Whenever a film, or for that matter, a book or even a play, is remade, it is confronted with a horde of fans waiting to measure the remake to the perceived higher standards of the original. Fans can take an almost masochistic pleasure in spotting and analysing every change the director has made to their beloved piece of art – a world they have inhabited, lived through and already claimed as their own.
This has been the case with ‘Dhadak’, which took on the gargantuan task of remaking ‘Sairat’, a small Marathi film that broke box-office records in 2016 and turned into a pop culture phenomenon all across Maharashtra. As soon as the trailer for the Hindi version dropped, social media boiled over with seething responses from Marathi-speaking audiences, panning the remake.
As one of those who had seen and loved the Marathi film, I was intrigued, though not surprised, by this response. Having studied film adaptation and by profession a translator, I am intimately familiar with the challenges in transposing a work from one language or medium to another. As such, my training has taught me not to be dogmatic: the Harry Potter movies work fantastically well on screen even though they do not adhere ‘faithfully’ to the original books, and the number of books we read in translation is testament to the fact that crossing barriers is a worthwhile, if somewhat arduous, task.
From this standpoint, I shared none of the objections of purists to the fact that Dharma Productions and Shashank Khaitan chose to remake a Marathi film, reset it in Rajasthan, and basically did a copy-paste with better clothes and fancier locales.
Translators know that the nature of their work is not linguistic but rather semantic or literary; our job is not to transcribe words from one language to another, rather to convey the meaning, spirit, style and tone of the original through the translation. This is true of film adaptation as well – each film has its own unique language. In form, content and spirit, the writer and director leave their mark through the choices they make in retelling a story. In this light, the problems with the remake are apparent in the choices of its makers.
Firstly, ‘Dhadak’ deliberately makes explicit what was left to the surprise and horror of the denouement in ‘Sairat’ – Madhu’s father makes his son swear that he will not “follow that upper-caste girl”, Ratan Singh says early in the film that any daughter of his who strays off the honourable path will meet a violent end and a number of supporting characters spout lines like “you will never be safe now”. The makers might argue that this underlining of the stakes is important to drive the point home for a mass audience but the resounding success of ‘Sairat’ – especially in rural areas – disproves the notion that people need to be spoon-fed like this. Without a hint of artifice or any overt dialogue, every supporting character in ‘Sairat’ is subtly defined by their caste and place in society, a world that Manjule takes great pains to paint in raw detail. In ‘Dhadak’, we get this one line from the father and no mention or depiction of caste divides otherwise.
Secondly, ‘Dhadak’ waters down, if not reverses, the inherently feminist narrative of the Marathi original which was driven by the character of Archie. Here was a girl who stood up for her love and was completely defiant in the face of an authority whose violence she was intimately familiar with. Archie’s arrogance is rooted in the comfort of her upper caste, but is not defined by it. She smirks and laughs at Parshya, but she never derides him by making her love into a prize bestowed upon her lower caste lover from an ivory castle as Parthavi’s character does by making Madhu jump through a number of hoops in an open dare to win her love. Neither does Archie simper and whimper or refuse to question her father like Parthavi does in the remake. One of the most stunning scenes of ‘Sairat’ is when Archie, on hearing that the police has got her man, runs to her lover’s rescue, gun in hand. In ‘Dhadak’, Parthavi pulls out a gun only as a last resort, making her into both a passive victim and sole culprit of the life of misery the couple has to live thereafter.
This rewrite paves way for Madhu to suspect Parthavi of infidelity later on in the film, and for the makers to turn an ordinary lovers’ tiff in the original into a moment of physical violence in the remake. This slap glorifies and plays up to the very patriarchy that the film is purporting to warn us against and is not the only instance of mixed messaging in ‘Dhadak’. How can one have sympathy for a girl who spouts trite lines like “I won’t cook, you will, but please use less ghee because I want to remain slim”? Archie’s bravado in the original is shown to be rooted in a sense of somewhat naive pride and immense self-esteem, and to turn that character into essentially a spoilt, controlling nag is not only a great shame but a betrayal of Manjule’s reversal of the damsel-in-distress stereotype.
Moreover, in the choice to use sweeping cinematography, horse-riding, sunset scenes and operatic music, the makers of ‘Sairat’ were making an ironic nod to the genre of Bollywood, whose escapist fantasies the young protagonists unconsciously imitate in a desperate attempt to run away from their harsh reality. The tension created by walking the fine line between Bollywood-like and realistic cinematography is precisely one of the Marathi film’s great strengths, one that Manjule wielded carefully to suspend the audience between comfort and discomfort before throwing them completely off the edge with the last scene. Stripped of this tension and devoid of realism, what we get in ‘Dhadak’ is an aesthetically pleasing but flat remake that has no room for the deep irony and thwarted hopefulness of the original. As a result, the film is a fairly straightforward take on a doomed love story set against a vague backdrop of caste and class. This is something we have seen umpteen iterations of already in Bollywood – think ‘Dil’, ‘Maine Pyar Kiya’, ‘Raja Hindustani’ – and so what is originally a damning statement on caste ends up becoming a dull public service message against honour killings.
’Sairat’ deliberately drew the audience in with the promise of an entertaining love story but left them instead with a lasting sense of how caste is not just political, but deeply personal, with damaging and often lethal consequences for young people who are just trying to go about living ordinary lives. ‘Dhadak’ leaves no such lasting impact, with the crucial rewrite of the climax going for a conventional ending instead of the damning scene of a baby’s footsteps in the blood of its slaughtered parents – a metaphor for the far-reaching and vicious cycle of caste violence.
The true genius of ‘Sairat’ lay in using the age-old story of star-crossed lovers to make a deep and scathing indictment of the caste system. It employed the very tropes of the Bollywood genre to undermine the dangerous fantasies it sells us. Without this spirit of allegory or subversion, ‘Dhadak’ is to ‘Sairat’ what Google translate is to a flesh-and-blood translator; it does a fair transposition of the original but fails utterly to read or convey its damning subtext.