An Auteurist Assessment of Rabindranath Tagore’s Works on Screen

Abstract

Rabindranath Tagore is and remains the most adapted author in Bengali and South Asian cinema at large. Although almost all great authors whose works are frequently adapted for cinema have been recognized in adaptation studies, the film adaptations of Tagore’s works have not been the given deserving critical attention. Through a systematic analysis of the historical documents, records and other sources that contain piecemeal information about ‘Tagore films’– some of which are on the verge of oblivion and most remain critically unexamined – this archival research attempts to revive them for critical focus and theoretical examination, and contextualise them in academia. Identifying the directors’ creative role behind critical acclaim and spectatorial acceptance, I argue that it is not the textual fidelity, but the directorial creativity that guarantees the success to adaptation of Tagore on screen. Thus, in distinguishing the adaptations works as either successful or unsuccessful from the prism of the auteur theory, the paper finally holds that filming a text arbitrarily is far from vindicating art or guaranteeing success; an exertion of the director’s esthetic exhilaration makes the films transcend the philological medium, and the film becomes a visual art. It is believed that research professionals will have fresh perspectives from this study to re-evaluate Tagore films from a wide range of critical and theoretical interests.