From the Visual to the Word

Bapsi Sidhwa’s Water is an unusual work which translates Deepa Mehta’s film “Water” into a novel. It renders an audio-visual experience into words, significantly reversing the commoner trend of turning novels into films and problematizing the usually assumed authority and “originality” of the literary text over the “adapted” cinematic version. Here the book adapts the film. As such, Mehta, the screenplay and dialogue writer remains a crucial contributor to the project. This is a new phase in the collaborative work that Mehta and Sidhwa started with Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man being turned into Mehta’s film, “Earth”.