Amitav Ghosh

KOLKATA: "It is a reality that many more people see films than read books and if a film is made [based on a book] it can bring more people to the book," author Amitav Ghosh, whose book The Hungry Tide is soon to be made into a film, told The Hindu here on Tuesday.

The Hungry Tide is a book set in the mangrove forests of the Sunderbans — the "tide-country." "Although a dynamic love story, within the body of the novel lie deep socio-political issues, concerns over the ecology of the islands, references to local mythology, wild-life — dolphins, crocodiles and tigers — all of which have inspired me to make a film on the book," film-maker Suman Mukhopadhyay says. "It is a novel that bites, that provokes."

An agreement was signed for the making of the film between Mr. Ghosh and Mr. Mukhopadhyay here last month after a year of discussions. The director plans to start shooting in November 2008 and hopes the film will be ready by July-August the following year.

"If one is willing to have a film made of a book one has to concede the authority over the text," something Ghosh seems to have prepared himself for. "You can only do it with the people you really trust," the author of five books, including the best-selling The Glass Palace, says.

Mr. Mukhopadhyay is obviously someone who has earned Ghosh's "trust." This is for the first time that a novel of the latter is to be made into a film even though there have been similar requests from other directors in the past. The film-maker has several documentaries and the award-winning feature film "Herbert" to his credit.

"When the director re-imagines and re-interprets a work of fiction it becomes a powerful piece of cinema," Mr. Ghosh believes. "Through the mind's eye one [an author] has seen things in one way; it is also interesting to see it filtered through the imagination of another [the director]," he says.

Just as "it can be troubling" when a book is represented in another medium "if it turns out to be a good film it will only add to the appeal of the book; fiction is after all more capacious and readers can come back to it." If not? "I don't have anything to lose. My book is my book, it stands apart for people to judge," Mr. Ghosh says.

Yet, the author has had a suggestion to make to the filmmaker: that he spend sometime in the Sunderbans — a region "which hardly figures in our intellectual life even though it is just 40 miles away from Kolkata."

What got Mukhopadhyay to decide on making a film on the novel? "It is a novel with the chemistry to instigate — a novel with immense cinematic possibilities."

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