From Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side to Rituparno Ghosh’s Shubho Muharat: Film Authorship and Transcultural Adaptation

Abstract

In her book A Theory of Adaptation Linda Hutcheon uses the term “transcultural adaptation” to illustrate different context in which literary or other cultural texts are adapted. This relocation of text through adaptation often adds multiple interpretations or alters textual politics. Hutcheon further argues that transcultural adaptation can transform the text in unpredictable direction. The paper seeks to explicate eminent Bengali film director Rituparno Ghosh’s (1961-2013) Shubho Muharat (The First Day of the Shoot, 2003) which is influenced by Agatha Christie’s (1890-1976) novel The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962). The essay untangles Ghosh’s strategy to add Indian socio-cultural background in the western text. He expresses authorial intensions when he re-narrates of the novel on screen. The paper argues that the transcultural adaptation creates a “Third Space of enunciation” where the auteur uses the traits of detective film and repeats authorial intention. Following Janet Staiger’s reinterpretation of auteurism the essay argues that duplication of authorial impulse is Ghosh’s “technique of the self”.