Rameshwari does full justice to her role with her soft, tender words and gestures.
The challenge every film/theatre director faces is to transform the narrative of ‘signs' to that of ‘images' and still retain the rhetoric of the literary work; and, there is no doubt that Sheshadri and his team have totally succeeded in this task.
