From film to book, Devashish Makhija’s Oonga is a moral with a story

A young Adivasi boy from a village in Odisha becomes obsessed with local stagings of the Ramayana. If good is destined to win against evil, Oonga reasons, couldn’t he harness it as Rama did and save his village from losing land to industrialisation and lives to the conflict between Naxals and government forces?

Devashish Makhija’s 2013 film Oonga (starring Raju Singh, Nandita Das and Seema Biswas) received critical acclaim around the world, but never had a commercial release in India. Now, Makhija, 42, has turned the story into a young adult novel of the same name, hoping it will finally be heard. Why a book, and why one aimed at young adults reading in English? Makhija says his reasons sit at the intersection of storytelling, violence and history. Excerpts from an interview:

This is an unusual turn, to take a story from film to book. Why did you decide to do this?
The same reasons that prompt someone to turn a book into a movie... it opens up the story to a different audience. This particular story has tried to explore so many themes and questions and ideas and characters that a 90-minute film could not comprehensively accommodate them all. But a book finally could, I think.

The film was a fractured end product and is now a closed chapter. I spent years writing the book only so I could leave the film firmly behind.

Why the young adult genre?
I consider my stories to represent the people’s perspective. The people do not write the history books. Those in power do. And history books end up being the primary record of our times, for future generations. It’s dangerous that any other perspective but the ruling regime’s is missing from these accounts.

It is in storytelling that we can document the perspective of the people… particularly of those being marginalised. I see myself as a chronicler of this counter-perspective. Young adults will be the decision-makers of tomorrow. I’m trying to do my bit to help them travel into tomorrow armed with both sides of the argument — the side they will receive with almost a military lack of choice, from their curriculum; and the side they can actively choose to receive from stories like Oonga, that exist outside their curriculum.

Where did the idea for this story come from?
The story of Oonga has its seed in an anecdote I heard while in Koraput, Odisha. A local activist told me how she had taken a group of Adivasis to watch a dubbed version of Avatar. They hollered and cheered as if they were their own fellow-tribals fighting the same battles. But they were shocked when the film ended. It ended “happily”! The Adivasis are still fighting the same battles, and losing. Something about that not being reflected in Avatar distressed them.

In Oonga, we replaced Avatar with the Ramayana as we developed the story further. But I’ve tried to have the struggle for land also represent all such struggles, protests and fights for fairness. I’ve tried to tell an allegorical tale that hopefully anyone in the world will be able to find a little bit of their own battles reflected in.

Were there parts you struggled with, when turning the film into this book?
Any other publisher would have debated the passages that deal with violence in this story, but Tulika Books saw merit in the larger debates I’m trying to evoke.

Is exempting the reader or viewer from the horror of the violence the Adivasi are subject to being fair to the Adivasi who has had to experience that violence first-hand? Especially since here I’m attempting to build awareness, acknowledgement and empathy in mostly unaware (sometimes apathetic) urban readers about a people whose tragedies they are so removed from. There are no easy answers. But it takes a special publisher to allow me that leap of faith.

What are you hoping readers will walk away with?
There are some things we don’t think about often and deeply enough. Daily life gets in the way. Death, injustice, our anthropocentrism, our capacity for hate, our very imbalanced view of development… I like raising questions about these through my stories. I don’t have a solution or an answer. I simply share with the viewers my own heartache, hoping that they will be haunted by these questions once they emerge from my stories, and will keep asking them too.

Can an artist or a storyteller effect change, in the way that a policy maker or political leader can? Who knows? I’m not holding my breath. All I can say for sure is that I create my work this way because if I didn’t put my unrest and heartache and rage and questions and protest into my stories I’d self-destruct. I do this so I can get some sleep at night, however disturbed.